Thousand Oaks man, dog help save lives in Haiti

Thousand Oaks man, dog help save lives in Haiti

Ventura County Star

In his 12 years as a search dog handler, Ron Weckbacher has witnessed the devastation wrought by many disasters—from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But the destruction caused by the earthquake this month in Haiti was the worst he’s ever seen.

“This was just massive—street after street of total collapse,” the Thousand Oaks resident said.

Weckbacher was among six handlers with the Ojai-based National Disaster Search Dog Foundation who traveled to Haiti with their canines as part of Los Angeles County’s search and rescue task force, which returned home Thursday.

Living on military rations and often sleeping just a few hours a night, the group rescued nine survivors from the rubble during its two weeks in Haiti.

Founded in 1996, the Search Dog Foundation works with teams based as far away as Florida. It adopts dogs from shelters and rescue groups and funds their training through grants and donations. Weckbacher leads the foundation’s Ventura County training group.

In a phone interview Friday from his office in Beverly Hills, where he works as a portfolio manager for UBS Financial Services, Weckbacher said he was trying to get back a sense of order in his life after working in the Caribbean nation.

“We train all the time for the ‘Big One,’ “Weckbacher said. “This was truly the Big One.”

While searching Port-au-Prince for survivors, Weckbacher saw flattened structures, bodies of earthquake victims stacked on the sidewalk and locals digging in the rubble with shovels in hopes of finding friends or relatives alive.

Amid the tragedy, however, there were scenes of hope. When rescue workers successfully freed a 50-year-old woman from a collapsed building six days after the Jan. 12 earthquake, she was singing, Weckbacher said.

“She was just ecstatic that we came and we were able to pull her out,” he said.

Rescuers found the woman after an excavator dug into a building and they heard voices, Weckbacher said. Her hand had been trapped under some debris. Rescuers worked for more than four hours to free her.

“It’s an incredible feeling when you do all that work and you’re actually pulling someone out of that wreckage alive,” he said.

Haitians desperate to find loved ones were among the rescue workers’ best guides as they looked for survivors, Weckbacher said. Usually speaking French Creole, the locals told searchers about voices they heard in pancaked buildings or text messages they received from trapped people, he said. Searchers pieced together the information with help from other Haitians who translated, U.S. Embassy personnel, and some of their own who spoke French or Spanish.

Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Bill Monahan and canine partner Hunter were searching the remains of a four-story building near the presidential palace when the dog sniffed out three women trapped under several feet of concrete, according to the foundation. Rescue workers saved two of them, Weckbacher said.

Another dog team helped confirm the location of two people who were later pulled out alive, the foundation reported.

When search dogs found no survivors in a rubble pile, rescue workers could tell the Haitians that no one was alive there, possibly preventing them from going in and risking more lives, Weckbacher said. “That gave people some closure,” he said.

Reflecting on his experience, he said it drove home the importance of prepared emergency personnel who can get quickly to the scene of a disaster. “You can really affect the overall outcome, and you can save people.”