By Laura A. Bischoff
Dayton Daily News
NEWBURGH, N.Y. — Some of the most valuable players on Ohio Task Force One’s team do their work in exchange for toys, pats on the head and every now and then a belly rub.
Juno, Pepper, Rushton and Cruise have trained nearly their whole lives to be urban search and rescue dogs; they made their debut deployment to the East Coast this weekend to catch the scent of trapped human survivors in the wake of Hurricane Irene.
The dogs can search an entire city block in less than hour — a task that could take human search team members all day.
They can quickly disregard humans at the scene who aren’t hidden and sniff for the ones who are out of view. They can nimbly and athletically traverse rubble piles and even follow scents in flooded areas while traveling on the bow of a boat.
“Their playground could kill them every day,” said Debbie Triplett, an Ohio Task Force One member and Rushton’s dog handler.
They are elite K-9s. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has only about 200 certified search dogs among the 28 regional task force teams.
FEMA requires a Task Force to have search dogs before the team can be activated to a disaster scene. They are in such demand that dogs and doctors are the hardest slots to fill on a task force, said Dave Kimbler, a retired Dayton firefighter and a dog handler on Ohio Task Force One.
Ohio Task Force One is a search and rescue team based in Dayton that includes doctors, engineers, truck drivers, communications equipment technicians, and search and rescue experts.
Late Monday afternoon, the team received orders to proceed from Newburgh to the Albany area, where they will search houses in small communities that were hit by flash flooding.
For Kimbler and Cruise and the three other dog-and-handler pairs, Hurricane Irene was the first deployment with Ohio Task Force One.
“It is a life time of volunteering and this may be our one shot,” said Heather Sweitzer, a fire captain in Ravenna Twp.
“You have to do this purely for the love of the job because you’re not going to profit from it. It’s going to cost you dearly,” Triplett said. “It really consumes your life. You have to dedicate so much to it.”
The dogs begin training as young as 18 months and it takes a year to prepare for the certification test. And they undergo at least monthly task force training sessions in Dayton, where they are drilled to sniff out the scent and are celebrated when they make the find.
Certification lasts three years, so search and rescue dogs usually only last six to nine years in the FEMA system.
The training and deployment can be very dangerous - two of Triplett’s dogs suffered grave injuries when they were pierced by rebar sticking out of concrete chunks in a rubble pile during training.
“We have to have to remind ourselves that these (dogs) are our tools. That’s a hard concept to wrap your mind around because I don’t want my dogs to go into dangerous places, but I want them to save the human that they are trained to go in for,” Sweitzer said.
High-energy, athletic dogs that come from sporting, herding or working lines work best as rescue dogs, said Beckie Stanevich, another task force dog-handler.
Dogs can be cross-trained for both live human and cadaver searching but it’s usually better to specialize, said Stanevich, a retired nurse from Grafton, W.Va., who has been training dogs since 1973.
Search dogs can be trained to find hidden survivors who may be buried beneath rubble and also to find survivors in the wilderness.
Stanevich said trainers get “cadaver” scent from pulled teeth, blood samples or even bone fragments left over from hip replacement surgeries - something she admits is a little ghoulish.
Sweitzer said even if the dogs don’t get a chance to put their training and expertise into action on this deployment, “We are going to continue training like it could happen again next week.”
Copyright 2011 Dayton Newspapers, Inc.
Dayton Daily News