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Between the hours of approximately 12:30 and 2:15 pm, the Sierra Madre Police Department responded to five reports of bear activity that required an emergency response.
By News Desk
All five reports involved a bear intruding into a structure, including four homes and one garage. All locations were in the northeastern part of the city of Sierra Madre.
There are no reports of injuries at this time, and only one of the structures was occupied at the time the bear entered.
After receiving the fifth report (at approximately 2:15 pm), Sierra Madre Police Department officers reported that they were able to divert the bear into the wildland north of Sierra Madre’s residential neighborhoods. There have been no additional reports of bear activity since then.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife was notified, and a representative was on the way to Sierra Madre. The City of Sierra Madre would like to remind residents and visitors to call 911 anytime they feel threatened by wildlife or if wildlife enters a home.
The one person at home, a woman, hid herself in another room until it left. Hope it didn’t find any food on this trip.
It is time to stop sensationalizing the actives of bears in Sierra Madre and elsewhere. People need to understand how well a bear can smell: the average dog can smell 100 times better than a human and a blood hound can smell 300 times better than a human. A bear can 7 times better than a blood hound so 2100 times better than a human. In this instance the bear took a chicken from a garage freezer. The homeowner, all homeowners, don’t realize they have smells of food on their hands, in this case chicken juice from the chicken being placed in the freezer, on their hands and then on the door knob to the garage and then on the handle of the freezer.
All is well. Thankfully.
Our residents are getting much better at securing their homes as well as using their bear cans.
SMPD did a great job.
The unfortunate aspect is the fact that the local “NEWS” stations have complete access to our SMPD incident scanners.
Unfortunate, because the TV helicopters are immediately dispatched, disrupting the police, terrorizing the bears, unnerving our residents & creating a dangerous situation.
Glad the bear was unharmed.