Metro

Factory workers rescue dog from river

A quick-thinking asphalt factory crew rescued a panicked red pit bull caught in a rising Flushing River Tuesday.

The dog went into the water near the Dept. of Transportation yard underneath the Van Wyck Expressway and was spotted around 9:30 a.m., desperately trying to make her way across the river toward Willets Point Asphalt.

Felipe Garcia, a machine operator at the asphalt firm, noticed DOT workers frantically waving to him from the opposite shore, and ran to get plant manager Larry Santana.

“The DOT guys were waving to my guys, telling them to look down – and they saw a dog in the water,” Santana told The Post.

By the time Santana and two more workers, Joaquin Sequen and Tom Piazza, arrived at the water’s edge, the pit bull was struggling to get loose from cement debris and wood pilings, and the tide was coming up over her chest.

“She was stuck in between there, and the water was rising,” Santana recounted just after the rescue.

“We got a rope,” he said. “We tried to get it around her head first, and then we got it around her body.”

“It took a little while,” said Santana, “but we pulled her up.”

The dog was shaking furiously when they pulled her out.

“She was freezing, she was tired,” Santana said.

He said he and his workers didn’t think about their own safety when they rushed to the rescue.

“It was something we thought we had to do. We couldn’t leave her. We were afraid she was going to bite us, but we couldn’t leave her.

“When we got her out, she ran back down into the water area, and we yanked her out again,” Santana recounted.

“We got some blankets food and water. You could tell she was pretty dehydrated.”

A police boat also arrived on the scene, Santana said.

“The cops had a boat and were coming up and down, but we already had her out.”

Santana and his crew don’t know where the dog came from, and workers at the DOT yard declined comment.

The city’s Animal Care & Control picked up the three-year-old pit bull after her rescue and took her to a Brooklyn care center for evaluation.

Workers have named the dog Mia. She was not wearing a collar and didn’t have a dog license or identification.