The 9/11 Dogs: The heroes who searched for survivors at Ground Zero (HarperTrue Friend – A Short Read)

by George, Isabel

  The water was a relief from the heat radiating from the walls, which crackled as they held back the blazing plane and its fuel, now pouring through the building. Omar remembered how, for a split second, the idea of making it out of the Tower alive in this chaos seemed impossible. ‘People passed me on the stairs saying their prayers, asking God to keep them safe. I wondered if I was doing the best for Salty. I decided that if we were going to die here in this dark place then I needed to let him go free. I could not let my faithful companion down by making him stay with me and risk his own life. I whispered to him: ‘Salty, you should leave me now. It’s too dangerous for you to be here. Go now and I will see you when we both reach the bottom of the stairs. Go, my friend, before it’s too late.’

  Salty understood the order. He stood still long enough to allow Omar to release the grip on his harness, but he would not leave his master’s side. ‘Go, Salty. Leave me now,’ said Omar, pushing his dog forwards. His colleagues tried to help, but the sad sight of the dog, who clearly did not want to go anywhere without his master, was too much to bear. They tried to encourage the dog to run ahead, but he would not go. Clearly, wherever Omar was going, Salty would be at his side. As he replaced his guide dog’s harness, Omar knew he had to accept that Salty would be with him to the end.

  Comfort for the Dying

  9.30a.m.:With thirty floors still to negotiate before they reached ground level, Salty’s reluctance to leave Omar’s side became an inspiration to Donna and the other hopefuls on the stairs. Omar cuddled his dog in his arms: ‘I stroked Salty and told him how happy I was that he was my dog. I felt Donna kneel down and spread her arms around him and I imagined his big golden head resting on her shoulder. He was always my hero, but now he was everyone’s hero, and I felt honoured to know this beautiful dog. I told him: “Salty, your calmness and reassurance is everything we need to help us the rest of the way. I know you will be the reason why we have every chance of survival.”’

  With Salty leading the group, ahead of Omar and Donna, there was calmness in the ranks. But three flights down a bottleneck of people was beginning to form as fire fighters carrying emergency packs and breathing equipment were heading up to check for survivors on higher floors. Those who were determined to get out of the Tower quickly met the dying and the injured waiting for assistance on the stairs.

  Salty made his way to the worst of the casualties and wandered between them, meeting their outstretched hands. Touching his head and body, the people smiled, spoke to him and reached for him, gaining some comfort before he moved on, making a pathway for Omar and guiding him safely through. The dim, intermittent lighting was not a problem for Salty or Omar, but others found it difficult to focus and negotiate the stairs. Letting Salty lead the way speeded up the descent, and within an hour and fifteen minutes Omar and his colleagues had made it down from the 71st floor, only to find the lobby awash with water from the sprinklers and littered with survivors unsure of where to go next. Fire fighters directed Omar and the rest of his group towards the street, where the confusion spread.

  Hitting the street, Salty was back on familiar territory. With Omar safely at his side, Salty set a pace to get them to safety. The snowstorm of debris from the fall of the South Tower persisted between the buildings, enveloping the scene indiscriminately, spitting grey ash. Running along the sidewalks they met people scarred by the fire and the falling debris that had caught in their clothes and hair. Aviation fuel that had escaped from the planes as they crashed into the Twin Towers had dripped onto everything in its path, or raced in sheets of flame, causing horrific injuries to anyone it met. Some people were running, but others were too dazed to run anywhere.

  Even twenty blocks away from Ground Zero, the dust crept over and into everything. The fallout from the collapse of the South Tower almost submerged man and dog. Like two ghostly apparitions, they ran on in search of safety and a pathway home.

  Chaos in the Ruins

  10.28 a.m.: After burning for 102 minutes, the North Tower finally collapsed. The structure – almost sliced in two by the hijacked airliner – could take no more and fell to the ground. Roselle and Michael were taking shelter in the subway when the news reached them. The sudden arrival of more people piling into the station prompted Michael to ask someone what was going on. ‘The North Tower is down and there’s only a ball of fire and smoke where the World Trade Center once stood,’ was a stranger’s description of what the man and his dog had just escaped.

  Roselle was still comforting the woman blinded by the dust from the collapse of the South Tower. She was cradling the Labrador like a baby and holding her so tight it was as if she was afraid of what would happen if she let go. More people started to appear in the subway. With them a medical unit immediately honed in on the woman clinging to Roselle. As the woman was now in safe hands, Michael decided it was time to move on and prompted Roselle to venture out onto the street. Somehow she found her bearings, despite the distractions and confusion they met as soon as they emerged into the grey world above.

  Michael wanted to head to the house of a friend on the edge of the city, but did Roselle understand this in the confusion? She had been there before and was somehow reminded that she could make it there again. Without stopping to think or question Roselle’s actions, Michael held onto his dog and let her take him – man and dog were thinking and moving as one. After all, she had a view on the world that Michael could only imagine, and the choking dust was enough for him to battle against as they ran on and on through the wall of sirens and screams.

  As if in a bubble that contained just a man and his dog, Michael trusted wherever Roselle led. The world he could hear but not see was in chaos, and all he could do was seek sanctuary. Block after block they ran, until eventually they emerged from the wreckage, shocked and mired in dust, and walked into the welcoming arms of their friends. How Roselle had found them seemed, in everyone’s eyes, to be a miracle.

  Not far away from the house where Roselle was then resting from her ordeal, Salty arrived on the doorstep of his family’s home in New Jersey. As the Rivera family opened the door they almost didn’t recognise the grey figures that stood in front of them. Running for their lives, Salty and Omar had made it home, and it seemed to everyone that this, too, was a miracle. With eyes full of tears of relief and arms outstretched, Omar told his family: ‘I owe my life to Salty, my companion and my best friend.’

  The Search for Life

  By 10.30 a.m. the Twin Towers were a just a fallen pile of concrete and tortured metal. The phone lines to the Towers had been jammed for over an hour, and the city’s 911 system had been overwhelmed with calls. Patrol cars and fire rigs were stationed at every turn on every block, within and outside the impact zone, and their sirens created a constant wall of sound. Carnage erupted as the terror in the World Trade Center spilled out onto the streets. People slumped onto the sidewalk in a state of shock, many nursing horrific injuries: a woman sat holding her head in her heavily blood-stained hands; another staggered to a halt, the back of her jacket melted to her skin. Hands, faces and limbs were snagged and scored with shards of shattered glass.

  The evacuation of Lower Manhattan began in earnest shortly after the fall of the South Tower. Attention focused on the people still trapped inside its sister building. Many of the workers on the opposite side of the North Tower had no view of what was going on. One man had called his wife from the 86th floor to tell her that he loved her and that he had no idea what was going on, but he knew he had to get out. He tried the door to stairwell C but it was twisted, so he struck the dry wall with a crowbar and broke through. He joined others jostling their way down the dimly lit stairs, and within seconds of hitting the street they were running for their lives.

  ‘Get away from the Tower! Get away from the Tower!’ The calls came loud and repeated as the building’s 1,000-foot-long crumbling shadow chased them down. Lost inside the ruins were hundreds of office staff and the emergency workers who had fearlessly swept each floor up
to the point of impact for survivors. The slump of the second Tower was followed by an eerie hush, broken only by the music still playing from the underground shopping mall.

  A pall of thick grey ash lingered over the pile, mingling with the smoke rising from the crushed masonry and steel framework, and scattered over the burning heaps of debris. Fire fighters tore at the rubble with their bare hands. When the call went out that morning, 14,000 fire fighters and paramedics were deployed to the Twin Towers: more than 2,000 of them became trapped in the impact zone. Voices called up from the ruins and rescuing hands reached down into the fire and ash. Frantically clawing at steel girders and concrete blocks, emergency workers fought on towards their stranded fellows entombed in what now resembled a sinister multi-layered cake of colours and textures. Everything that had been vertical was now horizontal and swarming with police and fire crews forming ‘bucket brigades’ to shift the dirt and debris as fast as possible.

  1.28 p.m.: The first search dogs arrived at Ground Zero and got to work immediately. Dogs from the New York Police Department K-9 Unit and New York Fire Department eagerly hit the pile, not knowing in which direction to start.

  One of the first dogs on the scene was Appollo, a veteran police search dog who was a little grey at the muzzle and had an eye on retirement, but whose experience on the ground was unrivalled. The German Shepherd’s lean body would have given any younger dog a run for its money, and he would have walked into hell for his handler, police officer Pete Davies. When Pete received the call to duty that day it was like any other emergency, with strict procedures to follow before the team could carry out the order: ‘Get to the World Trade Center site and get there quickly.’

  Appollo was used to the drill and sat patiently while Pete strapped on his official reflective jacket and packed fresh water, food and essential equipment for man and dog, as he had done many times during his twenty years as a New York City police officer. ‘The station had been handling running reports and requests from Ground Zero since the first plane hit at 8.46 a.m., but nothing could have prepared any member of the search-and-rescue team for the scale of the devastation that met us when we arrived on the scene,’ recalled Pete. ‘I had attended countless rescue situations with Appollo over our eight years as a partnership, but my first sight of Ground Zero was one of despair. Thinking back, I guess it was clear to many of the teams that the search for life would be very short.’

  Appollo was his usual eager self, literally straining at his leash to get to work. Sniffing the dirty air, he sneezed repeatedly, and Pete could see that the thick dust and ash mix was going to be a problem for his dog’s eyes too. Already its sticky greyness was collecting on his heavy black coat, and his ginger-brown underbelly was losing its sheen. It would usually take hours for normal masonry dust to collect like this, but this was not normal and the effect was almost immediate.

  Pete had plenty of water in his bag and he knew he would need every drop. The initial team of six dogs and handlers checked in with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials and took their first steps onto the site, already named Ground Zero. Appollo was well up for the search, and as he swaggered towards his first view of the pile his eyes immediately focused on what lay directly ahead. He was shoulder to shoulder with danger but still trotted ahead of Pete, who was taking in his own view of the carnage.

  Nose so near to the ground it was almost touching the cinders, Appollo switched into search mode. For the first few seconds of the search Pete was the partnership’s eyes and ears, as Appollo concentrated everything on his sense of smell. Taken by a moment of sheer disbelief at the magnitude of the task in hand, Pete turned briefly away from his dog, who was working less than six feet ahead. In that split second Pete turned back to see Appollo disappear headfirst into the pile.

  Striding forward without thought or caution, Pete reached into the fiery pit and pulled Appollo from the embers, patting the flames that immediately caught his smouldering coat. ‘I saw Appollo ahead of me and knew he would just get on with his job. To be honest, I really couldn’t believe the enormity of the devastation all around me. It was just too much to take in and make what would normally be a logical decision, so I decided to let Appollo make his own way over the pile and I would follow, picking up signs and sounds along the way. He knew what to do, and if there was life to be found there I knew Appollo would locate it.

  ‘But when I saw the last flick of his tail disappear into the ash, something powerful came over me. I’m not sure how I got to him and I’m not sure how I caught him as he was falling, but it happened, and once I had him in my arms there was no way I could let go until I knew that he was OK. This dog saved my life so many times during his career. This was already our toughest test imaginable.’ Taking hold of Appollo, Pete rushed him away to check him over and allow him to rest for a while. Within an hour Appollo was back searching the pile, with only a patch of singed fur on his belly to show for his ordeal.

  If there was life to be found in the chaos and the wreckage, time was rapidly running out.

  ‘Duty. Honour. Country’

  Dotted about between the ruins, the search-and-rescue dogs made their presence felt. The sight of the determined German Shepherds, Labradors and Retrievers gave hope to the uniformed officers digging frantically to find their buddies. Very soon, shouts for ‘Dog over here!’ could be heard all over the pile as the whine of fire fighters’ electric locators rose out of the rubble. As each one tripped, a fellow officer ran to tap on the wreckage in the hope of a response from below.

  Fires that were probably ignited by the jet fuel were being sustained by the vast amount of paper and wood from the thousands of square metres of office space. The almost lunar landscape of ash was a shifting surface that made the search difficult and dangerous for dog and handler. But the world that lay under the columns of twisted steel and concrete was one that could only be accessed through a canine’s hyper-sensitive sense of smell. Trained to detect traces of blood, flesh, sweat and other odours emitted by the human body in times of stress, the dogs were to be the key to rescuing life and, sadly, recovering remains. If the dogs couldn’t find anything in this chaos, no human stood a chance.

  New York police officer Suzanne McCrossan was supposed to be on leave that day, but she didn’t need a call from her chief to make her realise that all leave was cancelled. Quickly changing into her uniform and grabbing her faithful search dog, Charlie, she made for her police vehicle and headed for the city precinct. Golden Retriever Charlie knew they were going to work, so he was excited and typically eager to get into his distinctive NYPD K-9 jacket.

  Only two weeks back from maternity leave, Suzanne left her husband and baby daughter knowing this deployment would be unlike any other. She recalled: ‘The news reports were more like scenes from a movie than real life in downtown Manhattan. I recognised the buildings, but everything else was unreal, and as I left my family, with Charlie at my side, I only knew one thing for sure and that was that Charlie would look after me, as he always did. I trusted him to keep me safe.’

  Suzanne made it as far as the outskirts of the impact zone before she hit the full horror of the job in hand. She reached down to pat Charlie, still innocently wagging his tail in anticipation of a ‘find’. Gathering all her equipment and taking a firm grasp of Charlie’s long lead, Suzanne left the dog van to start her walk in. Clouds of ash still lingered in the air, and all the time people coated in its greyness were passing her like ghosts, in silence or in tears. Their hollow expressions were something Suzanne will never forget: ‘I wanted to ask people if they were OK and where they were going, but their expressions appeared to answer all the questions I could ever ask.’

  Charlie looked at every person as they passed, and some could not help putting their hand down to him, which he met with his usual rub and lick. For some, this was too much and they simply fell to their knees and wept as they hugged him. Charlie took the attention well, but Suzanne was aware that they had to get to Ground Zer
o as quickly as possible. She quietly explained to people why they needed to break away and that others were relying on Charlie to be there to rescue them and help them to safety. ‘I felt sad doing this, but I did not want to let my colleagues down. After all, these people were safe and many others were not.’

  Arriving on site, Suzanne made herself known to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) team and prepared to go onto the pile. She had not yet taken a step onto the still-hot ground when Charlie was spotted by a group of fire fighters working their way through the debris covering the skeleton of a rig. Its burnt-out chassis mangled almost beyond recognition, the vehicle, she could just make out, was the likely resting place of several of her comrades. ‘Dog over here! Please send your dog over here,’ they called. Suzanne let Charlie bound ahead of her and he was met with several outstretched hands. In any other situation, this would have been unusual, as the men knew better than to touch the dog while he was working. But the reaction was instant and natural and could not be helped.

  They said they had heard knocking from under the wreckage, which was almost entirely covered by a column of concrete. Charlie did not need an invitation to start work. Within five minutes the dog had begun to dig towards the rear of the rig, which had been used as a water hose on the site, and the call went out to investigate the ‘find’. The second call was for one of the orange body bags, which was passed on down the line to where Charlie stood.