Paws for a cause

Most working partners are together eight hours a day, but not many are together 24/7 like Ron Weckbacher and his rescue dog Dawson.

They are members of the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, a Ventura-based nonprofit that provides training for canine-firefighter disaster search teams that seek out victims of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Area teams, trained by the foundation, were placed on alert during last week’s heavy rains that threatened La Crescenta and La Cañada Flintridge homes, officials said.

Wilma Melville started the foundation in 1996 after she and her Federal Emergency Management Agency-certified search dog were deployed to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Melville saw a need for more canine disaster search teams and designed a program to recruit dogs from animal shelters or rescue organizations and match them with firefighters.

There are 72 search teams in California, Florida, Oklahoma, New York, Texas and Utah that were trained by the foundation, which provides ongoing training for dogs and handlers at no cost to fire departments. It also finds homes for retired dogs and those that do not make it to certification, officials said.

When Weckbacher found out about the program 13 years ago, the Glendale native contacted Melville to become involved. She had a border collie named Manny that she was having a difficult time matching with a firefighter.

“It was sort of out of desperation that she decided to meet with me and asked me to take the dog and work with it and come back in a week,” Weckbacher said. “She thought I’d give up, but Manny and I bonded, and I came back and told her I still wanted to do it.”

Few civilians are in the program because of the time and physical demands, Melville said.

Manny and Weckbacher were partners until Manny retired in 2007. They were called to ground zero after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, helped after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and assisted in Ventura County Sheriff’s missing persons events. Manny died in 2009.

Weckbacher worked with his second dog, Abby, from 2007 to 2009, during which they were called to the Metrolink train crash in Chatsworth and numerous missing persons calls.

Now Weckbacher, a Burroughs graduate, trains handlers and their dogs for the foundation. And, he and Dawson, a male black and white border collie, are called by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance to help during natural disasters.