The old Dandenong Fire Station has gone to the dogs – quite literally.
Dandenong firefighters joined Search and Rescue Dogs Australia (SARDA) for a combined training exercise at the Princes Highway site on Sunday 13 November.
The day involved four separate training drills.
Handler and canine abseiled about 20 metres to the ground from the top of the training tower in one, and the dogs walked across 25 metres of elevated horizontal ladders of varied widths in another.
There were two search and rescue drills, the first a standard search over two floors for 12 ‘victims’ hiding in cupboards, holes in the floor and behind walls.
Level one was smoke filled, and with visibility down to 1.5 metres, smoke detectors were sounding and dog treats were placed around the search site.
The canines ignored the ‘walking wounded’ and observers and honed in on the human breath scent trails that led to the trapped victims.
The second search drill occurred on the second floor, and involved the handler remaining on the lower level.
The solo dogs successfully located one person hidden underneath flooring in a 300 millimetre cavity, some in less than a minute.
The fire station partnership with SADA developed about two years ago.
The crews train together a few times each year and are about to structure theoretical lessons for handlers to develop and improve their knowledge and understanding of CFA structural searching techniques and more.
The partnership also allows CFA members to gain a greater understanding of SARDA’s capability and capacity.
Both services gain a greater insight into each other’s abilities and techniques through the inter-agency collaboration, and find it easier to operate together when responding to the same incident.
