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1 SEARCH & RESCUE DOGS By Hatch & Judy GrahamContributing EditorsAlAlert on human feces in atrium of partially collapsedbuilding in Mexico City in 1985. Photos by Judy GrahamThThe train wreck near San Bernardino, CA. Houses were buried under tons of courtesy State Office of Emergency Hammond and Cinnamonsearch for human scent beneath the pot-ash and rubble I saw sparks, then I heard thescreech and all of the cars just startedpushing together, a resident of DuffyStreet was quoted in the San BernardinoCounty (CA) the morning of May 12th, a run-away freight train traveling at an esti-mated 90 derailed on a curve inthe Muscoy area north of San down a 25-foot embankment,the train - six locomotives and 69 loadedhopper cars - crashed onto a row of homeson Duffy St.

2 The train was allover the place, Associated Press quotes an eyewitness. It looked like a toy in a sandbox. Piecesof the (train s) axles were in people syards. And over everything was tons ofdamp, powdery trona, a mineral used tomake soda ash. According to one account,the ash filled the air with what seemed aheavy fog for almost an hour after engineer was brought out bywitnesses, news sources reported; he wasin serious condition with broken ribs, butalive. The conductor in the lead enginewasn t so lucky; he was found dead. Thebodies of two half- brothers, 7 and 9 yearsold, were recovered from their home, ap-parent victims of suffocation from the left two persons missing: Thebrakeman, and a 24-year-old man, Chris-topher Shaw, who had been asleep in hismother s dogs neededLocal police K-9s had been on scenein the early stages of the operation, andreportedly alerted on and helped locateone of the small boys.

3 But the K-9 han-dlers readily admitted their dogs weren ttrained for disaster Office of Emergency Ser-vices personnel arrived on scene as SanBernardino City was setting up an inci-dent command system to integrate helpfrom nearby jurisdictions, and determin-ing what other outside resources they dneed to cope with a disaster of this mag-nitude. Over the years, OES has come torely on volunteer SAR dog teams as animportant resource for finding lost hunt-ers and hikers, young chil- dren and eld-erly walkaways, victims of drowning,homicide and avalanche, as well as ur-ban disaster. Surveying the Duffy St. site,OES offi- cials thought immediately were SAR dog teams close athand in southern California, but they wereprimarily wilderness search and urbantrailing dogs.

4 Like the police K-9s, theyweren t disaster- closest available disaster dogswere located in the San Francisco BayArea. Two California Rescue Dog Koerner and Alf continue therubble search, a fundamental part ofany disaster dog John Koerner with his big blacklong- haired German Shepherd, Alf, and Shirley Hammond with her red Do-berman, Cinnamon - were soon aboardCivil Air Patrol planes, headed a 2-1/2 hour flight, they landed atRialto Airport and were met by a SanBernardino County Sheriff s helicopter. It looked like snow Before setting down, the chopperpilot circled the site several times to givethe handlers a good view of the disaster. It looked like it had snowed, Shirleyremembers, and wondered how effec-tively the dogs could search in this CARDA teams were briefed andbegan searching as soon as medical andheavy rescue teams were in place to backthem up.

5 First assignment was to try tofind the man missing in his mother shome: a collapsed wood frame house withfour hopper cars perched precariously heavy rescue coordinator, adeputy fire chief from the Lorna LindaFire Department, sketched a floor planof the house, and Shaw s mother indicatedwhere her son had been asleep in the frontbedroom when she left. What we didn t know, Shirley says, was that he had gotten up and was com-ing out of the bathroom, down the hall,when he heard the world coming to anend, the sky was falling. And he said hejust booked!* He didn t quite make it tothe front door. Initially the two dog teams began afree search of the site, then started a di-rected fine search. John reports that, con-trary to their usual proce- dure, both dogsand handlers worked the same area to-gether as a team.

6 The rubble where Shawwas presumed buried was a semi-con-fined area, and in the interest of savingtime, we worked them both simulta-neously. I don t know if I d recommendit as a general practice, heI cautioned, but said that in this caseit worked very well. I ve got to commendboth dogs. They really worked together. The trona was something of a prob-lem, causing the dogs to sneeze when theygot a noseful; still, they kept reports she squirted Cinnamon smuzzle with water from her bicyclebottle each time the dog had a sneezingepisode, and this seemed to pointed the wayIn one area of the collapsed house,the dogs alerted by scratching and dig-ging. Seeing a direction to move, fireheavy rescue personnel cleared ash andrubble down to ground-level, leaving avertical wall of debris for the dogs toagain sniff.

7 As each successive layer wasremoved, the dogs would recheck. Theycontinued to alert in the same area, thehandlers the alerts were consistent,they weren t what the handlers had cometo expect in a disaster situation. Shirleyand Cinnamon are veterans of theMexico City earthquake mission as wellas fires and mudslides. John and Alfsearched the Bay View Industrial Parkfire, so this wasn t their first disastersearch, either. Among CARDA s oldestand most experienced search dogs, Alfand Cinnamon have developed a strongbark- ing/ digging response to indicatedisaster victims they can t reach throughthe in the soft soda ash their reac-tion was different. Cinnamon would digand dig and dig, and then turn aroundand look at me, and then she d go backand she d dig again, Shirley she tried to direct the Doberman tosearch somewhere else, Cinnamonwould soon come back and say No, it sin this area.

8 And dig some described his dog s reaction as digging, smelling, sort of whining, nothis characteristic jubilant dig and bark for live victims. He at- tributes this to thedepth of soda ash - at least 12 feet - cover-ing the missing any case, the dogs interest wasevident. Someone was down under thosetons of ash and rubble. Following up onthe dogs alerts, the fire- fighters task wasa slow one. Hoping for a live rescue, theywere using hand and light power in heavy equipment could endan-ger Shaw s life - if he was still alive. Con-ferring on the situation, officials acknowl-edged there was perhaps a 1 percentchance of bringing out a survivor. But OESpersonnel and the incident and site com-manders agreed: that one chance in a hun-dred was worth holding off the rescuers continued removingdebris by hand where the dogs had in-dicted, the CARDA teams searched theother damaged houses and the train wreck-age.

9 One dog and handler also workedback along the tracks in case the brake-man had jumped from the train before 12-foot-deep surprisePools of diesel fuel and antifreeze onthe ground around the wrecked: locomo-tives, and dripping battery acid, made thisa risky place for the dogs to search. A1fshowed interest at the front end of one ofthe engines, but John couldn t get him inposition for a definitive alert. Early nextmorning the missing brakeman was foundhere under the wreckage, completely cov-ered by ash; workers reportedly had to cutthe train into pieces and remove it in smallsections to reach his , four semi-dump truckloads of tons of steel, wood, house de-bris and ash had been removed from thesite where Christopher Shaw was pre-sumed buried.

10 At about 9 , more than13 hours after the accident, a fireman re-moving debris discovered a void in therubble. He stuck in his hand - and felt an-other hand!From under the rubble Chris Shawsqueezed the fireman s hand. The shoutrang out, He s alive! Shirley took over an hour and a half forrescue and medical specialists to carefullyremove the trapped man. Describing thepainstaking process of clearing debris andash, John commends Deputy Chief GeneBrooks of the Loma Linda Fire Depart-ment who supervised the operation. Thatguy s alive today because of him. It waslike digging in loose sand, he said. Nor-mally in a situation like this, the victimhas a wall or some- thing on top of himso he s got an airspace. This guy didn he had was the soda ash sort of packedabove his head.