Robert Schenell remembers being the first member of the New York Police Department’s K-9 Unit on the scene when the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001.
Seventeen minutes later, Schenelle watched a second plane crash into the WTC’s South Tower. Schenelle and his rescue dog, Atlas, hid for cover when the South Tower collapsed around them less than an hour later.
For eight months, Schenelle and Atlas remained there at what became ground zero, working 12-hour-search and rescue shifts at the site of the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.
“We did that straight through till May 30, [2002], until they shut it down and said that the recovery is now over, the site’s now closed, ground zero,” Schenelle told ABC News. “That was a very traumatic day for a lot of us, because we had been there so long, and, you know, you never want to just give up.”
More than 300 dogs took part in the search, rescue and recovery effort at ground zero in the days, weeks and months after the 9/11 attacks according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which refers the dogs as the “four-legged 9/11 heroes”
It became evident all too fast the efforts of the dogs and their handlers, at ground zero would be largely a recovery mission, according to Dr. Cynthia Otto, a veterinarian who traveled from Pennsylvania to New York on 9/11 to help with the effort.
“That was just the most devastating part of the whole process,” Otto told ABC News. “All of these dogs were trained to find live humans, but it became clear that they started to recognize human remains, and they didn’t do their normal response.”
The dogs became critical in the effort to find human remains, using their sense of smell and their ability to go into spaces where humans could not to help identify many of the nearly 3,000 people killed at the site.
“One of the things that has really stuck with me is that the dogs provided so much more than just the scent detection,” Otto said. “They provided some sort of source of comfort for all of us that were working there, and it really made a difference.”
