Dogs Trained for Disasters Are an All-Too-Rare Breed : Emergencies: Although most sat out the Northridge quake, there might not be enough next time, officials say.

They are of a certain breed, these people of the disaster dogs. Crazy about their animals, psyched for catastrophe, altruists at heart.

And their dogs? A very elite corps. In all of California, there are only seven working dogs certified ready for disaster work, the toughest there is.

The Northridge earthquake could have been their Big One, rife with canine heroics etched in the public’s mind. But with few collapsed buildings, the dogs mostly sat on the sidelines, without the kind of publicity that could have rallied more people--and dogs--to their cause: saving human lives.

All of which has left the dog people warning that when the next one hits, the dearth of disaster dogs may prove disastrous indeed.

There are hundreds of dogs who work for a living, tracking wandering Alzheimer’s patients and children lost in the woods. Dogs sniff out everything from accelerants used by arsonists to narcotics smuggled by criminals to homemade sausages lovingly tucked inside a traveler’s suitcase from overseas.

But disaster dogs, who inhabit yet another realm in the service of human beings, are much scarcer than the other working types. About four years after California developed its system of eight urban search-and-rescue units--and assigned four dogs and handlers to each 56-member team--the state is still 25 dogs short.

And all but Hek, the retired police dog, live outside the Los Angeles County line.

“In the case of a really big disaster, with lots of buildings down, the smartest thing we could do would be to call on Switzerland,” says Hek’s owner and volunteer handler, Inglewood Police Sgt. Ty Cobb.

In a disaster, not just any dog can have its day.

The training is long and arduous. The dogs must be unflappable, agile, obedient and must love to play.

They should be able to distinguish between a living person or, say, Pseudo Corpse 1 and Pseudo Corpse 2, and among the “body in a bottle” scents designed to train the sensitive canine nose. They should not expect anything beyond praise, or perhaps an edible treat, as a reward.

The same goes for their handlers. In the world of canine disaster work, volunteerism rules. Money and time are tight. And, as the Northridge earthquake proved, not even disasters guarantee a stage for the dogs to strut their stuff.

In a disaster, trained canines are the quickest and surest way to find people buried by debris. As such, the dog people have spent years trying to persuade government officials that Chicken Littles they are not. Infrared sensors can’t see through concrete; fancy listening equipment is all but useless amid the cacophony of disaster work.

Many dog people yearn to emulate the Swiss, whose state-supported dog teams travel the world on a moment’s notice to discover people hidden under rubble, mud and snow.

Although the Swiss model may forever be a pipe dream in the United States, the ranks of certified disaster dogs are expected to grow. California handlers say about a dozen are making sufficient progress. But in Fontana last weekend, nearly half the dogs who took state certification tests flunked.

And California, mecca for calamities natural and man-made, is more advanced than any other state in the field of emergency response, including dogs.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency copied California when it set up its own national disaster response network of 25 units, including California’s eight. But they, too, are always short of dogs. Several disaster teams throughout the country can’t yet muster a single one.

“We are not prepared,” says Shirley Hammond, a volunteer handler in Palo Alto who coordinates disaster dogs for California’s Office of Emergency Services. “It’s hard for those of us who have spent all this time training to realize that we are not making that big a dent.”

The reasons range from perennial money problems to disasters that strike without warning. Unlike other working dogs--such as those used by law enforcement to sniff out drugs, explosives and smuggled human beings--a disaster dog could conceivably spend its entire career in training, just waiting for the Big Enough One to strike.

“We would love to have seven times 70 dogs,” says Michael Douglass, the Office of Emergency Services’ assistant chief in the fire and rescue division. “It’s just that it takes a lot of time. And all the handlers, for the most part, are volunteers.”

This brings a special set of problems, too. In California, there are four separate and often feuding associations of search-and-rescue dogs, of which disaster dogs are the most highly trained.

Each believes its training methods are best. All members are passionate about their animals and dedicated to the nobility of volunteer disaster search. Some, such as Hammond, even quit their paying jobs to always be available should disaster call.

“(But) their dogs get along much better than they do,” says Mark Ghilarducci, manager of the program in the Office of Emergency Services. “The handlers can be their own worst enemies. We can’t get them to agree on a damn thing.”

The same can be said for dog people nationwide. “We are all strong-minded and have got an opinion,” says Bill Dotson, a nationally recognized dog trainer who works with Virginia’s Dogs East.

In California, however, the Office of Emergency Services convinced the disaster dog people to form a confederation that administers tests--such as the one held last weekend--to certify dogs for disaster work in the state. The California standard is more rigorous than that used by FEMA for national and international disaster work.

The dog associations are still grumbling, however, over the California standards (too tough or not tough enough?) and whether the pass/fail method of grading is best. One recent canine aspirant, for example, failed because it urinated during the exam. Another was hit by a car and injured its leg.

Yet another dog, already certified ready, has been involuntarily (perhaps temporarily) retired because its owner, an Inglewood police officer, just gave birth to her second child. Human families still come first.

*

San Bernardino awoke to one of its worst disasters May 12, 1989, when a freight train hauling 69 cars full of trona derailed and crashed into a residential neighborhood at Duffy Street. Eleven homes were seriously damaged and four people were killed.

But because the trona, an ash-like compound of hydrous sodium carbonate, had blanketed the area, rescue workers had no way to know whether anybody else was buried under the debris.

The state Office of Emergency Services called for search-and-rescue dogs by 10 a.m., but it was not until six hours later that Shirley Hammond and her red Doberman, Cinnamon, arrived from Northern California. Within minutes of its arrival, the dog picked up a human scent and local resident Chris Shaw was rescued.

“What I could not understand is that there were literally no qualified dogs around,” says state Assemblyman Paul A. Woodruff (R-Moreno Valley), who was at the scene. “We had to fly one in. If that person had had any serious injury, or just loss of blood, he would have been dead.”

Woodruff’s has been a lonely voice for the dogs in Sacramento, and he is not running for reelection this year. And the limited use of disaster dogs during the Northridge earthquake didn’t exactly start a legislative stampede to the cause.

“What this does is again postpone the inevitable,” Woodruff says. “The question is: How many children are going to have to die in a collapsed classroom before local government takes advantage of sharing responsibility for acquiring these dogs?”

*

Like most of Southern California, firefighter Walt Harrison and his family in Yucaipa awoke with a jolt before dawn Jan. 17.

As a volunteer member of Riverside County’s urban search-and-rescue team, Harrison was prepared. After the shaking stopped, he and his wife and three children--and his disaster dog, Misty--moved into their trailer stocked with emergency supplies. Then he waited for the call directing him to the quake’s front lines.

“I was excited about going,” Harrison says. “That’s what I live for. I want to find live people. I’ve spent 3 1/2 years preparing her. It’s like being a fireman. You like going to the big fire.”

Harrison’s mobilization call came at 8 a.m. “Misty knew,” he says of his yellow Lab. “She sees me getting my stuff, she knows we’re going to search. She loves it.”

But mostly, Harrison and his dog just stood by. To combat boredom, they walked around and watched TV. By the time they were summoned to the collapsed Northridge Meadows apartment complex, it was the afternoon of Jan. 18, the day after the quake.

There, Misty joined Cobb’s dog from Inglewood and a golden retriever from Bakersfield. And she quickly let Harrison know she smelled humanity amid the smashed mass of concrete debris.

She did not bark, however, as she had done so many times in training when she “alerts.” Instead, she pawed at the floor. The victim--the last one found at the complex--was dead. The smell is distinct.

No dog working during the disaster discovered anyone alive.

Rescue workers who were at the Northridge Meadows apartments say they believe most of the victims died shortly after the earthquake. Bringing in the disaster dogs earlier would not have changed the result, they say.

There were dogs from the Los Angeles Police Department at the apartment building on the morning of the collapse, but these “felony dogs,” who track armed suspects, are not trained for disaster work.

*

There are, of course, many levels of disasters to which dogs and handlers around the country respond. Hundreds of dog teams find people lost in the woods, in the snow, underwater and underground. The training for each location is different, although principles overlap.

The Sigma chemical company in St. Louis, for example, manufactures an artificial odor of decomposing bodies--Pseudo Corpse 1 and Pseudo Corpse 2--which dog handlers find ideal for training animals for what they call “land cadaver” work, the uncovering of graves.

Using “body in a bottle,” as the chemical is affectionately known to handlers, is much easier than using real body parts--primarily from accidents--which, until Pseudo Corpse’s arrival about two years ago, was a training norm.

Handlers dab the chemical, which is far too subtle for a human to smell, on an object, bury it and order the dog to search.

The best dogs for such work, handlers say, are those who love to dig. Other rescue dogs are better suited to aquatic careers.

At a recent dog team training seminar in Wiggins, Miss., Kody, a 3-year-old golden retriever, was showing off his water skills, eagerly jumping into a boat at the 1,900-acre Flint Water Park, his black nose held high as he sniffed the air.

Soon Kody was barking at a spot in the water where a diver was hidden below. Angie Messina, the dog’s owner, says Kody has recovered 43 drowning victims in the lakes and bayous around her home in Slidell, La.

The human scent lifts off the water at the spot where the victim goes down. But because smell travels much as smoke does, a handler must mentally map the air currents before sending rescue divers down. Sometimes handlers throw talcum powder in the air so they can see the air flow.

Kody, too, was summoned along with other members of Slidell’s all-volunteer American Search & Rescue Assn. to the site of Amtrak’s worst train wreck outside Mobile, Ala., last September.

Forty-four people were killed when a barge pulled by a tugboat strayed into a bayou shrouded in fog, then smacked into a railroad trestle minutes before the Amtrak Sunset Limited roared across--and off--the bridge.

Although Kody has found many bodies before, the sudden crush of disaster victims seemed to overwhelm the dog.

“My dog, as seasoned as he is, he was so depressed,” Messina says. “I had to work real hard over three or four days to bring him back up. The more experienced dogs, who knew what they were there for, they were depressed. The area was saturated with the death smell.”

Usually, however, handlers say that as gruesome as rescue work might turn out to be, for the dog it is play. Barry Orange, a veterinarian in Clark, N.J., says his Rottweiler, Maxine, loved the excitement in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing last year.

“She’s real rough and tumble,” Orange says. “She does good in collapsed buildings.”

Orange and his dog were called in two days after the explosion to find bodies, but had to leave because conditions were still unsafe.

Still, Maxine was rewarded for a job well done. If dogs don’t get a prize, they won’t bother playing the search-and-rescue game.

Volunteer Carol Gardner, who works her coon hound, Polly, in searches throughout the South, says experience has taught her to first brief the family of a victim beforehand about on how the process works.

“I tell them, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to find him,’ ” Gardner says. “ ‘And I want you to know that it is not that I am being disrespectful, but when I do find him, I’m going to praise the dog. I’m going to play with him.’ ”

That is often tough. Last November, police in Irvington, Ala., called Gardner and Polly to search for the head of a woman whose sexually mutilated body they had found. They closed off the interstate freeway and Polly sniffed at the spot in the dense grass where the body had been found.

Within 10 minutes, the dog found a tissue with the victim’s lip print and a perfume bottle--and then, her head.

“She alerted, and was digging and kind of yelped,” Gardner says. “I figured that was it, but I really didn’t want to see. Then, finally, I thought I’d better look, to make sure. It was the head, all right.”