US Air National Guard/Staff Sgt. Joshua Horton Tech. Sgt. Rudy Parsons, 123rd Special Tactics pararescueman, and his search-and-rescue dog, Callie, exit a UH-60 Black Hawk as part of Callie's familiarization training at the Boone National Guard Center, Frankfort, Kentucky, November 29, 2018.
- After deploying in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, members of the Kentucky Air National Guard realized the service needed a better search-and-rescue capability.
- Eight years later, the Kentucky Air Guard's 123rd Special Tactics Squadron got Callie, the
Defense Department's first search-and-rescue dog. - Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
In 2010, airmen from the Kentucky Air National Guard deployed to Port-au-Prince, the capital and most populous city of Haiti, in response to a magnitude 7 earthquake that impacted millions.
"With the destroyed airfields, it was difficult for many government organizations to land aircraft and provide assistance," said Master Sgt. Rudy Parsons, a pararescueman with the Kentucky Air Guard's 123rd Special Tactics Squadron.
The airmen were able to get on the ground and assist in clearing the airfield thanks to their special capabilities, but they soon faced more complications.
"Local sources were telling people that there was a schoolhouse that had collapsed with about 40 children inside," Parsons said.
"A team of special tactics airmen went over and started looking through the rubble, just carrying these rocks off, looking for these missing kids. A few days into the search, (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) was finally able to land. They brought a dog to the pile and were able to clear it in about 20 minutes. There was nobody in that pile."
"It had been a couple days of wasted labor that could've been used to help save other lives," Parsons continued.
"It was at that time that we kind of realized the importance and the capability that dogs can bring to search and rescue. Every environment presents different difficulties, but it's all restricted by our human limitations. Our current practice is: Hoping that we see or hear somebody."
US Air National Guard/Staff Sgt. Joshua Horton Callie, a search and rescue K-9 for the 123rd Special Tactics Squadron, during an exercise at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, July 17, 2019.
In response to scenarios like the Haitian earthquake, Parsons spearheaded a new approach, developing the squadron's Search and Rescue K-9 program. The effort, launched in 2018, is designed to increase the capabilities of disaster response teams in locating and recovering personnel through the use of specially trained canines.
After several months of preparation, the unit acquired its newest member, Callie, a 26-month-old Dutch shepherd, making her the first search-and-rescue dog in the Department of Defense.
She has now earned multiple qualifications to accommodate the specific skillset of the 123rd STS, including helicopter exfiltration and infiltration, mountain rescue (rappelling plus ice, snow and alpine maneuvers), static line and freefall parachute insertion.
"Callie is trained in live-find," Parsons said. "She goes into wilderness, collapsed-structure or disaster situations. She's trained to detect living people, find them, and alert me when she's located them. We react accordingly, mark the spot and begin the extraction of those people.
"The unique function that we can provide by developing Callie is that we can get her to places that nobody else can get to," Parsons added. "That's the biggest benefit that we really saw value in. In the situation like the earthquake in Haiti, we can get her in there, and those days in difference could be the difference in somebody's life."
Before Callie's introduction to the unit, the method of search and rescue in urban settings involved probing and digging with drills and cameras. According to Parsons, this slow and sometimes unreliable method only added tools, weight and difficulty to the process.