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On the morning of September 11th, Officer Lim and Sirius were at the Port
Authority police station located in the basement of the World Trade Center's
north tower. Officer Lim heard the sound of an explosion and thought
that a bomb had gone off inside the building. Lim commented to Sirius,
"...one must have gotten by us." Of course, that was not the case
because the explosion Lim heard was caused not by a surreptitiously placed
bomb, but by one of the hijacked planes crashing into the building. Officer Lim knew that civilians needed to be evacuated from the building and that he would need two free hands to perform this task. Consequently, Lim left Sirius in his basement cage, where he believed he would be safe. Officer Lim raced upstairs into the north tower. Just as he reached the 44th floor, the second plane crashed into the south tower.
As Lim (right, with Sirius) was frantically escorting civilians down the fire stairs to safety, the building suddenly began to collapse around him. Miraculously, Lim and those he was assisting found themselves standing in the remains of a crumbled 5th floor fire stairway that had somehow managed to escape total collapse. Lim and those with him were eventually evacuated from their precarious perch with the aid of ropes tossed to them by other rescuers.
Once the safety of his civilian
evacuees was assured, Lim desperately tried to make his way back down to the
severely damaged basement police station to rescue Sirius. However, other
rescuers stopped him because the area was too dangerous to enter.
Thus on September 11th, Sirius, a
well-trained bomb detection dog, whose life was dedicated to the dangerous job
of searching for bombs as part of America's "War on Terrorism," died ironically
in a terrorist attack that even he, with all his training and experience, was
powerless to detect. However, the irony of his death is far out shadowed by the
nobility of his service to mankind. Resource: Port Authority Police Memorial |
