|
Interview with Chris Christensen in Shiloh, Illinois October 2001 In October 2001, Evy Serpa, owner and president of KUMPI Dog Food and I drove to Shiloh, Illinois so that I could photograph Servus and Evy could deliver dog food to Servus' handler, Chris Christensen. During our visit, Chris recounted his experience at Ground Zero and the two events that nearly took his dog’s life. With his permission, I recorded everything he said. "Servus and I left Shiloh Wednesday night, September 12, after getting permission from the Mayor to take one of the town’s four squad cars. We followed a team from the Cahokia, Illinois Fire Department from Shiloh all the way to Ground Zero at 85mph for 14 hours. It was about 10 o'clock Thursday morning when we pulled into the city. I found a parking spot about a half a block from Ground Zero and walked in with Servus. It looked like a nuclear device had gone off. There were no food or supplies piled up yet. It looked like it had just happened. I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I stood there looking at the wreckage and looking at Wus (Servus). The smoke was really thick and acidic and made my eyes burn.” "About 20 to 30 minutes later, some guy told me they needed a canine to search for victims off of Liberty Street, by the NASDAQ building. We walked around the back of the Liberty One building and saw two victims being removed; both had been decapitated. Wus and I were directed to enter an opening too small even for a dog to fit through. A guy from Battalion 3 Rescue told us to go on around the backside of Building 4 and down the escalator there.” "What no one knew was that just out of the line of sight, the escalator dropped off like a water slide. I inched my way down to a tiny ledge about eight to ten feet below ground surface where a piece of metal sticking out of the wall caught my backpack and spun me around. When that happened, it was like slow motion. I saw this blur going right by me, and I’m watching and another six feet below me he (Servus) impacted face first. His feet went straight back and it was like he collapsed into this dust 16 to 24 inches deep. And I still remember seeing this I-beam above him and when he impacted you could see the fear in his face as he gasped. All that dust stuck in his nose. I said, ‘Oh my God, he can’t breathe!’ Within ten seconds his tongue turned purple from a lack of oxygen. There was sunlight penetrating straight down and I could…see another 20 feet where there was another escalator going down. If he had (fallen a few feet) over he’d have landed on that escalator. I could see a footprint in the dust on the escalator, so I knew someone was down there.” “When Servus impacted and sucked in all that stuff, he tried to vomit and couldn’t. I stuck my hand down his throat and pulled out a wad of gook. By then he was convulsing, so I screamed up to the guys that my dog’s in trouble. I picked him up and bench-pressed him over my head to that ledge. I crawled up and lifted Servus up to the guys and told them to hold him for me. I climbed out and grabbed my dog. It was like I was on TV in slow motion. All I could see was this big, red fire truck and I was thinking they have to have suction and oxygen. Everyone was watching as I ran straight for that truck, carrying a 70-pound dog across the debris field. I get there and he still can’t breathe; he’s still convulsing. I put him down on his side and his mouth is opening and closing like a pair of scissors. Dog’s have eye reflex capability, like when they come out of anesthesia, you tap on their eye to see how responsive they are. I tapped his eye…nothing. They were fixed and dilated.” “I said to myself, ‘My God, you’ve got one, maybe two minutes before he’s dead!’ So I screamed, ‘Somebody get me some oxygen!’ Somebody handed me a water bottle and I pulled the cap off. I poured the water over his face and all this crap just came out of his nose, like liquid concrete. Paste just kept streaming out. I wiped his face off but he still couldn’t get any air. He was still convulsing. So we scooped his mouth out a little bit and tried the suction but it wasn’t powerful enough. Finally the oxygen showed up with a non-rebreather, like a human mask you put over your nose. I cleaned more crap out of his nose and put the mask on him; 100% oxygen. I said, ‘Wus (Servus), don’t give up on me buddy, we didn’t come here to die. You’re not leaving me. I’m not letting you die here.’” “It took a good 30 seconds of 100% oxygen to turn his tongue from a blood purple to more of a pinkish brown. And he’s still convulsing. You figure that’s five minutes of being in a convulsive respiratory state. That’s like you trying to breathe through a wet washcloth. The next thing I know is this nurse walks by and asks if we need an IV. I said, ‘Yeah, you got one?’ She said, ‘Yeah, there’s one in the back of the fire truck.’ I told her to grab it. She said she’d never given an IV to a dog before and I told her I didn’t care and to just stick him. She opted to give the IV to an EMT who wanted to do it, but you could see his hands were shaking. I said, ‘Man, just stick him. You can do it, don’t be scared.’ He said, ‘Man, I’m so nervous.’ I told him to just do it. He did and hit the vein on the first try.” “We taped Wus up and the next thing I know there is one of those basket stretchers coming down the street. We load him into it and then must have looked like MASH, running with the IV bottle and the stokes basket. Four or five dogs are running beside me. There must have been 20 to 30 people helping me, including firemen, policemen, a vet tech and the nurse. The first thing we see about a block away is an ambulance, a paramedic unit. I said, ‘Man, my dog’s hurt. I need to get him to the animal clinic.’ He refused, saying ‘I ain’t putting no dog in my ambulance!’ Well, those cops went off, taking down his name and number. Man they were mad. I told them we didn’t have time to argue and to let it go. We start running down the street another half a block or so, trying to find the mobile veterinary clinic, which was only three blocks away. But, no one knew where it was. We were guessing. We were running around Ground Zero guessing at which way to go. No one knew where the vet was and Wus was still struggling for air; he was probably getting only 20% of the oxygen he needed. I thought, ‘My God, how long can he hold out?’” “So, we find a crushed car and set the stretcher on it. We waited a second to try and settle Wus down. Next thing we see is an NYPD van come around the corner. ‘You guys need help?’ ‘Yeah, I need to get to the animal clinic. Can you take us?’ ‘Sure,’ and he opens up the double side doors. We load Wus and then everybody piles into the van. I thought it was only going to be me and Wus, but everybody, the vet tech, the EMT, the firemen, the policemen, everybody piled in; they knew how to get to the animal clinic at 62nd and York. The driver radios in that he is running an injured canine up to the animal hospital and asks for an escort. So, we’re doing 80 mph northbound on the FDR with three motorcycle cops running lights and sirens in front of us.” “We pull in and jump out, all covered in dirt and ash. Wus is still convulsing. He’s probably been convulsing seven to ten minutes, trying to suck oxygen through the mask. He is on his second bottle now. A 2100 cubic-foot bottle can last a long time, and he’s on his second. We throw all of our gear into the stokes and walk into the main lobby where five to seven people are standing there waiting for us. Everybody grabs on to the stretcher and runs to the elevator. The vet team is cutting all the junk off of Wus as we head up to ICU. They move him over to the surgery table and give him some drugs to slow his breathing and reduce his stress. They washed his eyes and gave him more injections, shaved his leg and redid his IV. I’m standing there thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe this. My dog is going to die.’ I’m petting him on the head, crying. ‘That’s my dog. That’s my buddy.’” “They took him in for x-rays and brought him back to ICU to stabilize him. Then they moved him into a huge stainless steel, walk-in type cage. I said, ‘That’s my dog. We’re joined at the hip. We’re buddies.’ I crawled in and sat with him as they set up his IV. Then, as they were putting a heat lamp on him he went into shock and started shaking uncontrollably. And shock can easily kill a dog in 20 minutes. Eventually he warmed back up and stabilized after a couple of hours. He had calmed down and his color came back.” “Once I felt Wus was out of danger, I called for a ride back to Ground Zero and a police officer from District 13 picked me up. He dropped me off over by Liberty One and as I walked back onto the site, I overheard a couple of rescue workers talking about Building 4 falling over. I walked around the corner and sure enough, the top of Building 4 had fallen off and landed right where Wus and I had gone in. I counted five stories of steel. If Wus hadn’t been injured we would have been killed. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.” “I stayed a while and helped a couple of groups and then got back in my car and figured out how to get to 62nd Street. By then, six hours had elapsed. I go in and talk to the doctors. They’re pulling blood and running all these profiles. By now, Wus is up and looking good. It was really pretty cool. I walk in and he’s on a little blue blanket with nurses all around him. You know, Wus is just a big hambone. So, I walk in and he’s got a bandage on his leg with the IV. You can hear his tail just thumping and you hear all the nurses saying, ‘Oh, he’s so cute.’ And I’m thinking, ‘My God, Wus has won everybody over here.’” “The doctors released Wus around 3:30 pm. We headed back to the perimeter of Ground Zero and slept in the car for a couple of hours near the Woolworth building. I was exhausted. When I woke up I moved the car closer to the center of the site to ensure I could get back in; security protocol changed every hour, and many workers who left the site were not allowed back in. Wus and I slept through the night as a heavy rain fell. Early the next morning I took Wus for a walk. He still had a bandage on his leg from the IV. I’m looking for a piece of grass for Wus to go to the bathroom on when a young man asked if I wanted a cup of coffee. I said sure and he asked what happened to my dog. I said he got hurt falling down a hole. I didn’t notice at the time that this guy was a priest; he had the collar on. He came back from a hot dog cart with a cup of coffee and asked me if he could pray for my dog. I look up and I now see he is a priest. I said I’d be honored if he’d pray for my dog. So he puts a hand on Wus’ head and says, ‘Father, bless this dog, protect him, heal him so he can go back and help. Go back and find someone alive.’” “I went back to my car and put Wus in the back seat as I had planned to go and join the bucket brigade. As I opened the door to get my backpack, he jumped out. I said, ‘Wus, get back in the car.’ He just stood there, didn’t move, just stood there with a weird look like, ‘Uh huh.’ I said, ‘No. Get back in the car.’ Nothing. He would not move. I said out loud, ‘I can’t believe this.’ I reached in, grabbed his lead and hooked it up. Suddenly, he was like a puppy, ‘Let’s go.’ We went back out to several areas and then took a break. I gave Wus some food and taped up his booties. Firemen were coming to pet him. We slept in a building for an hour or so and then went down to Liberty One. That’s where I saw some of the body parts coming out.” “I took Wus over to the main FEMA command post for the dogs and a fireman yelled, ‘Canine, I need your dog!’ So he takes us through this, like...I remember elevators going up and an open area…and he takes me down in through this building and there’s no light on and everybody’s running in and out and there’s standing water in the walkway. Ice cold water. My boots hit it and (the water) went right into my socks and I thought, ‘Oh my God’. If any survivors had been trapped in the lower levels, they would have either drowned or died from hypothermia. Wus follows me with his booties on. We walk out into the main open area where Towers One and Two stood. All you could see were mounds of devastation. Rescue workers everywhere, heavy equipment.” “It was Friday night. We would start working in one area and then get called over to another area. If a dog got a hit, they’d call a second dog in. If the second dog hit the same area, they would stop, pull the machinery back, and you’d see 20 guys come in with buckets and shovels.” “We moved on and ran into a fireman just coming on duty. He introduced himself and asked me where I was from. I told him St Louis and he stopped. ‘You came all the way from St. Louis to help us?’ I said, ‘Of course. I’ve been here since Thursday morning.’ He asked if Servus was my dog and I said he was. He shook my hand, and firemen don’t just shake your hand; they clasp onto your wrist and forearm, too. He said, ‘Thank you for coming and God bless you.’ All of a sudden I see him put his gear down and pull his shirt off. He hands it to me and says, ‘Here’s a souvenir from the people of the City of New York.’ I thanked him and put it in my backpack.” “Wus and I resumed work and then this guy comes around. We are standing next to a crushed ambulance or fire truck and he says,’ My God, can you smell that?’ I said “Yeah.” The dogs are all working it. Just imagine an area the size of a queen bed with five men walking around it trying to find a body that you know you can smell, but you can’t find. It was unbelievable. We walked around the pile and could not find the source, not with dogs, not with humans. We knew it was right there, but we could not uncover it. And do you know why? They were vaporized. The body parts were so small they didn’t even look human.” “I remember finding some paperwork; a checklist from the aircraft. Switch one on, trim tab setting, etc. I put it down, thinking I didn’t have time for that. Then I looked to my right and I saw a white shirt in a pile of debris. I grabbed it and pulled. Nothing was in that shirt but fragments of body parts.” “Later on we got a call to search an area that required a traverse over some I-beams with four-foot gaps in between. The beams were 60-feet long and wet from last night’s rain. There was a void space underneath one of the beams in which 20 or more people could have survived. No one was found. As with the crushed vehicle earlier, we all knew by the smell that we were close to some dead bodies, however, no one could locate the source. As we reached the end of a wet, slippery I-beam, Servus went to jump the gap and lost his footing. As he fell, a fireman reached down and caught him around the chest. The impact threw him back into respiratory convulsions like before. I screamed for someone to bring oxygen to me because I knew he would never make it to the hospital. A vet helped me stabilize him with oxygen and load him into the stokes. We started an IV, put him in a Suburban and headed back to the animal hospital on 62nd.” “As we walked into the hospital the vet told everyone to glove up put masks on. That hurt my feelings and I asked, ‘Do we smell that bad?’ She said, ‘Yeah, you do. We know what you’ve been walking through and yes, Chris, you smell really, really bad.’” “By now it was 12:30 Saturday morning. We had been working almost seven hours off of Liberty; it had been 4:00 Friday afternoon when Wus wouldn’t get back in the car. One of the vet techs named Hernandez helped me find a place to sit and wait. He was abnormally quiet and began asking me a lot of questions, like ‘Is it, is it really bad in there?’ And I was being an optimist and I said, ‘Yeah. It’s really bad.’ ‘Well, do you think anybody is still alive?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ He said, ‘Do you really think there are people alive and trapped in there?’ I said, ‘Of course, of course I do,’ as there were for many days. And so I didn’t think any more about it and started giving Wus a bath. Around 2:30 am, Hernandez went off to do other chores. After he left, the vet came over and told me that Hernandez’ father had been missing since the 11th. He had volunteered to come in and work the midnight shift because he couldn’t sleep. I thought about the answers I had given him and hoped I had not said anything inappropriate.” “Seeing that this was Saturday and I hadn’t had a shower since Wednesday, I asked if there was a place I could hose off. I was told I could and that Hernandez would take me where I needed to go. It was now 3:45 am and I was really excited to take a nice, hot shower. So, Hernandez takes me to the shower area and I strip down to my shorts and I’m waiting for Hernandez to leave so I can take this hot shower. I’m ready to get undressed and I’m sitting on this bench and Hernandez keeps asking questions. We talked until 5:45 in the morning, so for two hours I sat in a pair of shorts on a little wooden bench answering questions and wanting more than anything to take that hot shower. Finally Hernandez left and I stood under the hot water for an hour. I used an entire bottle of shampoo on my hair, trying to get that stink out.” “I put on some clean clothes and went to a bunkroom and slept for a while. When I woke up I found a sign on the door, which read, ‘Everybody please be quiet. There’s a rescue worker who’s getting some much-needed rest.” I get up and find a pink index card taped to the glass on the door. I pick it up and read, ‘Mr. Christensen, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. I hope to speak to you in the future…By the way, my dad called…he’s alive.’” “I stood there and thought, ‘This has been the trip of a lifetime, with the things I saw, the people I met, the building falling over, the priest blessing my dog, me going back to the same animal clinic, meeting this kid, getting my hot shower, going back to the room and seeing Wus’ newspaper story taped to the wall…” “I waited until the blood test results came back before I left to find and thank the vet at Ground Zero who had helped me. I thanked everyone and said my goodbyes to the friends I had made there. I loaded Wus up and headed back to the site, parking on one of the farthest streets over. This time I made Wus stay in the car while I left to find the vet. I walked out through a barricade and found her group. I told them to tell her thank you for me and then went to find some booties for Wus but there weren’t any. After an hour I gave up and was headed back to my car when the guard stopped me at the barricades. He would not let me pass through. I said, ‘Hey Buddy, my dog’s sitting in my car over there.’ ‘What’s your dog doing in the car?’ ‘Well, he got hurt. He’s the one that fell down the hole. I’ve got to go get my dog.’ He asked to see my ID and let me in. It was insane. Firemen would literally walk out, go three feet, turn around and not be allowed back in.” “I got to my car and headed out just in time to get stuck in traffic; it was about 6:00 pm Saturday evening. By then, so many rescue teams had arrived they were tripping over each other. Teams were set up here, mounds of gear there, just junk everywhere. It was organized chaos. I said to myself, ‘It’s time for me and my dog to go.’ I asked a cop how to get out of the city and began my 900-mile journey back home.” |