ASCHAE’s DogBlog

Source: PalmBeachPost.net, Jan 21, 2010

International heroes are coming in all varieties in Haiti — even on four legs.

A black-and-white border collie named Blaze raised his snout into the air, searching for the scents of life amid the stench of death.

And then Blaze made a dedicated scramble over concrete rubble, weaving past twisted rebar and the remnants of someone else’s shattered life toward one of the few walls still standing in a row of decimated houses atop a mountain village in Port-au-Prince.

The dog pawed and sniffed and barked tirelessly at the wall as Steve Driscoll, his handler, came rushing.

Driscoll, a Palm Beach County firefighter and paramedic, shouted to the rest of the Miami-Dade County-based search crew that they had a survivor.

The crew punched a small hole in the 8-inch wall, shined a light and found a 2-year-old girl in a concrete bubble, in dusty jeans and mustard yellow shirt, barely conscious.

She had been entombed for six days. On Wednesday, she went home with her parents, barely a scratch on her.

“That dog performed a miracle,” said Louie Fernandez, a spokesman for Miami-Dade’s elite search-and-rescue team Task Force-1, in a phone call from Haiti. “The rescue of that little girl lifted the spirits of our whole team here.”

Even in the face of sobering numbers — tens of thousands dead — rescuers give thanks for small miracles like the one performed by a man and his dog.

Driscoll, 47, has seen his share of lives pulled from the jaws of death in his 19 years as a county firefighter and paramedic. He has seen the worst of tragedies as a FEMA-certified rescue dog handler and trainer for 12 years, working an 11-day stint in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

But he and the 13 members of his search team had never seen anything like Blaze’s find on Monday. They applauded as the toddler was pulled out, given new life.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw her,” Driscoll said. “It was a pretty overwhelming feeling. Every eye on those 13 was teary-eyed.”

Driscoll gets only a few minutes on a satellite phone every other day, but he used all of his time to call his wife of 16 years, Lori, a physician’s assistant back in Loxahatchee, to tell her the news about the little girl.

She laughed, choked up, as he told her hurriedly how their 8-year-old dog — he calls Blaze “intense” and she “driven” — barked immediately at the deceptive concrete wall.

Lori’s mind went to their watchful family pet, one of fewer than 100 dogs in America to achieve FEMA’s highest level of certification, and recalls the puppy that herded the couple’s two daughters, now 6 and 9, around their living room.

“He watches out for everybody,” she said.

The guys at Fire Station 22 can attest to that. Blaze comes to work with Driscoll on every shift. He runs on the firehouse’s treadmill, and the other firefighters take turns playing hide-and-seek, climbing ladders and squeezing into cabinets, daring Blaze to find them.

“The dog’s amazing,” said Capt. Robert Cusell, one of the shift commanders. “You have to see it to believe it.”

And that dedication reminds them of Driscoll. The former high school football player and world-class water skier still holds the academy’s record for doing more than 2,700 continuous sit-ups.

Officially, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue doesn’t have a K-9 search and rescue program. And the “higher-ups” don’t know that Blaze works every shift at Station 22 and sleeps in his own crate, Battalion Chief Nigel Baker said.

“But I’ll personally vouch for him,” Baker said. “That dog’s family.”