VET Assists Search Teams Following Junction Flooding
When local authorities were unable to find four of the people who went missing following severe weather that led to flooding along the Llano River, the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team (VET) was called upon to join the Texas Task Force 1 (TX-TF1) water rescue squads in Junction, Texas, in the search efforts.
Twelve VET members, including four students on the fourth-year Community Connections Rotation with the VET, departed College Station at 5 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 10, for what would become a six-day deployment, during which they provided veterinary care to the search-and-rescue dogs that worked during the day to find the lost and missing.
“Some of the concern was based on what was experienced the night of the flash flood. An RV park was initially surrounded by water and residents were cut off,” said VET director Wesley Bissett. “A second wall of water then washed them down river.”
The team’s support of the search-and-rescue dogs includes pre- and post-operational examinations—which includes the treatment of sore muscles and abrasions from rubble, or, in Junction, prickly pears—as well as the ability to respond in the field if a dog is injured while working. As part of their post-operational examinations, the dogs are decontaminated using the team’s one-of-a-kind unit that was created by VET program manager C.J. Mabry.
“We want them to wake up the next morning ready to go to work again. They are there to find a lost person or give closure to loved ones, our role is to keep those important team members out working,” Bissett told the San Angelo Standard-Times. “We work closely with search and rescue to prevent issues, and they are an amazing group people who really take care of their teammates.”
By keeping careful watch over the dogs, they are able to remain efficient and effective in the field, which can extend their operational time by allowing the dogs to remain healthier throughout a deployment.
“The search dogs are incredible athletes, and their handlers have spent so much time getting them trained. They don’t look at those dogs as tools but as team members,” Bissett told reporter Yfat Yossifor.
Jorgenson, one of the fourth-year veterinary students who deployed with the VET, told Yossifor that the experience was like no other and she was happy knowing she was contributing to the dogs’ success in the field.
“We are getting to see firsthand what this team does and the impact it has on the dogs,” she said. “It’s specialized kind of medicine because you don’t normally get to work with working dogs and have to think about muscle soreness and their feet.”
While in Junction, Bissett said VET members received the same outpouring of support they typically find in the towns to which the team deploys and that the 11 other VET members working in Junction represented the team, and Texas A&M, very well.
“This is a wonderful rural community. They have taken on feeding all of the responders with meals rotating between different churches,” he said. “While visiting with members of the community, we learned about the community’s active outreach to the families of the missing, and it was very heart-wrenching to hear what those families are going through.
“Drs. (Deb) Zoran and (Amy) Hilburn, along with veterinary technicians D’Lisa Whaley and Sarah Kronberger and our students, did an amazing job in keeping these dogs operational,” Bissett said. “Jim Yeager, the search manager for Texas Task Force 1, estimated that our efforts keep these dogs working for at least 50 percent longer than they would otherwise.”
To see a few pictures taken during the deployment, visit the VET’s Flickr page, and to read Yossifor’s article on GoSanAngelo.com, click here.
