Countryside Campground, Mogadore, Ohio
Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel…He has raised up a horn of salvation for us…to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve Him without fear. ~ Luke 1:68a, 69a, 74
Before I leave you until the end of October, I wanted to add something about the rescue and recovery workers and a few other heroic efforts involved in New York, Washington and Shanksville, to commemorate 9/11.
I’ll begin with the search and rescue dog teams who responded in New York.
About 300 search teams responded. Only about 100 were prepared for a disaster of monstrous proportions in a major city. Many were wilderness search and rescue dogs, experts at finding people missing in the woods. They could not cope with the enormous mound of twisted metal, glass, and smoldering rubble and the urban noises. ~ akc.org
“Everything was so blown apart and the odor of death was all over and it just made the dogs almost crazy.” Walton says human and canine members of the search and rescue teams became depressed by what ended up being a futile search for survivors in the rubble of the Twin Towers. ~ cbsnews.com
I read somewhere that rescue workers would sometimes hide to give the dogs someone to find.
For more than two weeks after the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, hundreds of search and rescue dogs hunted for signs of life in the smoldering ruins. Ricky, a 17-inch-tall rat terrier, was able to squeeze into tight spaces. Trakr, a German shepherd from Canada, combed the wreckage for two days — then collapsed from smoke inhalation, exhaustion and burns. Riley, a 4-year-old golden retriever, searched deep into the debris fields and helped locate the bodies of several firefighters. “We went there expecting to find hundreds of people trapped,” said Chris Selfridge, 54, of Johnstown, Pa., who was Riley’s handler. “But we didn’t find anybody alive.” ~ nytimes.com
Dr. Cynthia Otto, the director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia who looked after the dogs at ground zero, said the that, for the most part, the dogs’ injuries were only “very minor” — cuts and scrapes on their paw pads, legs and bellies, mainly, as well as fatigue and heat exhaustion. ~nytimes.com
But they also served as therapy dogs.
The notion that dogs have the power to ease human emotional suffering is not new. Anyone who’s cried in the presence of a canine companion knows that. Smoky, a 4-pound Yorkshire Terrier, is credited with being the first therapy dog, cheering wounded soldiers in hospitals on the islands around New Guinea during World War II.
Dealing with such enormous waves of grief, fear, and confusion goes way beyond what is required of a therapy dog who visits hospitals and nursing homes, and there were some who became too stressed to work.
Most teams stayed at the Family Assistance Centers, helping the relatives of the dead and missing. Red Cross mental-health experts saw that workers were not talking to the human therapists, and thought maybe they would talk to the dogs. ~ akc.org
They were a ray of sunshine among the death and debris, even just for a minute. Bretagne, the last known surviving search dog of 9/11, was laid to rest in June 2016. ~ 911memorial.org
The following is but one of thousands of human stories from the World Trade Center collapses (told to USA Today by Eddie Reyes and Scott Strauss).
The tears still come, especially when we recall our wives and children waiting for us that day – from home, from work, from school – not knowing if we’d walk through the door again.
We were New York City police officers at the time. We each took different paths to the World Trade Center that day. Those paths converged as we tackled opposite ends of a dangerously intense rescue of two New York and New Jersey Port Authority police that changed our lives.
Only 20 people survived the collapse of the twin towers and were pulled from the rubble. We were able to help save two of them.
We’d both ended shifts just before the planes crashed into the towers, although the notion of working a shift quickly became meaningless. We drove through civilian-directed traffic into Manhattan because police officers and firefighters already were running toward danger at the World Trade Center site.
Officers set up perimeters and saved as many dust-covered people as they could around the area that would come to have different names: Epicenter, Ground Zero, The Pile and, eventually, hallowed ground. For us it was Dante’s Inferno. We choked on thick, black smoke that kept us from being able to see the men we were rescuing, even as we were chest-to-chest with them.
Two officers, Port Authority Police Sgt. John McLoughlin and rookie Port Authority Police Officer Will Jimeno, were trapped under 30 feet of rubble. Will’s wife was seven months pregnant. They were injured, stuck and in pain.
Our team crawled over and through hot steel beams. We stripped ourselves of “extra” equipment – even our service weapons, which is unheard of – to fit through a dark, narrow opening in the ground about the size of a manhole. There wasn’t room or time for sophisticated equipment.
We scraped at the rubble with hand tools and knives to free our brothers while dozens formed bucket brigades to carry away and sort through rubble and remains. Choking and dry heaving from the heat and smoke, we dug with our bare hands. When the medical kit a medic brought to the rescue wasn’t compatible with the one given by an emergency room physician, we improvised, doing things like using a ball point pen to puncture vials of medication while officers McLoughlin and Jimeno were trapped beneath cinderblocks.
Firefighters yelled at us to get out of the hole as two more buildings collapsed in the area, while McLoughlin and Jimeno worried we were going to leave. We stayed, but worried they may not survive the rescue. Ultimately, we wedged a perfectly angled piece of rebar between Jimeno and the cinder blocks that were crushing him, and were able to get him out. About eight hours and hundreds of rescuers later, we were finally able to pull out McLoughlin the next morning.
We didn’t know until later that we’d endured burns and cuts through our uniforms and our boots, right through to our feet. We worked until supervisors forced us to get medical attention. We were just two of hundreds of people who helped save those two men, but we’ll always remember our colleagues who didn’t return to their families. Those two men were all of us, and we used every bit of training, strength, and even gallows humor to free them.
We worked on the pile for nine months. Today, we’re haunted regularly by the images of the people and things we saw and uncovered – body parts, shoes, souvenirs – to offer what solace we could to as many families as possible.
Now our families worry as we cough and use inhalers to treat our labored breathing. We get checked regularly for conditions that we acquired from toxic conditions and materials at the piles, and encourage everyone who worked downtown after 9/11 to get medical consultations free of charge through the World Trade Center Health Program, which was established under the Zadroga Act.
Most important to us now, is to remember those we lost on 9/11, and those we continue to lose too soon from the effects of Ground Zero. That gallows humor still keeps us intact as we discuss our ailments the way elderly people might. Many of us are managing the most serious medical conditions, like cancer, as a result of our work, so we need it.
We don’t regret one moment of work on the rescue and in those piles. It has brought us to today and we consider it a privilege to carry the memories of those who were lost, and those memories we’ve been able to create with our families ever since.
Eddie Reyes is program manager for Northwell Health Emergency Management, and Scott Strauss is vice president of Northwell Health Corporate Security. Both are former New York City police officers.
Additional information I uncovered from New York:
On May 30, 2002, the Last Column, draped in the American flag, was removed from Ground Zero in an honor guard procession to mark the end of the nine-month rescue, recovery, and relief efforts at the World Trade Center site. ~911memorial.org
Of the 2,977 victims killed in the September 11 attacks, 415 were emergency workers in New York City who responded to the World Trade Center. This included:
- 343 firefighters (including a chaplain and two paramedics) of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY);
- 37 police officers of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department (PAPD);
- 23 police officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD); and
- 8 emergency medical technicians and paramedics from private emergency medical services
- 3 New York State Court Officers
- 1 Patrolman from the New York Fire Patrol
- 1 Special Agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ~ Wikipedia.org
Many other people at the scene that day and in the weeks that followed also witnessed horrific events at close range, including the loss of colleagues and the gruesome recovery and removal of body parts.
In addition, more than 91,000 rescue, recovery and clean-up workers, and volunteers—including virtually all of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY)—were exposed to the environmental hazards at Ground Zero during their work on “the pile” and at other WTC-related locations in the days and months that followed.
FDNY members, nearly all of whom responded to Ground Zero within the first week of the attacks, suffered the most intense degree of exposure to the toxic mix of dust and chemicals at Ground Zero. ~ www1.nyc.gov
If you want to peruse more New York statistics, take a look at this site. I don’t know who was responsible for putting all these numbers together, but it’s an extensive and comprehensive list of much more than just body counts.
https://nymag.com/news/articles/wtc/1year/numbers.htm
The following article is too long to add here, but it’s very good, so I encourage you to click on the link below. It was written on the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Pentagon, where 184 of the 23,000 in the building lost their lives.
https://www.army.mil/article/250093/survivors_stories_heroism_tragedy_inside_pentagon_on_911
And then there was Flight 93, where 40 passengers and crew worked together, sacrificing their lives in Shanksville, PA to stop the attack on the US Capital building. The following is a good article that describes some of the events surrounding this heroic tragedy. One of the things that most surprised me about this one was how much our National Park Service was involved. I have no idea why.
The first two paragraphs are from a NPS press release from June 1, 2018. The third is an update.
Later this year, the remaining wreckage of Flight 93 will be returned to Flight 93 National Memorial as part of a longstanding effort by the Families of Flight 93, the National Park Service (NPS), and the National Park Foundation. The burial will take place in a restricted access zone on the sacred ground of Flight 93 National Memorial and will not be accessible to the public or the media.
Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded its on-site investigation of the crash in September 2001, the remaining wreckage of the plane has been in secure storage until an appropriate time to return the wreckage to the crash site at Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.On June 21, 2018, the wreckage of Flight 93 was transported to and buried at the crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Four shipping containers (one pictured above) arrived at the site holding the recovered wreckage. Visitors to the memorial, local first responders, National Park Service staff, and several family members of those aboard Flight 93 stood watch as the containers arrived. The burial took place during a private ceremony at a restricted access zone on the sacred ground of Flight 93 National Memorial. ~ nps.gov
I found myself wondering at the involvement of our National Park Service, so I began searching and discovered that because the Park Service is part of our government, they were asked (sort of expected) to help in anyway they could. The ones working at all the National Historical Sites in New York helped in New York, providing information and security. The ones in Washington, helped at the Pentagon. The ones near Shanksville, helped there. Many more across the country were repositioned to help provide security at other potential targets. They even have an aviation department.
Unsung heroes.
We had no idea.