Aid is streaming into Louisiana and Mississippi, in the form of both workers and donations, and an ISU employee and her dog are waiting to become part of that stream.

Robin Habeger, program coordinator for the College of Business, is part of a search and rescue team, Star 1, based out of the Story County Emergency Management Agency. She and her search and rescue dog, Talyn, are on standby to go to Mississippi to search for human remains when the aftermath of Hurricane Rita subsides.

“We were called in to work the debris fields in Mississippi, but we are still on standby. We would have gone down two weeks ago but Rhode Island self-deployed and took our spot,” she said. “Tentative plans were for us to potentially leave early last week; however, with the new hurricane moving in, I doubted it.”

Habeger said she was told to pack for 10 days, but she could potentially be deployed longer than that.

“We were initially told to pack for 10 days – that is 10 days of self-sustaining,” she said. “While there, we work 12 hours on and get 12 hours off and that is throughout the deployment.”

Habeger has been involved in search and rescue training for more than four years and has been called out by law enforcement agencies on numerous occasions to help with investigations.

“I was involved with the Evelyn Miller case over the Fourth of July,” she said.

“That was a busy weekend; there were four requests for service that weekend,” she said.

Star 1 is only deployed on the request of law enforcement officials, said Angela Tague, Star 1 member and program assistant for the entomology department. Star 1 has been deployed throughout Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois.

“They are an extra resource for law enforcement and very valuable,” said Lt. Dru Toresdahl, field services commander for the Story County Sheriff’s Office. “They have a lot of expertise where law enforcement doesn’t because we don’t have the resources to train people in skills they will maybe use only once or twice a year.”

Habeger and Talyn are one of only seven canine teams in Iowa that are nationally certified through the National Association for Search and Rescue, a process that includes a written exam covering canine first aid, lost person behavior and knowledge of how scents move, as well as a field test where handlers and their dogs demonstrate their skills. Handlers must also know crime scene preservation, amateur meteorology and survival techniques, Habeger said.

Star 1 has approximately 15 operational ground searchers and about 24 canine handlers, with 10 of those being operational, but not necessarily nationally certified.

“We lose people because they don’t realize the time commitment it takes,” Habeger said. “It takes about 18 months to two years before a dog and handler is fully trained and most of that is training the handler because dogs have the natural ability.”

All team members are subject to an FBI background check before they are allowed to join.

“We don’t want pedophiles out looking for children. It’s happened before in Texas where there was a pedophile on a search and rescue team,” Habeger said. “We are following in the footsteps of law enforcement and they need to be confident that we have the appropriate personnel and that we are qualified.”

Besides ground-searching for live people, Talyn is also trained for human-remains detection, both on land and in the water.

“Talyn will alert on a single tooth, as well as a combination of hair, blood, teeth and the waxy substance bodies give off as they decompose,” Habeger said.

She said human-remains detection dogs can be highly trained to detect small amounts of human remains, such as blood drops and dismembered remains.

During any given year, Star 1 gets deployed anywhere from 15 to 20 times and the average deployment is 24 to 48 hours, Habeger said.

“We handle everything from missing children to Alzheimer patients walking away to human remains detection,” she said.