Dogs Dig In to Sniff Out Victims at Crash Site

As soon as Mike Guerin arrived in San Bernardino to assess Friday’s train disaster and organize state assistance, he knew one of his top priorities was to call out the dogs.

Minutes after his first meeting with local disaster coordination officials, Guerin was on his cellular phone to the Sacramento headquarters of the state Office of Emergency Services requesting search dogs capable of sniffing out any victims that might be trapped in the rubble of destroyed homes.

“It is our experience that whenever a structure collapses, especially wood frame structures, you can have a void where it has not collapsed completely,” Guerin said by phone from San Bernardino, “and you have the possibility of finding a body or a live victim inside.”

The request, as usual, was passed from the state to the private, volunteer California Rescue Dog Assn., known as CARDA, which had two of its “mission-ready” dog teams in the air and on the way within hours.

Collapsed Buildings

The two dog teams, each consisting of one dog and handler, came from Palo Alto and Belmont near San Francisco because they were the closest CARDA teams trained to work in collapsed buildings.

The teams were flown to San Bernardino County in two Cessna planes donated by the volunteer Civil Air Patrol. They arrived shortly before 4 p.m., to the relief of rescue workers who had stayed away from the collapsed homes to avoid masking the scents of possible victims with their own odors.

Once on the scene, the dogs--a Doberman pinscher named Cinammon owned by Shirley Hammond of Palo Alto and a Bouvier de Flanders named Alf owned by John Koerner of Belmont--were set loose to prowl a pile of rubble.

The rubble once was the home of Christopher Shaw, 24, whom authorities were afraid may have been trapped inside. The dogs darted over the debris, sniffing and following their owners’ hand signals before Cinammon barked three times at one spot.

No Victim Unearthed

Yellow-jacketed firefighters and orange-shirted city workers set upon the area with shovels, but no victim was immediately unearthed. Hammond said later her dog may simply have been frustrated by the tangle of debris and clouds of potash dust.

Like the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, the San Bernardino train wreck was a high-profile mission that refocused attention on the ordinary folks who give up hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars a year to provide the state with round-the-clock contingents of trained rescue dogs in all parts of California.

Two Organizations

Police around the state turn to the rescue dog group an average of three times a week. They use dogs to find lost hikers, kidnaped children, missing evidence and accident victims--anything a dog’s sensitive nose can sniff, save drugs. Narcotics remain the arena of specially trained, full-time police dogs.

Founded 12 years in Orangevale, Calif., near Sacramento, CARDA has grown to more than 100 members from Eureka to San Diego. Most of them live in Northern California, but the group has been expanding into Southern California for the last five years.

The association, which has 32 certified mission-ready dog teams and dozens more in training, is one of the state’s two volunteer dog search-and-rescue groups. The other, Organized Wilderness Finders, is affiliated with the Marin County Sheriff’s Department north of San Francisco.

Larry Peabody, CARDA’s coordinator, said the members of his organization train their own animals under guidance from the association, then agree to donate their time and often considerable sums of money to keep the group ready to respond on very short notice.

Although the Office of Emergency Services will pay their transportation, housing and food expenses for the San Bernardino disaster, CARDA members often drive their own cars and pay their own way to help with less visible, but no less important, crises, such as a lost child or missing crime victim.

“My wife has a dog, a German shepherd, he doesn’t care how big the debris is, he’ll haul it off as fast as he can,” Peabody said. “He really gets frantic when he scents a trapped person.”

Dig Frantically

The dogs are trained to dig frantically at any spot they sense a trapped, living person. They bark at any location they detect a body, even in water, Peabody said.

Although CARDA has 17 breeds registered among its members, from Doberman pinschers to retrievers to bloodhounds, most of the dogs used by the group are German shepherds.

Smaller dogs are being tried too, he added, especially after the success of a pair of Australian kelpies in the Mexico City earthquake.

“They can get into the places where the big dogs can’t,” Peabody explained.