Before Murphy, the dog Melville brought to Oklahoma City, she had trained a German shepherd named Topa. "I worked at it with Topa for four or five years and made about as many mistakes as there are to make, because I was being trained by people who didn't know a hell of a lot," says Melville. One trainer all but strangled poor Topa, dragging her around on a choke collar. Other trainers were far better, but Melville and her dog just weren't learning as quickly as the retired teacher (you can tell she was a total badass in the classroom and ball fields, like Meryl Streep in, only with a whistle and sneakers instead of a nun's habit) thought they should be. "The rescue group I trained with only drilled once a month as a group," she says. "How can anybody learn anything once a month?" After years of setbacks working with Topa, Melville started hearing stories about a trainer named Pluis Davern, a longtime rescue and show-dog trainer and handler who ran Sundowner Kennels in Gilroy, just south of the Bay area. Davern was about the best trainer around, everyone agreed, but too far away to help Melville and Topa. "They were thinking,Well I do, that's who!" says Melville. "And I didn't think it was anything. I'd spent five years on this, and this was the first time I found out that there was a professional, someone who actually knew how to do this, and could teach me! If she'd been on the East Coast I would've picked up and moved there for a month, six months, whatever it took." Melville began trekking up to Davern's kennel in Gilroy and making big improvements with Topa, but at some point Davern suggested that Melville start over with a new dog. Topa had been through a lot of bad training, some of which could be undone, but other problems were never going to go away. The most essential trait for a working dog is what trainers call "drive," a catchall term that combines energy, ambition, and focus. Trainers sometimes talk about wanting "crackhead" or "junkie" dogs with an obsessive addiction to toys and tug-of-war. It's said half in jest, but the analogy is about right. In the case of a good SAR dog, only the most dedicated tug-of-war fiends will scale steep ladders, climb over dangerous debris, and work their noses sore for hours on end just for a chance at that toy. Topa just didn't have it in her, so Melville retired her to a house pet's life of leisure. With Davern's help, she found a female black Lab that she named Murphy and went to work training her. "By less than 2 [years old], Murphy and I were FEMA certified in the advanced level," says Melville. "And I said, 'Well, I'll be damned, this is the way to do it! You need to have exact qualities, you can't just take any dog.'" Beyond drive, Melville also saw what an improvement a full-time, professional trainer made over the hodgepodge methods of scattered sheriffs' departments and dog trainers who handled most SAR training. Years of fruitless work could be condensed into about eight or nine months of work between a professional trainer and a driven dog. What you didn't need, Melville realized, was the dog's future handler. It was Melville's eureka moment, and the philosophical basis for the foundation. To that point, SAR handlers trained their own dogs, sometimes with great success, but far more often, without it. It's a bit like if Nascar drivers had to build and maintain their own car before they ever got a chance to drive one on the track. You might find a few brilliant mechanic-driver renaissance men, but plenty of great drivers and great mechanics would never make it to the big-time. "It's no wonder people are dropping out left and right, working three years and dropping out in disgust," Melville says. With Davern finding and training the dogs, Melville could find and train the handlers, and then they could pair dogs and handlers up and train them together for a couple of intensive weeks. It would be world's first SAR assembly line, capable of producing a far greater number of competent dog teams than the old way of relying on self-motivated individuals to find and train their own dogs. "If you can teach people to play tennis, field hockey, softball, or drive a car," Melville says, "then you can teach people to work with a dog,that dog is already trained. That's the key: You just need to teach them to work withdog. A blind person works for 30 days in a facility with a dog and then they go home. And they're getting on buses, on subways in New York City, crossing streets. That dog is responsible for that person's life, and it's all done in 30 days. Why can't we do it?" The irony for Melville was that she would be looking for handlers who were pretty much the opposite of herself. "I thought, why do we accept everybody that says, 'Oh, I think it'd be fun to train a rescue dog and go on deployments?' There isn't a single bit of fun in a disaster deployment. I said, 'Why would a woman in her early sixties with a highly trained dog make any sense to anyone?'" A firefighter or EMT with no dog experience couldn't be expected to train a dog from scratch on his own free time, but with a driven dog already trained by Davern, he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to keep working and drilling with the dog, just as firefighters are constantly training and drilling anyway. Pairing the animals with firefighters would also eliminate another problem: the way that the civilian dog handlers were perceived and treated in the field. "I remember going to one deployment and being excited because FEMA was supposed to have all these search and rescue operations," says retired FDNY Chief and collapse expert Vincent Dunn. "Then we had the meeting and it was just dogs. Dogs are great, don't get me wrong, but we were skeptical. And you know firefighters, they don't want competition — these cute dogs were going to get all the attention while we did all the work." "Some civilian handlers are outstanding because they take it on as their life," says Melville. "But how many people have jobs that let them deploy for 10 days? How many have an understanding of what it takes to really work at a disaster site for 12 hours a day, day after day, and then have families that understand that? If you have a wife and a family, they have to be willing to let you go for that long and have their own support networks at home for dealing with it." Despite SDF's perpetual impoverishment, the speed that Davern could train animals and Melville could match them with handlers meant that a significant percentage of new FEMA dogs were coming from the foundation, and that ruffled some feathers. Some old-school FEMA dog handlers considered it a point of pride that they were self-made civilian trainers and thought you had to pay your dues before you could handle a dog. And now these greenhorn firefighters and EMTs were coming in and taking their place. "Bringing somebody new in and giving them a trained dog, that created some resentment," says Sonja Heritage, who joined the SAR world after watching the Oklahoma City aftermath on television at her bartending job in Maryland. She's now one of the most experienced dog handlers in the country, with deployments to the World Trade Center, Haiti, Turkey, Taiwan, Nairobi, and a number of other disaster sites. Last year she moved to California to take over as the foundation's head trainer, so they could begin training dogs at the SDF's new campus, instead of at Davern's kennels in the Bay area. "It's a small, very homegrown industry, and Wilma and Pluis got a lot of backlash from that. When I worked as a judge for FEMA certification, you absolutely saw judges who were harder on handlers with dogs from the foundation. All I was ever interested in was training more dogs and training them well, and that's exactly what Wilma and Pluis were doing." For any field to prosper, it needs some form of self-criticism to keep it balanced and constantly improving. That's particularly difficult in the SAR world for two reasons. First, because large-scale disasters are (relatively) rare, there aren't many trials from which to learn from your errors. Second, because the work is done under such tragic and difficult circumstances by people who are genuinely heroic, very few people — within the field or without — are willing to challenge orthodoxies or second-guess past operations. That's where people like Melville, "the Irish pit bull," as they sometimes call her around the SDF offices, become a necessity. Like a high-drive search dog too fixated on finding a victim to pay any attention to the 30-foot crater she'll have to cross on a steeply pitched ladder to get there, Melville's been too focused on improving the SAR dog field to give much of a damn if she offends a few people's delicate sensibilities along the way. "We often joke that our mom is like a force of nature," says Harry Hirschman, one of Melville's four sons. "Unrelenting, determined, a lot of perseverance. Anybody who's coming up against the way business has always been done, they run into those kinds of things. She was a soccer coach without much of any experience with soccer, and she took a high schools girls' team to two city championships," at a time, it might be added, when the very act of coaching a women's athletic team was considered rebellious. "She learned to fly," Hirschman continues, "built her own plane, did these endurance horse races. Very direct, straightforward, and whatever resistance she's found she just ignores or moves past it."