By Candace Murphy
Inside Bay Area (California)
Copyright 2006 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
All Rights Reserved
They travel, two-by-two, in conditions of chaos.
It could be in the bereft flatlands of Iraq, on a classified search and recovery mission for MIA soldiers. Or on the craggy, mean mountains outside Park City, Utah, seeking the scent of a Boy Scout gone dangerously astray.
Or it could be, of course, on the Pile.
Aside from last month’s trip to Iraq, that might have been the most chaotic place Florida firefighter Bill Kidd and Mizu, his 12-year-old German shepherd, have worked together -- the Pile. The smoldering site of debris where the World Trade Center once stood, and where Mizu, a search and rescue canine, spent days in September 2001 seeking survivors.
She didn’t find any. By the time Mizu got to the Pile on Sept. 16, there were no buildings, no survivors, no life. Instead, there was only waste, and most of it toxic.
That’s why Kidd was with Mizu at the Iams Pet Imaging Center in Redwood City earlier this week. He and three other dog handlers are waiting for their canine partners to get their yearly magnetic resonance imaging scan, part of a five-year risk assessment and prevention study to see whether the dogs’ health was compromised by the 9-11 search and recovery mission.
Another FEMA handler, Mary Flood, exchanges pleasantries with Kidd. Flood arrived at the Pile with her black Labrador retriever Jake on Sept. 17, just one day after Mizu.
“Jake’s retired,” says Flood of her 12-year-old dog. “Besides, I hyper-extended his elbow a few weeks ago throwing a ball.”
Kidd shakes his head.
“Ask me,” he says, “it’s amazing these dogs are all still kicking at all.”
The powerful attachment between a handler and a working dog is like no other. Yes, the handlers came from all over the country to the Iams center, only one of three such centers in the country, to participate in the study. But what compels them the most is their utter and complete devotion to their dogs.
And none of these handlers act detached, like the title “handler” might suggest. Flood, who’s from a town just outside Park City, Utah, curls up on the floor with Jake after his MRI, to keep him warm as he slowly shakes off the grogginess from the anesthesia. Police officer Cari Guerrero, part of a K-9 unit from Saginaw, Mich., murmurs in the ear of her bored and whining 9-year-old German shepherd, Felony.
Bob Deeds, a FEMA worker out of Texas, admits that when his 8-year-old Lab, Kinsey, goes under anesthesia, it tears his heart apart. It’s disarming, he says, to see his partner incapacitated by a haze of drugs - the limp tail, the head that lolls to the side, the ears that no longer twitch to hear the odd, distant sound.
“It kills me,” says Deeds, fidgeting in a waiting room chair before Kinsey’s MRI. “Every year they put her to sleep, and when I watch them put the needle in to deliver the anesthesia, it kills me. I guess it’s because I’ve been around euthanasia so much. It’s hard for me to handle. She’s my partner. It makes me wish she could live as long as we do. But she just won’t.”
It’s an intense relationship, fomented by an intense workplace, where emotion is rubbed raw by adrenaline and often horrific circumstances. And truth told, the relationships on display in Redwood City have no doubt been forged by their common experience at the World Trade Center site, and the Pile.
Each story has its differences. Some told of 10-hour car drives and arriving in the black of night, the same calendar day as the towers were hit. Others remembered taking military transport - a C-141 in Deeds’ case - a few days later. Others remember molten metal still dripping under the Pile more than a week after the attack.
But from there, the stories uniformly blend together: The smoke, the smell, the dust, the futility.
The dogs, trained to work and to find survivors in what the handlers call “live finds,” couldn’t find anything. And these dogs aren’t used to not finding anything. These are dogs that find, and get rewarded; find and get rewarded. Despite 12- to 16-hour shifts, however, there were no finds, and no rewards.
Instead, the scent of death dominated the air. That meant Mizu, the only dog of these four to be cross-trained as a cadaver dog as well as a live-search dog, was the only canine that wasn’t stymied. All the others were confused.
To keep the dogs from getting too frustrated, the handlers had to dispatch volunteers to hide so that the dogs could find them and consequently be rewarded with either lavish praise or play with a tug toy, the most common rewards for rescue dogs.
The game of hide-and-seek wasn’t only good for the dogs.
“Most of what we found would fit in the palm of your hand,” Deeds says. “It wasn’t even identifiable. I’d go and get a firefighter to hide in an adjacent building just so Kinsey could find someone. The firefighters were more than glad for the break. I tell you, in those few days, she was 25 percent search dog, 75 percent therapy dog.”
Kidd saw a lot of dogs like Kinsey on the site and admits Mizu was lucky to have had her cross-training in finding cadavers. For her, he says, the day was like play.
“I didn’t even put her on a live search,” says Kidd, a Florida-based firefighter with a blunt, if not crusty exterior. “I know, FEMA’s main goal was live. But there were live find dogs on our team that just stayed in cages. It was known there was nothing live. And if the dog’s not used to it, it’s unnerving for them.”
None of the four dogs scanned at the Iams facility found any living survivors at the site of the World Trade Center. But they poked their noses for days, without the benefit of protection, in piles of dust containing asbestos, shrapnel, human remains and, as one veterinarian said, “God only knows what.” Most of these dogs also went on to work for years afterward, like at the sites of hurricanes Ivan, Rita and Katrina, where they swam through fouled, polluted water. They also worked after the earthquakes that shook Turkey and Colombia, where lye covering the dead bodies caused the dogs to bleed out of their noses.
While it’s all in the line of duty, it doesn’t make their handlers worry any less.
In fact, as she was being called to the 9-11 site, Flood said she wondered if she and Jake would ever come back. After returning from the 9-11 site, she said she wondered if it would ever come back to haunt Jake.
“We had knee pads, elbow pads, face masks,” she says. “The dog wears nothing.”
Though the results of the MRIs at the Iams center won’t be known for some time - they need to be analyzed by a technician at the University of Washington - the good news so far is that no search and rescue dogs that worked at Ground Zero have suffered major illnesses.
Veterinarians aren’t sure why. In a study released last month, roughly 70 percent of 10,000 Ground Zero workers tested at Mount Sinai Medical Center between 2002 and 2004 were found to have new or substantially worsened respiratory problems. But the estimated 300 dogs that worked at Ground Zero, without airway protection or skin protection seem to be fine. More than 200 of them are still living, too, which is a number that veterinarians would expect in normal, non-working dog populations.
“The truth is, we’re not finding anything,” says Dr. Amy Dicke, technical services veterinarian at the Redwood City imaging center. “We’re not finding anything that’s statistically different from groups of control dogs.”
But the Iams study makes for important groundwork. Though doctors aren’t finding evidence of reactive airway disease, like what’s being found in people that worked the Pile, it’s thought that by studying the dogs, doctors may learn to understand a disease such as mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. The dogs enter the equation because mesothelioma takes only five years to affect them, while it might take 20 years to affect a human.
“We’re following these dogs, tracking any abnormal health findings,” says Dr. Cynthia Otto, a veterinarian at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied dogs that worked at the World Trade Center and who served as medical support on the site of the disaster. “To date, incidents of cancer aren’t different and we’re pretty optimistic. We still have a number of dogs alive and still out there. We just want to keep an eye out for things. There are so many potential toxins there and some that people probably never imagined. We’re just keeping our eyes open for anything abnormal.”
Police officer Joaquin Guerrero, whose wife Cari brought Felony in for an MRI, thinks he did find something abnormal, though. He responded to the World Trade Center disaster with Rookie, his rescue dog, on the day of Sept. 11. On Tuesday, he greeted visitors by immediately informing them of Rookie’s death.
“My partner passed away two years ago,” Guerrero says. “Rookie was Felony’s brother. They worked the Pile together.”
Guerrero explains that a few months after the rescue effort at the World Trade Center, Rookie developed a strange spot on his gum. At first doctors thought it was an abscessed tooth. But after more testing, the spot, one-eighth the size of a pea, turned out to be a cancerous tumor. Within a few months, the tumor grew to the size of a tennis ball. Rookie died on June 30, 2004, and Guerrero suspects the toxins in the Pile hastened his dog’s death.
“I do think it had something to do with it,” Guerrero says. “But, I mean, we don’t really know. We have a brother and sister that were there, and the sister is still alive. But my breeder that bred him - none of his dogs have ever died from cancer. Ever.”
Rookie’s fate is not lost on the handlers at the Iams center. Some show faces of bravado, but it’s that relationship, that extraordinary relationship between man and beast, that has the worry seeping in around the edges of the facade.
One handler admitted he’s closer to his dog than his wife. Another, married more than two years ago, said he hadn’t yet taken a honeymoon with his wife, but had taken 14 weekend trips with his dog. All said it’s hard to imagine a day without their dogs.
Guerrero doesn’t have to imagine life without Rookie, of course. And even though he suspects the exposure to toxins led to Rookie’s passing, he says he has no regrets.
“People ask me, ‘If you’d known what would happen, would you still have taken Rookie to work the World Trade site?’ And I say, ‘Heck, yeah,’” Guerrero says. “Rookie, he helped out a lot of families. He gave a lot of families closure. People don’t give these dogs a lot of credit. They’re just a lot of unsung heroes.”