26 yrs after quake, Baguio looks to dogs for rescue

Twenty-six years since the 1990 earthquake shattered Baguio City, the Cordillera’s Office of Civil Defense inaugurated its very first canine team trained for disaster rescue and search missions on July 1. Seventeen dogs have been detailed to the team. EV ESPIRITU/INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON

BAGUIO CITY—Various accounts say it took a fly to guide a miner to hotel worker Pedrito Dy, who was found alive beneath the rubble of the Hyatt Terraces Baguio 14 days after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Northern Luzon on July 16, 1990.

Twenty six years later, disaster risk managers hope 17 newly-trained rescue dogs would help improve the chances of people caught in future disasters.

The dogs are part of the Cordillera K9 search and rescue unit formed for the Cordillera Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.

The dogs performed rescue simulations at the unit’s inauguration on Friday in Irisan village here.

This was the first K-9 team to be dedicated to search and rescue, said Alex Uy, Cordillera director of the Office of Civil Defense (OCD).

The 1990 temblor flattened the summer capital for the second time since the end of World War II, and rescue dogs were brought in from the United States, Japan and other countries, to augment the sonar, heat-detecting machines used to search for survivors.

But the idea of forming a search and rescue dog unit was explored after Typhoon “Pepeng,” which triggered a landslide in Benguet capital La Trinidad that killed 77 people in 2009, and the calamities caused by typhoons in 2015, said Frances Carasi, OCD Cordillera information officer.

Planning and preparations, however, took six years until the dogs from the Philippine Air Force, the Philippine Military Academy and the police and from private kennels were trained in August 2015.

The dogs will continue to undergo weekend training until August, and will be ready for deployment to disaster areas, even in Mindanao, Uy said. Reports from EV Espiritu, Inquirer Northern Luzon, and Danielle Uy, UP Baguio intern