Memphis pair juggles work that saves lives
Kari and Scott Harbin are helping save lives as Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital employees, but apparently that isn’t enough for the Memphis couple.
Kari Harbin is part of the K9 unit of Tennessee Task Force One, a FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force in Memphis, where she works with dogs to aid in disaster response. That’s in addition to her work as a nurse in Le Bonheur’s Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit for the past five years.
Scott Harbin was previously on the task force’s rescue team — that’s how he and Kari first met — and now he works full time with the Memphis Fire Department and part time at Le Bonheur as an emergency department technician.
Their reasons for jumping into their intense lines of work differ.
Kari likes the challenge. Her hospital unit addresses the needs of critically ill neonatal and pediatric patients who have congenital heart disease. Every child’s heart is different, she said, and learning the unique traits of each and what repairs can fix their problems give her something new to learn each time she clocks in.
Scott said he became a firefighter simply because he wasn’t sure what else he wanted to do, and his part-time work at Le Bonheur, where he helps nurses care for emergency patients, falls in line with other firefighters working second jobs.
They both have similar takeaways from their Le Bonheur jobs, though: Children are better to work with than adults.
“Some people would never want to deal with a child, but they are so much easier for me to deal with,” Scott said.
And Kari likes the honesty of the children she works with.
“They’re not going to fake that they’re in pain,” she said. “It’s a lot more fun, and this is the kind of hospital where you can blow bubbles and paint nails and basically act like a kid.”
Their busy schedules call for odd hours, but the two do their best to work the same holidays and get the same ones off.
“I’ve been a fireman for 24 years, so you’re going to miss them,” Scott said. “Christmas can be Christmas on the day after or the day before depending on things, same with Thanksgiving.”
Harbin dogs help FEMA group
Work brought Kari and Scott Harbin together prior to Le Bonheur. They first met each other on the task force, when Scott was a part of its rescue team until 2010.
Kari started volunteering with the task force in 2003, but the first three dogs she trained weren’t cut out for the program. Her fourth, a black Labrador named Jetta, became her first certified find dog. Jetta is now “very retired” at 16 years old, Kari said.
Today, she has two active dogs with the K9 unit: Fergie, a human remains search dog, and Jack, a recently certified live-find dog. Training a dog to be on the K9 unit takes, at minimum, a year and a half, Kari said.
“She does about two days a week with those dogs,” Scott said. “It’s a lot of commitment. All of the dog people on the task force, they are the most committed group of people in my eyes just because of how frequently they have to train.”
Hurricane Irma was Kari’s most recent deployment. Another recent disaster the team deployed her to was the deadly Gatlinburg fire in 2016. She spent a week using human remains detection dogs there with the K9 unit. The unit made “several recoveries” there, she said.
Kari said Gatlinburg allowed more flexibility in searching for people or remains with her dogs than larger-scale responses task force members are sometimes deployed to, like major hurricanes, in which orders often take longer to get through the chain of command.
“Something smaller scale like Gatlinburg, we were able to move around a lot more and be plugged in,” she said. “I rode around with a law enforcement person and was able to check houses as needed.”
Including Fergie and Jack, five dogs are in the Harbin household, despite Scott being allergic to dogs.
“Only two of them are inside,” Kari said with a smile. “We have a Roomba, you just try and keep the hair down.”
Max Garland covers FedEx, logistics and health care for The Commercial Appeal. Reach him at max.garland@ commercialappeal.com or 901-529-2651 and on Twitter @MaxGarlandTypes.