Large Snake Stuck In Between Gas Heater

Crew manager Dave Brierley said the call was logged as a "small animal rescue", and he said: "We would have thought 'that's just a snake that's crawled underneath or behind, it won't be too bad'.

"When we got there it was a big beast and had actually crawled inside, through a vent, and got itself trapped in the workings. It was a tricky job."

Firefighters have rescued an 8ft-long boa constrictor which slithered into a gas heater and refused to come out.

Billy the Boa coiled itself so tightly inside the heater that a crew had to dismantle the machine to retrieve the reptile.

Crew manager Dave Brierley said his colleagues joked that it would "go down in history" as the brigade's most unusual animal rescue.

His team was called to a semi-detached house in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, at about 3am on Tuesday by the snake's owner.

He added: "We haven't had anything like this before. The owner has it out of its vivarium from time to time and it usually coils up around a pouffe but this time it didn't want to go back into the vivarium. 

"So it went into the fire and wouldn't come out." He said it took his five-person crew about an hour to free the snake.