Man’s best friend to the rescue

STANDING at the foot of Slieve Donard shows why the Mourne Mountains are credited as the inspiration for writer CS Lewis’ magical land of Narnia.

It’s a fantasy landscape of majestic peaks and imposing valleys that Corkman Neil Powell has called home for most of his life. But it’s a chilly night in Scotland 23 years ago that the man who has given his life to mountain rescue will never forget.

It was Christmas Eve, 1988. Just three days earlier, Pan Am Flight 103 crashed at Lockerbie, killing all 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 people on the ground. The RAF flew Powell and his mountain rescue dog, Pepper, from their home in Newcastle, Co Down to Scotland to help with the clean-up.

Pepper and his master spent five days in Lockerbie, an experience Powell is understandably reluctant to discuss. “I don’t want to go into it, but there was human debris in the bushes and trees where the bodies had disintegrated,” he says in a soft northern accent that retains traces of his Cobh roots. “I’d never been in a situation like that before. Up until then, I’d been quite a squeamish person but sometimes you’ve no choice.”

Each year, the Irish Mountain Rescue service receives 250 call-outs. The task of finding missing people is given to remarkable people like Neil Powell.

“When you’re out on the mountains, even relatively minor things like broken ankles can become life-threatening,” says Powell. Winter poses challenges for search-and-rescue missions, as Powell says: “Ice, snow, fog, lower temperatures, these are all major hazards on the mountain.”

Powell is responsible for one of the most important changes in mountain-rescue practice in Ireland: the introduction of search dogs.

When this erstwhile schoolteacher and self-confessed climbing ‘obsessive’ joined the Mourne Mountain rescue team in the 1970s, search operations on both sides of the border were conducted by humans.

Powell thought man’s best friend might be able to speed up and improve what was hitherto a slow, laborious and often dangerous process.

“Many nights when we were out searching for people on the mountains, you’d see shepherds using dogs to round up their flock. I thought, ‘why can’t we get dogs to help us to look for people?’,” says Powell, who has written a book, Search Dogs and Me, about his experience. With a little help from a mountain rescue team in Glencoe, in the Scottish highlands, he began training dogs for use in search operations closer to home.

In 1982, after countless training exercises, Powell and Kim, his German shepherd, received their first real-time call-out: Powell’s GP was missing on Slieve Donard, the highest peak in Northern Ireland, in treacherous conditions.

Thanks to Kim, the doctor was located after an extensive search — although the doctor wasn’t overjoyed to see his patient. “The doc was suffering pretty badly from hypothermia by the time we got to him,” Powell says.

“He was pretty irrational, and he didn’t even recognise me.” The GP still gets a “bit of ribbing” in Newcastle but without Powell — and Kim — he would probably have perished on the mountain.

Powell returned home from Lockerbie with a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which only manifested five years later when he was studying for a masters in counselling at Queen’s University, Belfast. “Something like Lockerbie confronts you with the reality that life isn’t ordered, it isn’t predictable, and that can be very shocking,” he says.

Nevertheless, Powell continued to take his dogs to rescue missions around the world.

Powell recalls struggling in vain to find a young girl buried beneath rubble following the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey in 1999.

In Kashmir, his dog Charco located a man who had been trapped for 36 hours. “To see him being pulled out alive was just amazing,” says Powell, who has also trained dogs in counterfeit-disc detection in the US.

Powell has happy memories of Cobh, the family home until 1953. When his father, who was in the Royal Navy, was transferred to Northern Ireland, the family moved to Rathcoole, a sprawling housing estate north of Belfast that was to become a hotbed of violent Loyalism during the Troubles. “Back then, it was a very peaceful place. Catholic and Protestant people all got along really well. It only changed later,” he says.

After 40 years, Powell’s heart is firmly in Co Down. But having given up teaching more than a decade ago, a quiet retirement is the last thing on his mind.

When he’s not leading search and rescue missions on the Mournes or nearby Carlingford Lough, he is busy pioneering dog trailing, a cutting-edge technique that allows police to trace missing persons by the unique scent residue that each of us leaves on our clothes and the locations we pass through.

Search Dogs and Me is a paean to one man’s canine passion. “I prefer dogs to people,” says Powell, who lives with his wife and their eight dogs.

“Dogs are characters. They have a lot more feeling and emotions than many people realise. I wrote the book as a way of perpetuating the memory of the dogs that passed on and to show people how great dogs can be.”

* Search Dogs and Me is out now published by Blackstaff Press, price £12.99