Heat detector equipped in PCSO vehicles saves K-9's life

Police K-9 heat technology

FOX 13's Kailey Tracy shares the new technology that alerts officers if their police K-9 is getting too hot as heatstroke continues to be the most common cause of death for them.

PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. - Heatstroke is the most common cause of death for law enforcement K-9s, Sergeant Mike Kilian with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office’s K-9 Unit, said. 

It’s part of the reason the agency has technology installed in every K-9 cruiser that sounds an alarm if it gets too hot. It has already saved one K-9, Sergeant Kilian’s K-9, Eddie.

"I was driving an older truck," Sergeant Kilian said. "It had a lot of mileage on it and one of our handlers got out on a track for a stolen vehicle. "I left Eddie in the truck, went out with the handler tracking, and I could see, probably about five minutes into the track, a large plume of smoke coming from the area where my truck was parked," he said.

The alarm on Kilian’s vehicle went off as the temperature inside jumped, and he thought the worst.

"I ran back to the truck and what happened was there was a malfunction in the engine, which caused all the oil to go into the engine and all the smoke was coming through the AC vents into the cab of the truck. Luckily, the alarm went off, the windows went down. Eddie was in distress when I got there. I got him out of the truck, but the alarm saved his life. There's no doubt about it that he would have been dead," Kilian said.

"I was scared to death running back to the truck thinking the worst case scenario. I spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week with this guy, and he's my partner," he said.

The alarm Kilian credits is the Hot-N-Pop Pro that’s in all the agency’s K-9 vehicles. He said the dogs spend 10 hours a day in vehicles and while the car is always running and the air conditioning is always on, the technology is an extra layer of protection. 

"That's why the Hot-N-Pop systems work so well for us, knowing that sense is there of security that the dog is protected," he said.

If the temperature in the vehicle gets above 85 degrees, alarms go off, it sends an alert to the app on the deputies’ phones, dispatch is alerted, and they call the deputy. The deputies get an automated phone call, the windows go down and fans are activated towards the dog.

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"Every organization spends that extra money because there are a lot of horror stories out there of agencies that don't invest in this, and they lose dogs and there's nothing worse to see than something that could have been prevented by having this kind of technology," Kilian said.

Kilian says if they’re in a place where they can take their dogs inside with them, they do.

"There's no guaranteed safety. The only guaranteed safety is we're with the dogs. We try to spend as much time as we can with the dogs," he said.

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