Titan and I deployed to New Orleans’ 9th Ward in October for a week. We went with VA Department of Emergency Management and were the first K9 recovery teams on site. This was a rather historic deployment for VA since we responded from a request via EMAC from Louisiana. Through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, States can request disaster assistance from other States. This was certainly the largest deployment of mutual aid in history. When we got down there we were rather overwhelmed by the scale of devastation. The entire lower 9th ward needed searching and we were three dog teams with little base support. More teams were coming… but we were looking at an immense area. We sent a thorough report to VDEM, but I would like to make sure that our lessons learned are shared more broadly. I have posted them here.
Some of my photos are geotagged. I’ll provide a link later so that you can see these pictures in map view. Meanwhile, you can see a slide show of the photos above by visiting Flickr.
I’m writing quite a few Zooey posts since I let the blog slide for so long and need to get some of my favorite puppy movies and pictures up. Here is Cindy playing ball with Zooey when she was . I’ve been working on getting her excited about smaller balls. She has size one soccer balls that she loves. Today she just popped her first full size soccer ball. Apparently, the are not really made to standup to dog teeth and jaws. Oh, well.
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