Search & Rescue is Lab Owner's Labor of Love

As a member of FEMA’s Utah Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue, Liz Baumgartner, Co-Owner of Baumgartner Dental Lab, is ready to put her lab work aside whenever tragedy strikes. Baumgartner and her dogs are part of a Canine Search Team and have been part of the search and rescue community since 1998.

“I’ve always loved dogs and working with them,” she says. “I went from watching a woman on TV demonstrating search and rescue with her dog, thinking, ‘I could do that!’ to getting the skills to train world-class search dogs.”

Baumgartner has traveled across the country with her dogs to disaster sites such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, flooding near Boulder, CO, in 2013, and the deadly mudslide in Oso, WA, last April. Although her first dog, Arnie, is now retired, she has two dogs that are active with the task force: Blitz, a six-and-a-half-year-old border collie/lab mix, is a live-find dog trained to find trapped...