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Philadelphia Transit Authority, Police Pin Hopes on Dog's Nose

Posted on: Wednesday, 27 July 2005, 18:00 CDT

Jul. 26--As precious seconds ticked away, SEPTA K-9 Officer Dave Parke and his bomb-sniffing dog, Nora, searched for the dynamite hidden in the abandoned restaurant's huge kitchen, patrolling close together and at equal risk should something go terribly wrong.

Parke directed Nora -- more specifically, Nora's nose -- into the cabinets and crevices with simple hand signals. Nora found the dynamite quickly and suddenly sat, still as a statue -- her signal that explosive chemicals were in the area.

Then they rushed into a cluttered storage room to search for a detonation cord, which explodes at 22,000 feet per second. Nora found that fast, too.

After each find, Parke sang her praises loudly while pulling out a sausage-shaped tug toy that Nora, a 10-year-old Belgian Malinois, grabbed hold of and struggled mightily to wrest from her partner's iron grasp. Her tail wagged like a metronome in overdrive. Wrestling over the toy together, both Nora and Parke, who have been a bomb-detection team since 2000, had gone from intense, single-minded determination to behaving like kids without a care in the world.

This brought a smile to the normally unsmiling face of Philadelphia Police K-9 Officer Jules Ferraro, who was supervising Parke's and Nora's monthly retraining exercises, which constantly renew the incredible chemistry they've shared since their first six months of basic Police Department training -- 560 hours of patrol techniques followed by 400 hours of bomb sniffing.

"Without letting the bad guys know specifically what we do by publicizing it," Ferraro said, "we basically take the dog's natural drive to play and convert it into a drive for work. Let's face it: a dog has no concept of a war on terror. Nora is not looking for a bomb. She's looking for this."

He reached into his pocket and produced a well-worn tug toy, immediately gaining Nora's complete attention and sending her tail into perpetual motion.

At the moment, with mass transit systems on orange alert since the initial London train and bus bombings earlier this month, Nora and Parke are one half of SEPTA's bomb-sniffing K-9 corps.

Due to the death of one dog and the disability retirement of another dog's handler, K-9 Officer John Dwyer and his dog Sonia are the only other SEPTA bomb-sniffing team working today.

SEPTA Police Chief Richard Evans said that veteran bomb-sniffer Anouska, who lost her longtime handler to disability, will be retrained with a replacement handler along with four new bomb-sniffing dogs in September, bringing SEPTA's K-9 corps to seven, with plans to add two more dogs in 2006.

The $18,000 price tag to buy and train the dogs, and the money for specially secured, air-conditioned K-9 patrol cars, comes from federal Homeland Security funds, some of them funneled through Gov. Rendell's office as special grants.

Despite the feeling of safety that increasingly visible bomb-sniffing dogs give SEPTA riders, Evans said that "nothing is failsafe" and that the "best deterrent" to terrorist activity is "good intelligence" from the FBI and the Philadelphia police -- and a vigilant public.

"We move 52 million people a year on SEPTA," Evans said. "Double that, and that's how many eyes are on our trains and buses. We want people to let us know when they see something they think is wrong."

He said there has been "an incredible increase in calls about suspicious packages" since the first London bombings. "And that's good," he added, even though most of them turn out to be false alarms.

Although Evans and Jim Jordan, SEPTA security director, agree that no machine can beat a trained dog's nose for sniffing out explosive chemicals, both said that unlike machines, bomb-sniffing dogs require frequent breaks -- 20 minutes on; 10-15 minutes off.

Unlike drug-sniffing dogs, which paw excitedly when they make a find, bomb dogs are trained to leave their find alone. "The dog's got to sit when he finds the bomb," Ferraro said. "Just sit. I mean, the last thing you want him to do is bring the bomb back to you or touch it or knock it over. Once a K-9 indicates there's an explosive, the police bomb squad takes over. The robot X-rays the package. We go from there."

Ferraro said that last year's Madrid train bombings and this month's London train and bus bombings have created extraordinary interest in bomb-sniffing dogs. "When something like that happens," Ferraro said, "the first question people ask is: 'Do we have bomb dogs?' The second question is: 'How many bomb dogs do we have?' Followed by: 'We don't have enough bomb dogs.'"

Ferraro's life-and-death role in all this is to make sure that each bomb-sniffing dog's near-1,000 hours of training prepares it and its handler for the real thing.

"The dog doesn't understand the difference between training and a real job," Ferraro said, "but the handler certainly does. His body chemistry changes under the stress of a real job because he's liable to work a job differently than he works training. His dog will sense that.

"I try to present enough twists to these guys, so they'll work the training problem with some of the stress they'll experience when they work the real life problem."

Ferraro is adept at creating stress. "I might say, 'Guys, meet so-and-so. He's with the ATF and he's here to evaluate this training.' The guy might be my cousin with a clipboard but they don't know that.

"Or I'll tell them, 'I booby trapped the hide today.' If the dog touches the hide, a beeper goes off and you're dead." I want them to do the training as if their lives depend on it. Because in real life, their lives depend on how well dog and handler are trained."

Because the relatively small community of bomb-sniffing dogs and their handlers report monthly for refresher training, Ferraro doesn't want to keep using the same abandoned industrial and commercial office sites over and over again.

"If anyone has a large vacant site that they can let us use, please call me or K-9 officer Paul Bryant at 215-685-8088," Ferraro said. "You'll be helping our bomb-sniffing and drug-sniffing K-9 training tremendously."

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Source: The Philadelphia Daily News

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