One of the Evansville Fire Department’s newest members is 2.5 years old, walks on four legs, and sports short black fur and expressive eyes. Meet Indie, the department’s first K9 since 2019, who’s trained to sniff out materials such as gasoline, kerosene, or diesel fuel that an arsonist could use to start a fire.
A Labrador Retriever, Indie is a professional and personal companion of EFD investigator and handler Patrick Moore. Indie’s job is serious, but in her world, it’s a game. Upon Moore’s command to “seek,” she can alert him to even a drop of an ignitable liquid accelerant in a charred piece of carpet, plastic, or wood. The pair practices several times a day — Moore likens it to a basketball player working on free-throw shooting. He rewards each of Indie’s successful finds with a bite of food. “She only eats out of my hand,” Moore says.
Indie, who went through six months of accelerant training after previously being a service dog for sight-impaired individuals, was put to use Nov. 20 on her first shift with the fire department.
“Somebody had poured what appears to be gasoline on the side of a house and lit it,” Moore says. “She alerted on that. We took samples … and those are currently in the lab. We’re waiting on their analysis to see if it confirms her nose.”
Moore put Indie through her paces during a Dec. 2 media opportunity at the fire department’s training facility on Buchanan Road. He placed tin cans on the pavement; Indie stopped and alerted at ones with fuel inside. Indie then was led into a structure where drops of flammable liquid were in a wooden board and in a chair; she discovered both.
Indie has a sibling at home, another black Lab named Mabel, and Moore says “they get along great.” But it’s Indie’s nose that the fire department cherishes. Without a K9, it’s more challenging to pinpoint a fire’s starting point and determine the cause.
“It’s just another tool in our toolbox that we can utilize to help find the causes and sources of the fires that we have,” Fire Chief Tony Knight says. “Evansville is a medium-sized city, but we have a high volume of fire for a city of our size. So having these tools giving us more capability to pinpoint the cause in the event that it is an arson is very important, so (we can) get that arsonist under control.”
Insurance company State Farm had sponsored fire department K9s nationally since 1993, “but they stopped their program last year and everybody kind of scrambled,” Moore says. The funding is needed: Colorado-based nonprofit International Fire Dogs estimates that accelerant-detecting K9s can cost up to $35,000 to purchase and train. Moore says he raised about $15,000 from businesses and individuals to buy Indie, noting that there are ongoing expenses for training, recertification, and veterinary bills. Because of the community’s help, he says, “We’re able to have this great asset for the city of Evansville.”
