COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KRHD) — The recovery continues from devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country, with Texas A&M's Veterinary Emergency Team playing a crucial role in supporting search and rescue operations.
"All of those kids were in there because of camps and so that created another layer of intensity that you just can't really describe," said Dr. Deb Zoran, director of the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team.
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"The search and rescue mission was huge," Zoran said.
The team worked alongside specialized search and rescue dogs to locate people missing in challenging terrain.
"So there was a lot of, you know, very steep canyons the dogs had to get down into, all the tree debris, all of the debris from people's homes and cars and things, so they had to search in this very dangerous environment," Zoran said.
During the 23-day deployment, Zoran and her team, which included fourth-year veterinary students at Texas A&M, provided care for nearly 100 search and rescue dogs, with more than 50 receiving treatment daily during peak response times.
"A lot of our care was not just taking care of the pads or taking care of the pokes and the bruises and the porcupine quills and all of the things, but it was also that muscle rehab and that body rehab so they could get up and do it again the next day," Zoran said.
"Working on those working dogs, kind of talking to handlers, working closely with the veterinarians that were volunteering there, basically learning what it is like to be on a deployment for a disaster," said Blake Williams, a fourth-year veterinary student at Texas A&M.
For Williams and nine other fourth-year veterinary students, the deployment provided an invaluable opportunity for them.
"Being there in person seeing how this system works — seeing how we actually respond to these disasters in real time — was much more beneficial for our emotional growth, our clinical skills growth, and our intellectual growth, ultimately, than just the classroom setting," Williams said.
As recovery begins for the region, Williams told 15 ABC it's a deployment he won't forget.
"It really impacted me personally because this was in our own backyard," Williams said. "This was somewhere that I had been before, before the flooding had came through, and seeing the response of volunteers, just organizations that just came to help these people as well as ourselves, it's incredible and it's gonna stick with me for a while."
The search and rescue dogs successfully located all but two of the 160 people initially declared missing. Zoran said she'll remember a feeling of incompleteness as smaller groups continue searching for those that are still missing.
Zoran added that the working dogs would travel essentially a half marathon or more a day, so it was rewarding to keep them healthy, ready to go, and searching for those missing people.
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