Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Lisa Higgins knows water. She has the deserved reputation of being one of the top water
trainers in the country. She also trains and deploys her own dogs; finding the time to do that
on top of a hectic seminar schedule is, as all trainers know, a challenge.
Lisa was in the middle of a team training with Haylee when she got the call in July of
2011. Could she bring her dogs and come out to a Louisiana reservoir past Morganza, a reser-
voir that was part of a dam system for the Mississippi River? The system, challenged by record
rains, wasn't perfect. The Army Corps had made the difficult decision to open the Morganza
spillway and flood small towns downstream to relieve pressure on the levees in Baton Rouge
and New Orleans. The reservoir was still high in early July when a family of four went out to
fish. It was an area the family knew well, but the water level created a churning boil at one
spot. Their boat stalled on a log, and the boil pulled it in. The boat capsized. The father man-
aged to boost his wife and one of the boys to safety on the spillway wall. He got his second
son over to the wall, and his bruised and injured wife was able to pull the boy to safety. That
last effort was too much for the father.
“He saved his whole family. He was too tired to help himself,” Lisa said. She and another
team from Jefferson Parish got the call; Lisa was with Haylee in a spot where it wasn't easy
to get Haylee home first. Law enforcement on the scene said sure, bring her along. Haylee,
being Haylee, was thrilled. Lisa, being Lisa, figured that, carefully handled, it was another
opportunity to school Haylee away from home. Law enforcement on the scene were “excep-
tionally wonderful to her,” Lisa said.
That first day was long. When it's hot and windless, it can be even hotter inside a boat.
Lisa was working both her dogs, Dixee and Maggie, along with the Jefferson Parish team,
with their dogs. Because of the heat, handlers were working their dogs twenty minutes each.
They gridded, worked the dogs, rested and cooled them, then worked them again.
Toward the end of the first day, “I noticed that Maggie thought she had an area,” Lisa said.
They marked that and one other area of interest for local law enforcement and divers. They
didn't have time to narrow it down more that day.
Authorities called Lisa back on July 4 to keep looking. Law enforcement on the scene were
a bit disappointed Haylee couldn't come that day; she had been good company. Lisa started
in the area where little Maggie, her seasoned Australian shepherd, had reacted a couple of
days before. At the end of thirty minutes, Maggie was panting. Lisa put her up in the truck to
cool. She talked with the people on the scene. Dixee, her intense Malinois-German shepherd
mix from Kathy Holbert's kennel, had never had a water recovery. On the other hand, she
wasn't exhausted, like Maggie.
Dixee went out. Dixee alerted. Law enforcement recovered the victim there that night. He
was in 129 feet of water, more than 200 yards from where an eyewitness had seen him go
down. “Bodies can travel much further than that in water,” Lisa said.
