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NEW YORK CITY — In the frantic rescue operations at the
World Trade Center disaster site, over 300 dogs and their handlers are
committed to a mission of rescuing survivors no matter what the
cost. With perils overhead and underfoot, emergency crews have
learned to operate on instinct and to rely heavily on each other, as
all-too-often, the rescuers themselves need become the rescued.
Last week, brave men and women of the
NY Fire Department, the NYPD 13th Precinct, Emergency Medical Teams and
the Animal Medical Center on East 62nd Street all converged to save the
life of a single downed rescuer: "Servus" the dog.
Servus, a nine-year-old, 70-lb. Belgian Malinois with
the unlikely nickname "Wuss", fell 20 feet down face-first
into a pocket of jagged rebar, glass and powdered concrete.
There's not a single person at
"the pile" who doesn't recognize the immeasurable worth of a search-and-rescue
(SAR) dog. Whenever a new cavity is unearthed beneath the 110
floors of rubble, desperate cries of "Dog over
here! Dog over here!" attest to the fact that rescuers trust
nothing less than a canine when it comes to locating survivors. So it wasn't
surprising to see how dozens of rescuers literally dropped everything to
rush to the aid of a dying dog.
Wuss and his partner Chris Christensen,
a police officer from Illinois, had been searching in a tunnel beneath
the World Trade Center complex when they heard three loud bangs of a
firefighter's ax against a steel beam. The signal meant: "Run
for your life; another building is about to come down."
But in the narrow enclosure, there was
barely enough room to turn around, let alone flee. "There
wasn't much we could do but stay where we were and keep searching,"
says Officer Christensen. "I heard the signal three
times. There wasn't much we could do about it."
Something gave way that Thursday
morning, and Wuss tumbled to the bottom of a deep pit where he began to
go into
convulsions. As Officer Christensen clambered down the hole, he thought that Wuss
must've broken a leg, but upon reaching him, he saw that
his partner was suffocating.
He
describes the nightmare: "I could see debris was lodged in his
nose. I tried to get some out, but I just didn't know what to do.
"He'd inhaled a lot of dust, and
he tried to clear it by vomiting, but he couldn't. His tongue was
turning purple. He looked up at me, and I thought, 'My dog's in
trouble—I need help.'
"I
shouted up that my dog was dying. I mean, this dog is my buddy—I
wasn't about to let him die down there."
Above, the New York firefighters leaped
into action, and within seconds they were on the scene.
"I saw arms reaching down,"
says Officer Christensen. "I passed Wuss up the hole.
He was trying to breathe, but he was doubled up." |
Firefighters and canine rescue workers stand amid piles of rubble from the collapsed World Trade Center. (Photo: Sep 18, 2001, FEMA News / Michael Rieger)
Rescuers rushed Wuss to a fire truck
where they tried to administer oxygen to the dog. At the same
time, Karimah Tarazi, a registered nurse, shaved Wuss's front leg and
started an intravenous, but the dog had gone into shock and was shaking
uncontrollably.
Officer Christensen continues, "I
put the mask over his nose. Then I put my fingers up his nostrils
and started scooping out debris.
"All of a sudden, two people
grabbed a stretcher and helped carry my dog down the street. It
was the most impressive thing I've seen."
Firefighters, NY cops and EMTs flagged
down a paramedic and carried Wuss's limp body to the ambulance, but the
paramedic refused to help. "Humans only."
"I thought those cops were going to
shoot those ambulance drivers," says Officer Christensen. But
instead they loaded Wuss into a police cruiser which, along with three
police motorcycle escorts with sirens at full blast, headed for an
animal hospital three miles away.
At the hospital on East 62nd Street,
Wuss was stabilized, although he had sustained some heavy damage from
the ordeal and needed some rest.
Returning to the site, Officer
Christensen wanted to continue the search efforts by himself. He
told Wuss to stay in the police cruiser while he went back into the
south tower rubble. But
Wuss, eager as ever, jumped out of the car, wagging his tail.
"Get back in the car," the
man ordered, but Wuss just wagged his tail harder.
"I couldn't believe it. I
told him three times, and he just looked at me... He just sat there. Tears
came to my eyes."
The duo went back to searching for
about 16 hours into the next day. On Friday night, Wuss inhaled a
dangerous amount of debris and started choking again. Officer
Christensen, who had driven to New York from East Carondelet, Illinois with
Wuss just two days earlier, made the difficult decision to take his dog
back home.
"I said that was it," he
says. "I wasn't gonna lose my dog."
The two returned to East Carondelet on
Sunday and received a hero's welcome.
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