Inside Berkeley’s fire station in Elmwood, a 7-year-old black-and-white dog named Topa waits quietly in her crate, eyes alert, ready to work.
She is not a pet — she’s a certified disaster search dog, trained to locate survivors in the most devastating situations: collapsed buildings, landslides and other life-threatening disasters. Her partner, Rudy Valencia, is a firefighter, paramedic and Topa’s handler.
“Topa is a certified live-finding search dog,” Valencia said. “That means she’s trained to locate people that are still alive — that are buried or hidden in a disaster situation. … It’s very difficult to find.”
Before she was a rescuer, Topa was a survivor herself.
As a puppy, she was found locked inside a sweltering car in South Dakota with another puppy. “Bystanders rescued her,” Valencia said. “Unfortunately, the other puppy had died because it was so hot. The owner was found at a nearby bar and was arrested. Topa was surrendered and taken to a shelter.”
It was there, at the Western Hills Humane Society in Spearfish, that Topa’s future took a dramatic turn. Recruiters at the South Dakota Canine Center noticed her intense energy and obsession with playing with toys — traits that made her difficult to adopt, but perfect for search and rescue. “Some scouts saw how she liked to play and determined she had the drive to become a search dog,” Valencia said. “The Search Dog Foundation saw a video of her playing, and they rescued her and brought her to California to be trained.”
Valencia met Topa in 2018 during his training as a canine handler. Their pairing was both unexpected and unforgettable.
“They put me in a hiding place and told me that whichever dog found me would be my partner,” he recalled. “When Topa found me and started barking, I opened the hole — and there she was.”
From that moment on, the two have been inseparable. In 2019, Topa officially joined the Berkeley Fire Department. She even received her own firefighter badge, proudly worn on her vest.
“Becoming a handler has greatly enhanced my career and my life,” Valencia said. “It made coming to work exciting again. I bring my dog with me to work — she’s my partner, my life companion.”
Topa and Valencia are part of Berkeley’s Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team — one of the few in the region with disaster-certified search dogs. In fact, Berkeley is the only fire department in Alameda County that has dogs like Topa on staff.
Their first deployment came in 2021 during Hurricane Ida. While the trip didn’t result in an active search mission, it gave the team real-world travel and response experience. “It was more of a cross-country training trip,” Valencia said. “But we were ready.”
The readiness comes from constant training. Every week, Valencia and Topa join other teams on simulated rubble piles to practice finding buried people. “We hide in the rubble,” Valencia said. “The dogs find us and do a bark alert — when they find someone, they bark, and then they get rewarded with their toy.”
Berkeley’s canine program is growing, with two additional dogs — Wheeler and Ozzy — now training or certified. All three come from the Search Dog Foundation and go through the same rigorous FEMA certification process. First, they must pass a Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), followed by the Canine Evaluation (CE) —the highest national standard for search dogs. The full process can take up to a year. “These dogs are rare and incredibly valuable,” Valencia said. “People don’t always think of dogs when they think about the fire department, but in a disaster, they can save lives.”
He knows firsthand that having dogs like Topa isn’t just about preparedness — it’s about hope. Especially in earthquake-prone areas like the Bay Area.
“If something happens, we stand at the ready. We can save a lot of people.”
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