Dogs Team Up With Tennessee First Responders

Before the last drops of rain had fallen from Hurricane Katrina, Deborah Burnett and her black Lab, Keno, were already on the scene.

When an elderly woman became confused and sat down in the wrong car, the two tracked her down.

And when a little boy spent the night at a friend's house without telling anyone, one of his first sights the next morning was Burnett and Keno at the door.

When disaster strikes, Burnett, a self-described "man-hunter," grabs her dog and takes off.

"I train dogs to hunt people," she said. "If I have to go pull a dog out and your name is attached, it means you've either gone off and gotten lost or made law enforcement upset, and I'm going to hunt you."

Burnett and her dogs are part of Tennessee Task Force One, one of 28 highly trained emergency response groups across the United States. The Task Force, a team of emergency-response personnel, functions under the Memphis/Shelby County Emergency Management Agency. Operations are coordinated through the Memphis Fire Department with assistance from other local fire departments.

The team is made up of firefighters, police officers and civilian volunteers, who respond to both small- and large-scale emergencies.

"It's a good-guy thing," Burnett said of her work. "If I'm the one having a bad day, buried under concrete, that's the team I want coming after me."

As the Task Force's K9 coordinator, she is the force behind the dogs and handlers who find lost and buried people during or after an emergency. Burnett not only trains the Task Force dogs and handlers, but also dogs and handlers for other search and rescue teams across the United States and internationally.

Since 1994 when she began training dogs, and especially in the past six years she has worked for the Task Force, Burnett has built a reputation for herself and Tennessee.

The dogs can be any breed, and many are rescued dogs themselves. They are selected for training at about 18 months. Usually, handlers adopt them as pets once they're too old to work.

The handlers, who also go through rigorous training, are taught how to handle and how to read the dog. Then they learn to control the dog from a distance using arm motion commands. Before they can deploy, the handlers then must go through HAZMAT training, ropes training and rappelling courses, among others.

The Task Force has about 14 certified handlers, and a few more who are going through the evaluation process.

The dogs get a similar education, learning to understand the directional commands and going through "junk agility," a course that mimics circumstances that the dog might experience while working a disaster site, such as broken concrete, jumbles of metal and ladders.

Then comes the barrel field. The barrels peeking out from behind trees have doors and are used for hide-n-seek with a person hiding and the dog searching.

"It introduces the dog to looking for a person you can't see," Burnett said.

The skill is needed for the next step of training, the rubble pile. The rubble pile fuses the junk ability and barrel field training by providing a way for people to hide under slabs of concrete and metal, mimicking the effects of a downed building. The dogs must locate the hidden person while navigating the landscape safely and ignoring people they can see.

"The best part is when you take a dog that's green and train it to the ability that no matter what, it's going to find you buried," Burnett said. "The really strong dogs are the ones who don't make very good pets."

Like many of her dogs, Burnett's first dog, an English springer spaniel named Fergie, was going to be put down in 1994. Fergie, who died last year, "taught me a lot," Burnett said.

"You have to learn to trust the dog, and you have to teach the dog that the handler is an idiot, and the dog is on his own. We get in the way of the dog."