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INTO THE RUBBLE

© Joy Butler

September 11, 2001 marks the day when our freedoms were attacked and thousands of lives were abruptly ended. Terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon, Tuesday, with such explosive impacts that the 110-story twin towers were reduced to just 2 stories of crumpled steel and smoldering rubble. The world looked on in horror as thousands ran terrified through the streets of New York, with the giant buildings tumbling in the background. It was hard to believe that this was taking place in America.

When the fires were out and the ashes and debris settled over Manhattan, the overwhelming task of recovering the injured and the dead became urgent. We, once again, turned to our faithful and capable animal friends. We brought in the search dogs, more than 300 of them.

Into the rubble they climb, superbly equipped with forty four times the olfactory sensory cells as humans. With olfactory lobes constituting a full one-eighth of their brain, these dogs can perceive certain smells in the range of one part per ten quadrillion. At least one-third of cells emitted by humans are lighter than air and will stay suspended, to be quickly identified by the dogs. When time can mean life or death to a seriously injured victim or when a family agonizingly waits for answers before they can move on in their lives, these dogs can cover an area at least four to ten times faster than human searchers.

There are various types of search dogs. They may be any breed or mix of breeds and will have varied areas of training, such as water search, avalanche search, wilderness search, or tracking. Some are experts in several areas but those assisting at the World Trade Center are trained as disaster dogs or "rubble dogs". They were there in the Northridge Earthquake in California in 1994, they were at the Oklahoma City bombing site in 1995 and they are employed in many other disaster areas whenever needed. These dogs, sometimes, go into dangerous situations with falling debris or broken glass and their job can be physically and emotionally challenging. Finding multiple bodies can be distressing for a search dog, and his handler will try hard to keep up his spirits and motivation by taking frequent breaks.

These dogs must be in good health, have great stamina and pass stringent testing in obedience, agility, alerting, direction control and various disaster scenarios such as building searches and collapsed structure searches. They must learn to work in the midst of distractions and to ignore the scent of their handler and other searchers around them. Disaster dogs, specifically, are taught to give a "bark alert" and to remain with the victim. An elite few are FEMA or OES certified.