OBSERVER Photo by Damian Sebouhian Marty Schrader with his 19-year-old dachshund Archie.

“We thought we were going to lose him,” said Marty Schrader, owner of Archie, a 19-year-old dachshund who had somehow fell 8 feet straight down into a cleanup water pipe Friday evening.

Schrader, who lives off of Second Street on Woodrow Avenue in Dunkirk, had let Archie outside for his evening walk around the yard.

“We heard him barking, so we went outside to look for him,” Schrader recounted. Not able to spot their longtime family pet, “we just followed his barks and saw that he was down the pipe” in the neighbor’s front yard.

The Schraders immediately called the Dunkirk Fire Department to come help.

“They couldn’t get him, so we called (animal control), and (Steve Purol) was able to reach down with a noose, got him around the neck and snaked him out of there,” Schrader said.

“I got a call about 10 p.m.,” Purol told the OBSERVER. “The police department, the fire department and the streets department were down there and they said they had a dog down in a pipe. I get there and the pipe is like 8 inches wide, but it’s 8 feet down. A little dachschund was at the bottom floating in some water. The catching pole is only 5 feet long, so I had to lay down, reach all the way down and it took about an hour but I was able to get the noose around him and slowly pull him up. The dog was uninjured and I gave it to the owners.”

“That dog would have died if we hadn’t all worked together,” Purol added. “I’m so glad my arms were long enough to reach down there.