Sep 14, 2011
Searching for lost pets and missing persons in post fire and flood disasters,
By: Harry Oakes, International K9 Search and Rescue
I've been asked by several search dog teams how we've found pets alive after a housing area has been destroyed by fire (wildland/house fires/ forest fires). and search for missing persons in fire and flood disaster scenes.
Fires:
In the Skeleton Fires in Bend, Oregon we brought in 7 of our search dog teams and donated our time to the victims of the fires. 60 homes were destroyed by a wild fire.
First make sure the area has cooled down. Scene safety is priority.
Second contact the local human society or animal control and get in contact with the home owners of the destroyed homes who have reported their pets missing.
Third, make contact with the pet owners and get permission to access their destroyed home rubble site. Make sure you inspect the scene first. Look for hazmat materials, sharp glass, metal, nails, live hot electrical wires, etc. Once you've made the scene as safe as possible, work one search dog team on a "Clear the area" search. Into the wind. Z pattern air scent search. If the dog indicates death alerts mark the location. If the dog indicates live alerts, mark the location and bring in a confined space camera, listening device and or just start removing rubble.
It's great if the family has something in their possession that belongs to the missing person or pet.
then you can have a scent for the search dogs to try to detect.
In the Skeleton Fires, we located 21 animals including one horse. 15 of the pets were still alive.
6 were dead. it brought closure to the families.
Be ready for ugly politics. Even though the local SAR teams didn't raise a finger to help these victims, they had no problem bad mouthing our efforts in the newspaper. To them, I raise the Middle finger skyward and say GFY.
It's sad that we drove for 6 hours each way, donated our own money, time and efforts and were successfull only to get badmouthed by local sar and sheriff's teams. EGO's .. smaller then their IQ's.
The results speak for themselves.
We also now have a 24 hour pet ambulance service on call 24/7 for pet transport to include Iv's and oxygen.
Floods: Same search procedures as fire searching. Air scent disaster site and watch dogs reactions for live and dead alerts. Mark locations and recover remains.
www.k9sardog.com
Harry Oakes.
