Littlest search dog was up to big task
By Caitlin Cleary Seattle Times staff reporter
Highly trained and obedient, focused and tireless, Ricky, a 3-year-old Rat Terrier, is the smallest urban search dog in the country. He can climb aluminum ladders, run complex patterns on command and tell the difference in the scent of the living and the dead.
At 17 inches tall and only 18 pounds, he can wiggle into small voids under dangerous debris, spaces where people and other search dogs cannot go.
For 10 days starting Sept. 19, Ricky and his trainer, Janet Linker, a Seattle firefighter and dispatcher, worked the night shift at the site of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, searching for survivors and, toward the end, bodies.
They were sent as a part of Puget Sound Urban Search and Rescue — 62 firefighters, police, doctors, engineers, public-safety personnel and three other search dogs. They were one of 28 elite teams coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
This week, Ricky sat quietly on top of the podium in front of the Seattle City Council, wearing his official vest adorned with official patches from FEMA and Puget Sound Urban Search and Rescue, while the human members of his team received thanks and commendations.
Linker and Ricky worked together with trainer Kent Olson and his canine search partner Thunder, a golden retriever, to locate several victims in the rubble, among them a firefighter and a policeman.
Olson, a forensic therapist at Western State Hospital, and Linker both work for Northwest Disaster Search Dogs.
Ricky, who lives with Linker and her family in Auburn, is not a shy dog. He jumps around and chews things up and fetches until the sun goes down. He will not give up the ball. He can bark continuously, and for a long time. But when people are trapped and dying, these are the traits that make Ricky in demand.
The training takes nearly two years. In drills, Ricky can search through piles at concrete recycling plants the size of half a baseball field and find three victims in eight to 10 minutes. Bulldozers and jackhammers will not distract him. He will not quit until told.
During FEMA tests, the dogs are sent to find victims in rubble where distractions such as cats in cages and dirty laundry have been planted. When the dogs find a victim, they use body language to signal their trainer. After each find, they get a toy as their reward.
"The dogs think it's a game," said Olson. "You make it fun for them, and that's what keeps up their drive."
At Ground Zero, however, there were few survivors emerging from the debris.
"When we first got there, we were overwhelmed with how big it was," said Linker.
The team quickly got into a rhythm of work. Up at 3 in the afternoon, water and feed the dogs, eat dinner, take the bus to Ground Zero for the night shift, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., after some of the heavy equipment had cleared out.
Ricky and Thunder searched the buckled subway tunnels and stairwells, locating victims and marking their resting places so workers could remove them later. Ricky's small size worked well.
"There were a few situations where we had to climb underneath metal beams, and the space just kept getting smaller and smaller," Linker said.
Olson said there were some voids that Ricky was able to get into that 64-pound Thunder could not.
If the dogs find a person alive, they are taught to signal their trainer by barking.
When Ricky found a body, his signal to Linker was to stand very still and look at her intently, all the fur on his body standing up. Before rescue workers would start to dig, Thunder had to confirm the find, lying down as his signal to Olson.
There was very little barking at Ground Zero.
"It's really hard to know exactly how many people Ricky helped find," said Linker. "I saw them take a policeman and a firefighter out from areas that we had just searched. I don't know how many people were in the stairwell. There were lots of people in there. They were gone, not alive."
Much of the time, though, Linker couldn't tell what building she was searching.
"To me, it was unrecognizable," she said. "I never saw steps. I never saw handrails. It was rare that you'd find a softball-sized chunk of concrete. The only intact thing was the paper."
The search teams did find some personal items scattered throughout the debris, which were kept for victims' families. "People would find necklaces, or someone's pager or cell phone," said Linker. "You'd find clothing with nobody in it."
After their rotation was up, trainer and dog returned home.
"Sometimes I wonder if the dogs feed off our emotions," Linker said. "If I'm
nervous, my dog is nervous. If I'm upset, my dog is upset. Toward the end,
he was just tired of working, tired of the noise, the commotion, the power
and construction equipment always running. I've never seen Ricky as mellow
as he was when he got home."
-- Anonymous, October 11, 2001