Dogs

[off the grid]

We recently had a search in a river that was flowing at about 4 mph with 5-15 feet of depth. Windy conditions prevailed on both the evening of the first day and the morning of the second day of the search. Dogs were brought in on the morning of the second day. Water temps were about 56 degrees. They alerted up near the point last seen. The subject was found shortly after about 4 miles down stream. Given the water and wind conditions along with the shortness of time, I feel that the dogs had a fairly limited ability for a reliable location and that waiting on a hit from them was a waste of time at that stage in the search. Our team as a whole has had a low success ratio using dogs on land or water. I am looking for info or stats on dog searches and any input from other teams on their success or lack of success with dogs. I am also looking to see if anyone has developed a search SOP on river searches.

 

[ReefGuy]

We recently had a search in a river that was flowing at about 4 mph with 5-15 feet of depth. Windy conditions prevailed on both the evening of the first day and the morning of the second day of the search. Dogs were brought in on the morning of the second day. Water temps were about 56 degrees. They alerted up near the point last seen. The subject was found shortly after about 4 miles down stream. Given the water and wind conditions along with the shortness of time, I feel that the dogs had a fairly limited ability for a reliable location and that waiting on a hit from them was a waste of time at that stage in the search. Our team as a whole has had a low success ratio using dogs on land or water. I am looking for info or stats on dog searches and any input from other teams on their success or lack of success with dogs. I am also looking to see if anyone has developed a search SOP on river searches.

We don't have cadaver dogs, but a nearby volunteer S&R has a couple. Twice, they've alerted and we've been called out, with no bodies found. One was on an old SUV (stolen, but no remains), the other "victim" was found alive in the next county. They have not had a successful alert that I know of.

 

[Bubblesong]

We had a public safety demonstration of a sniffing dog looking for a live and quite well child, just a demo, in our downtown. The dog did get hung up in front of the cheese shop, but successfully tracked the kid to the toy store.
On the other hand I thought the age old way to throw off search dogs was to go in water, so maybe not a lot of potential for diver rescue?

 

[off the grid]

Thanks for the info. Thought there would be more people with some dog stories out there!
Related to water searches that is!

 

[oem3105]

We use our USAR K-9 team on a lot of our water calls. We will usually dispatch them out as soon as possible and cancel them if they aren't needed once more information is known. They are very helpful in cases where we do not have a witnessed event/last seen point in narrowing down our search area. Usually in these cases, we will run sonar and K-9's looking for targets of interest before we consider putting a diver in the water. We have had cases where the K-9 indicated on the exact location of our target.

The key to using dogs for water searches is knowing them and their training. You have to be careful as there are a lot of "certified" K-9's out there that would have a hard time finding their food bowl. We are lucky in that we have a long history with our K-9 team and we work well together. I would not be comfortable in using a K-9 team that I didn't know and haven't had the opportunity to trained with.

 

[off the grid]

Thanks