Consider This from NPR - When Disaster Hits, Dogs Come To The Rescue

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

This year the U.S. has experienced devastating natural disasters. Outbreaks of tornadoes leveled entire neighborhoods. Flooding trapped people in their homes. Wildfires burned out of control. When people go missing during these catastrophes, it's a race against time to find them alive – or their remains. That crucial search is often carried out by specially trained dogs.FEMA has 280 certified detection dogs trained to find people in disasters. Another 80 dogs are trained to search for human remains. NPR's Scott Detrow visits a Maryland training facility where dogs, and their handlers, learn skills that could save lives. Email us at [e-mail] Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

When disasters strike... In Texas, at least eight deaths are blamed on the unforgiving ice storm. Today, the governor of Mexico says the death toll climbed to 43. We're going to begin with the news, and the news this morning is not good in Vermont. A disaster there. Earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires. Death toll from the wildfires in Hawaii has risen to 93. When people go missing during these catastrophes,

the clock starts ticking to find them or find their remains. It's a critical job, and it's done by man's best friend. Ouch. Hey. Ouch. Good boy. done by man's best friend. Out. Out. Out. Good boy. Around the country, FEMA has about 280 certified detection dogs trained to find people in disasters.

Another 80 dogs search for human remains. We're looking for dogs that can do the work, and it doesn't matter what their breed is, as long as they have that high drive, friendly to humans, friendly to other dogs, they have that high drive, friendly to humans, friendly to other dogs, they have that toy drive, they have agility, they have the confidence to go in and work independently if they need to. Victoria Ledwell works as a canine coordinator and a dog handler

for FEMA's Urban Search and Rescue Squad in Maryland. For me, I've always, always loved dogs. As a retired firefighter, she's used to responding to emergencies. I got partnered with my first dog, Fonzie. It was a yellow lab and had a great career with Fonzie, and now I'm working Pasquale. Ledwell and her dog, Pasquale, were deployed to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Fiona and later to South Florida after Hurricane Ian. Over the summer, Ledwell went to Hawaii.

Thirty-five dogs were sent there to recover the bodies of people who died in the wildfires. Watching the dogs work in Hawaii, what they are able to smell versus what we think they should be able to smell, it's amazing. Those dogs were smelling and alerting on human remains that were powdered ash. Coming up, we visit a training site for these dogs to see them in action and learn how they operate. That's just ahead. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Friday, November 10th.

It's Consider This from NPR. You want to do the ladder? Climb it. Back. We'll do his least favorite, it's the seesaw back here. Come here. Next to a Maryland industrial yard, a black lab named Parker is working his way through an agility course. Over.

Good boy. Come. Up the hill from the course, there are piles of rubble with overturned boats and busted-up buses. There are concrete and plastic tubes all over, all big enough to hide people in, which is key because Parker and dozens of other dogs look like they're having a great time, but they're here to practice a serious job, how to find people trapped after disasters. Whenever there's a hurricane or a wildfire or an earthquake or any other mass casualty event, FEMA sends teams of trained dogs in to help find people.

Right now, there are around 280 dogs like Parker across the United States waiting to be deployed to the next natural disaster to help rescue workers locate living people trapped under debris. Another 80 or so are trained a little bit differently to help recovery teams locate dead bodies. These dogs play a key role in natural disaster recovery efforts, and it's the job of people like Victoria Ledwell to make sure they're ready on any moment's notice. So glad to have you guys here. Welcome. We got a lot of work to do today. Ledwell is the canine coordinator for FEMA's Maryland Task Force 1, a group of Maryland-based dogs and their handlers. Many of the handlers are like Ledwell, current or former firefighters who just love dogs.

A dozen people are sitting in a circle of plastic chairs as Ledwell ticks through her checklist of updates before the training starts. A reminder about getting veterinary services. Ledwell's a handler herself. She's on to her second dog, Pasquale, after a good run with another pooch named Fonzie. We're looking for dogs who have a high nerve strength and high drive, very biddable, very smart. You're saying biddable? Biddable, meaning I can ask them to do a chore or a task

and they're like yeah I want to do that. Most of the dogs in this Maryland cohort are known as the P team. As puppies they were all given names that start with P because they all came from the same breeder. But FEMA insists dogs can and do come from all over and once a dog is identified with that energy and drive the training begins. Like anything else, one step at a time. And we start to build on that. All right, you showed interest in the scent. Now we're going to see if we can get you to bark at that scent. And then we're going to reward that. And we can keep expounding on that and make it a bigger and bigger problem until they're able to not only say, okay, I'm looking for live human scent. I'm going to use my nose. I'm going to find it. Then I'm

going to bark when I find it to indicate that I found it. We can do that all on the ground in a small scale, but then we can build on that. Just like any dog, the thing they're working for is a toy. So I can speak for myself. At home, my Labrador Pasquale will play with every toy. I call him Pass, and he loves every toy, but when he's working, he only gets one specific toy. It's a tug. He decided that was the best toy in the world. He loves that toy. He only gets it as a reward when he's searching. So does the toy come with when they're on an actual deployment then? Yes. So toys go into pockets. You'll work in a vest. And absolutely, toys come along, and they get rewarded when they find their source.

Some handlers are lucky their canine partners picked a toy that's easy to carry, but that's not always the case. My last dog had what we call the flying squirrel. It was like a floppy frisbee, and it didn't fit well into pockets, but it didn't matter that it was hard for me to carry because for him that was important. You just had to make it work. I have to make it work. In recent years, Ledwell and Pasquale have gone to Puerto Rico and South Florida after hurricanes. Pasquale didn't come with her, but Ledwell more recently spent 10 days in Hawaii,

working with the 35 dogs FEMA sent to help find remains after the devastating wildfires in Maui. It was hard, hot work. The dogs needed protective booties on their feet. But what we ran across in Hawaii was that the rigors of the job of working, the boots were disintegrating over time. And the boots were just because there was still hot ash and hot spots. The pavement's hot. We didn't want burned paws. Dogs can latch onto the faintest scent of humans inside rubble because of their super-powered noses. And the system that allows them to smell? It's by comparison way bigger than

ours. In our noses, we just have this really small area of tissue up inside our head where odorant molecules can be absorbed and recognized by our bodies. And in dogs, that's taking up a large portion of the inside of their snout. So they just have a much larger surface area that's able to detect odorant molecules. That's Erin Hecht, the director of the Canine Brains Project at Harvard. She also says the way dogs process smell allows them to search for survivors or bodies in ways that people just can't. So they're just pre-wired for odor processing in a way that our brains aren't. Dogs' heightened sense of smell helps them get the job done. But a good candidate for search and rescue has to have drive and energy. That's one reason why so many of the dogs training in Maryland are Labradors.

So Pager is an urban search and rescue dog that detects live human scent. He thinks that microphone is a toy, probably. This is Pager. He has a little bit of a different story than the other dogs, though, because he was donated to a Puppies Behind Bars program. That's Pager's handler, Joshua Kurland. He's a firefighter when he's not working with FEMA's Maryland dog team, and he says he was first drawn to working with canines at the Fire Academy.

I probably should have been paying attention to my fire skills, but I saw canine handlers over in the background working, and I was like, oh, the fire department has canines. Kurland ended up with Pager because Pager flunked out of Puppies Behind Bars. Him and his sister were trained by prisoners to go to various programs like police programs, wounded veterans programs. And both him and his sister were a little too rambunctious, a little bit too high drive and high energy to work out in that program. So they both got sent back to the kennel in Maine. I don't know what you mean by high energy. Yeah, yeah. We watch as Curlin and Pager go through their drills. I'm going to direct them around the bases.

We see Pager running around a field laid out a little like a baseball diamond. There are wooden platforms where each base would be. And Pager is sprinting, tongue flapping in the breeze, from platform to platform, and then jumping on them and pausing. He's following Curlin's commands, allegedly. Pager, hop up! Back! Pager! Curlin says Pager's struggling with focus just a little today, but he's still got the job done.

Good boy. There's another regular drill called bark barrels. And we got a dog who's warming up now. We saw them as soon as we arrived. Long, black plastic tunnels, big enough for a person to fit inside. There's three of them, and they all have a wooden barrier in front with a small opening, just big enough to fit a dog's snout into. Someone hides inside, but only inside one of them.

Want to go to work? The dog has to figure out which barrel. So, producer Erica Ryan climbs into the middle one to test the skills of Parker, the first dog we had met on the agility course. Alright, I'm just waiting to see who's going to come save me. Search! So, Parker immediately went to the tunnel that Eric is in. Now he's focused, he's barking, he's sniffing.

Find him. Get him out of there. Get him, get him, get him. Oh, that's a good job. Now, one final drill. A simulation of what you might find after an earthquake. So this is a pretty serious simulated rubble. We've got piles of concrete here. We've got some overturned boats there. I see some broken down buses in the back.

Do you use all of this for different simulations? We do. We do. We're trying to simulate what a collapsed building would be like. And now Kerland and Pager are up to tackle the rubble. All right, Pager's on the pile. He's kind of roaming the perimeter here. Pager's struggling a little, but there are a lot of unusual smells with the crowd of people watching.

So we know he's getting closer. Oh, colder. Okay, now he just did a loop of the tube that we know somebody's in, making his way back. Oh, so he was right there, but now he has looped and gone in the other direction. Kerlin and Pager keep practicing, just like their teammates. Soon, dogs from around the region will come here for a certification test to see whether or not they'll qualify for another three years in the program. If they pass, they'll keep training,

keep practicing, and waiting for the call to deploy to the next big natural disaster. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.