When machines and human noses aren’t up to the job, canine sniffers work best.
For three days this week in Brighton, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is putting 18 dogs to the test.
Small amounts of explosive material can be undetectable to humans and even machines, but a dog’s nose can detect odors down to parts per billion — or trillion.
“Their noses are fantastic,” said Doug Lambert, an ATF special agent and a certified explosives specialist. “Even our best man-made machine’s detection is much less, in parts per million.”
The dogs, from 11 agencies in the region and already certified by their employers, are in line for national certification in explosives detection.
Explosives-detection canines are being called to service more frequently, said Denzel Lukens, the lead trainer for the Adams County Sheriff Office’s canine units.
Adams County sheriff’s two explosives-detection dogs were called for searches about 15 times last year, but “we’re way above that this year,” Lukens said. “They’re calling us more and more.”
The Adams County dogs were on a team of seven that helped sweep Prairie View High School less than a month ago when noises from a locker prompted a bomb scare.
“When we search a lot of big buildings, we help each other out, so we were able to clear that pretty quick,” Lukens said. “The dog portion took us an hour and a half. With just two dogs, it might have taken six hours.”
Adams County’s canines also do daily sweeps of county jails and the courthouse.
In addition to having a good nose, search dogs must be confident and committed to searching, trainers said.
“They have to be fanatic about searching,” Lukens said. If its toy gets thrown in the woods, a dog should be willing to search until it’s found, he said.
Dogs with good detection potential are usually about a year old when they are identified. It takes about 16 weeks to train them to sniff out explosives odors. With regular training, such dogs usually work about nine years.
For the ATF’s National Odor Recognition Test, canine handlers take the dogs around two circles set up with multiple metal cans, each of which contains an odor.
Each circle consists of five explosives odors as well as other distracting decoy smells such as food, toys and common suitcase items.
When the dogs think they have detected an explosives odor, they must sit to alert their respective handlers.
To pass, the dogs must detect all 10 explosives odors, while never alerting handlers to an odor that isn’t explosive.
“They get two opportunities to pass,” said Cody Monday, the lead trainer for the odor test. “Dogs have bad days too.”
The certification is good for two years.
The test will be a breeze for Tarzan, a 97-pound, 7-year-old German shepherd who has received ATF certification twice before.
Tarzan and his handler, David Tyndell, work for the Department of Homeland Security in Lakewood, assisting government agencies that need a bomb-sniffing dog, including the Secret Service and the ATF.
“When he gets in the car, he knows it’s business,” Tyndell said. “Time to work.”
Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372 or yrobles@denverpost.com
