I was invited to spend Monday in Downtown Los Angeles with AT&T’s Disaster Recovery team.  I got a tour of their vehicles, gear and technology.  These guys travel heavy and when I say heavy I’m talking about a dozen semi trucks and trailers, an entire hardware store, more fiber then I could measure in an entire lifetime and rescue dogs.  I also got to meet with their hazmat team and partially try on one of those florescent yellow suits.  It was an amazing and eye opening day. I learned that nearly every single person there is a volunteer.  They all work in some capacity for AT&T and give weeks of their time every year to preparing for the next big catastrophe. I was thoroughly impressed at how AT&T is is putting a human face on their company.  They’re dedicating millions and millions of dollars every year on this and I have to say it’s quite a nice surprise. The most impressive thing I saw were the rescue dogs.  I met Eric, a firefighter who said he spends almost all day everyday with Ben his rescue dog.  Ben is amazing, he’s able to find survivors under 20 feet of a collapsed building.  That’s phenomenal but what I learned was that rescue dogs don’t go searching for anything, they’re smelling for what’s not there and they can sense if a person is alive or dead.  Ben is trained to skip over the dead and search for only the living.  Check out the video and you’ll see only a small fraction of what Ben can do.