VIDEO: The Oklahoma City Fire Department announced that two new canines will be used to search for victims during natural disasters. “Dino” doesn’t wear a badge or a hard hat, but he is a member of the Oklahoma City Fire Department and Oklahoma Task Force One. “Dino is a very smart dog, and so, a lot of this is just he and I getting to the point where we understand each other, and weโre working together,” Capt. Nathan Johnson with the Oklahoma City Fire Department said.
While he has the energy to play fetch all day, the canine isn’t after tennis balls or frisbees. “He is a live-find search and rescue dog, so he looks for live humans that have been buried in some kind of disaster,” Johnson said. “Heโll stay at that spot. Heโll bark, and then thatโll tell us that we need to look in that spot to find somebody.โ
Dino and Johnson were recently paired together at the National Search Dog Foundation in California. Now, they will work toward certification with FEMA. “That test is to search for up to six victims on two different rubble piles, and we have a time frame that we have to do that in, and Dino has to be able to find those six victims,” Johnson said.
Once they get that certification, Johnson and Dino can respond anywhere across Oklahoma and the nation to help after disasters. Johnson said this has been a goal of his for years, going back to when he saw the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum when he was younger.
“They also have a section of the memorial that was dedicated to the search dogs and everything they did. I kind of knew from that moment that thatโs where I wanted to go with my career,” Johnson said. The whole process could take anywhere from six months to a year to complete, according to the fire department.
