Remembering the search and rescue dogs of Ground Zero

Editor’s note: The video above aired in a previous newscast.

NEW YORK CITY ( WPIX ) – There were many heroes on September 11, 2001, but over 300 of them were dogs, here are some of their stories.

After the chaos, nearly 100,000 workers and volunteers cleaned up Ground Zero in New York, according to the National Library of Medicine. Over 300 dogs also assisted in rescue and recovery efforts at Ground Zero, and dogs were used in recovery efforts at the Pentagon.

Dozens of search-and-rescue dogs searched the wreckage of the site for survivors.

In New York City, where most of the destruction occurred, the hours turned into days and the days into weeks.

Recovery officials realized the chance of finding survivors was increasingly slim, and the operation shifted its focus to recovery at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

Cadaver dogs, trained to find human remains, were also on the scene, often finding bits and pieces of victims scattered through the rubble.

“It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen, the most horrific act of violence I’ve ever witnessed,” said John E. Feal, whose recollection of the rescue, recovery and cleanup efforts can be found in the Library of Congress .

“The first thing I found was an entire body burned into rebar, but you had to look a couple of times. It was so unexplainable; the rubble down there. There was not a desk. There was not a chair. There was not a computer. There was not a briefcase. There was nothing but dust, concrete, rebar and papers flying around that is it,” said Christine Famiglietti, an NYPD officer who also helped during the Ground Zero cleanup effort.

Her memory of the recovery efforts is also in the Benjamin Luft collection of 9/11 oral histories, available on the Library of Congress website. She also remembers seeing long lines of volunteers passing buckets of rubble to each other to try to clear up the site.

Another participant in the oral histories said that, in the three months he spent at the recovery site, they found very few victims.

The last living person known to be rescued at Ground Zero was found by a search and rescue dog, 27 hours after both the towers collapsed, according to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

However, even after the last live person was found, the dogs continued working alongside their human handlers in an attempt to find life or bring peace to families searching for a lost loved one whose last known location was near or at the wreckage site.

Famiglietti, the NYPD officer, recalls that at one point the dogs, who were the unsung heroes, were getting depressed because they could not find any live survivors.

“I was down there with a guy from the 113 (precinct), and they asked for volunteers to hide in the rubble. They pulled everyone off the rubble and hid a bunch of us, and they told us to lie down like we were hurt. They then sent all the dogs in. And the dogs started barking, and life came back; everyone was clapping. Life came back to the place, and we pretended they had found us, and it was incredible; it was something that was unbelievable, moving – it really was.”

In the coming days after this American tragedy, search-and-rescue dogs, along with cadaver dogs, appeared in countless newspaper articles.

One famous photo shows a 4-year-old golden retriever, Riley, being carried out of the debris, a symbol of hope to people at the time. Riley was with FEMA’s Pennsylvania Task Force 1. Riley passed away in 2020.

Another dog, Apollo, a German shepherd with the NYPD, was the first search-and-rescue dog on the scene, along with his handler, Officer Peter Davis, according to the American Kennel Club .

“We got there right after the buildings collapsed,” Davis says. “To get to the rubble, we had to go through almost waist-deep water. All of a sudden he disappeared [and] fell into a hole. Then this big fireball came up, and he came running out. He was on fire. I brushed off the burning embers, and he went right back to searching.”

Apollo was awarded the Canine Excellence Award. He passed away at age 14, according to the AKC.

Michael Hingson, blind since birth, owned a guide dog named Roselle, who heroically led him down 78 flights of stairs to safety during 9/11. They escaped the collapsing towers and later Hingson shared their story in “Thunder Dog: The True Story of a Blind Man, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust at Ground Zero.” According to the AKC , Roselle died in 2011.

Salty, a guide dog, was with Omar Rivera on the 71st floor when a plane hit the World Trade Center. Rivera initially stayed at his desk but followed Salty when he became agitated. They ran for the stairs amid panic, and Rivera released Salty from his harness to descend alone. Salty then guided Rivera to escape just before the building collapsed. Salty passed away in 2008.

Though all the dogs that served in the 9/11 recovery effort have since passed, their tales of bravery now live on and appear in books like “ Dog Heroes of September 11 .” Multiple tales of heroic 9/11 dogs appear on many websites.

In 2011, 10 years after the attack, photographer Charlotte Dumas traveled across the U.S. to photograph the last remaining search-and-rescue dogs that had worked at the World Trade Center in her series called “ Retrieved .”

Multiple documentaries, such as “Hero Dogs of 9/11” and “9/11: True Stories of Ground Zero’s Hero Animals,” have also been produced to commemorate the amazing creatures that helped in the recovery at Ground Zero.

Sadly, Bretagne, a golden retriever and the last known living search-and-rescue dog who bravely scoured Ground Zero, was humanely euthanized on June 6, 2016, according to National Public Radio.