February 19, 2024
ICSSAR Monday Night Meeting
We would like to thank Iron County Sheriff’s Deputies and K9 handlers, Erik Rohman and Jared O’Mealy for attending our meeting tonight and providing us a training on how our teams can work together in the field during searches and how our ICSSAR dogs can work with the Iron County Sherriff’s dogs.
When the ICSSAR team gets paged, the Iron County Sheriff’s K9 team also receives the page. It’s important from the very beginning that we have proactive communication. If the ICSSAR team arrives on scene first with our search dogs, we need to ensure that is communicated to the Iron County Sherriff K9 team and vice versa. It’s quite possible we will develop a transition plan to rotate the dogs for extensive searches.
It’s also very important that the ICSSAR human volunteers know how to interact around the Iron County Sheriff K9s to ensure the safety of the volunteers and to uphold the integrity of the search. Deputies Rohman and O’Mealy covered how they run their dogs during searches and how members of the ICSSAR team can aid the Deputies in a role referred to as “Cover”. By allowing a cover to run a sent with the Deputies and their K9, it allows another set of eyes on the trail. While the K9 handler is watching and reading their dogs behavior and alerts, the Cover can have eyes on the trail and up ahead.
After the classroom training, the team went outside to stage how a basic search flank would work best with the Iron County K9 handlers. They went over the responsibilities of any Covers that would be involved in a search, where they should stand and how they should communicate with the K9 handler.
Thank you again to the Deputies for stopping by tonight. We look forward to continued training.
#ICSSAR #WeWillAlwaysComeToYou #SoThatOthersMayLive #K9Team #Training
