LORTON, VA. — Every muscle tense, every nerve on alert, the wiry yellow Labrador shot from her leash and bounded nimbly up a vertical maze of concrete slabs, rusted beams and chunks of rubble.
Every few feet, she stopped and sniffed the wind, then darted through another opening.
Within three minutes, Pryse, a member of Virginia’s Fairfax County urban search and rescue team, had homed in on her target: a woman trapped inside a section of cement pipe.
After a few extra sniffs to confirm the scent, the 6-year-old lab began barking furiously, her tail wagging with excitement.
“Whoo-whoo! Good girl!” came the muffled voice of the “victim” from inside the pipe, its entrance camouflaged with a wooden pallet. Then a hand pushed a colorful cloth tube out through the pallet, and Pryse began shaking it in a frenzy of delight. It was her favorite tugging toy, hidden with the victim to reward the dog for her success.
“To her, it’s all a game of hide-and-seek,” said Ron Sanders, 54, Pryse’s handler and best friend, who was waiting nearby with pats and praise.
“That toy means more to her than anything in the world, even food. We use the toys to create loyalty to the victim, and we train the dogs to navigate the rubble. So when they go in there, it’s like Disney World with a prize at the end.”
Pryse and Sanders, a retired firefighter who lives in Lynchburg, Va., returned last week from Nepal, where the Fairfax rescue team, sponsored by the Fairfax County, Virginia Fire and Rescue Department, was deployed by the U.S. government to search for survivors trapped in the massive, 7.8-magnitude earthquake April 25 that killed more than 8,000 people.
Both were on the scene during the dramatic rescue of a teenage Nepali boy who had been trapped under a collapsed hotel in Kathmandu for five days. After the boy was safely extracted, Sanders sent Pryse racing straight up and into the precarious ruins to search for any other survivors, but she detected no live human scent.
Back home, they took a few days to get over jet lag. Pryse was reunited with her canine housemates, Tomo, a 12-year-old German shepherd who retired after deploying with Sanders to half a dozen disasters; and Roxy, a 6-year-old Belgian Malinois who was too high-strung to become a reliable sniffer dog, but became so attached to Sanders that he didn’t have the heart to part with her.
Then, it was back to “the pile,” as Sanders and his teammates call their permanent training site, a tower of rubble built on the grounds of an abandoned prison complex in Lorton, Va.
The team trains two weekends a month to keep the dogs ready for both disaster deployment and periodic recertification by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Like all rescue dog handlers, Sanders knows that the “fun” training is also intended to send an animal he loves, and who would do anything for him, into harm’s way. Injuries on the job are uncommon but not unheard of; dogs inside a collapsed or burning building can fall into crevices or get caught on sharp metal.
Accidents also occur in training; two of the Fairfax team’s dogs are currently recovering from broken legs.
Sanders has never had a dog that was seriously injured or killed in the line of duty, but last winter he lost Ondo, a handsome, older shepherd who was his first rescue partner. After retiring from years of service, Ondo accidentally swallowed a sock and died. As Sanders told that story last week, he choked back tears.
Ondo’s stained-glass portrait hangs in the family kitchen, and his collar has been passed on to Pryse.
Now that Sanders, too, has retired, and his son Eric and daughter June are grown, he spends much of his free time with his canine companions, doing informal home training between the regular sessions in Lorton and the occasional emergency deployments.
They, in turn, are clearly devoted to him.
“You really have to enjoy doing this because it takes so much time and patience,” Sanders said, sitting in the kitchen as Pryse kept trying to climb into his lap for an ear rub and Tomo kept dropping a rubber ball at his feet, hoping for a game of catch. “It becomes a way of life, and they become part of your family.”
