BEAVER FALLS – There’s a new dog in town.

Sam is the new K9 officer, the arson dog working with handler Capt. Dave Seidl of the Beaver Falls Fire Department.

The energetic, 4-year-old lab is a soft, fluffy light yellow with still-a-little-bit puppy eyes. But his inky nose is his business side. A lab’s nose is at least 40 times more sensitive to smells than a human nose, according to State Farm, a sponsor of the Arson Dog Program and organizer of Thursday’s demonstration that let Sam show some of what he knows.

Sam and Seidl spent April training in New Hampshire, cementing their teamwork alongside 15 other handlers and dogs. Seidl brought the region’s inaugural K9 accelerant dog, Patty, to Beaver Falls in 2015.  After seven years of service that saved homeowners about $1.5 million in premiums, Seidl said, Patty is retired, adjusting quickly to getting her food in a bowl twice a day at home like a regular pooch instead of sniffing for accelerants to earn her next meal, whether or not there’s a fire.

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Sam, a well-traveled and well-educated canine, already is following in Patty’s pawprints. Since arriving in May, Sam has “six counties and a couple of arrests under his belt,” shared Seidl, who has assisted departments from Ohio to Harrisburg to Punxsutawney with his K9 partners.

Sam doesn’t flaunt his Irish roots, even though he was trained as a scent detection dog on the Emerald Isle. In 2019,  Sam came Stateside to work for a South Carolina fire department, said Doug Griffith, a Pittsburgh-based senior government affairs coordinator for State Farm. After Sam’s handler suddenly fell ill, Seidl took the opportunity to make Sam the latest canine half of the Beaver Falls accelerant detection team. 

The team demonstrated Thursday what the lab nose knows — and how instantly. A human investigator might dig out 8 inches or more of debris to seek an accelerant pattern and take weeks to test three different samples, each at least the size of a quarter (about $500 a pop, said Seidl); all the while, the scene’s evidence is at risk of deteriorating. A canine investigator like Sam makes his determination on the spot, saving time and money as he distinguishes among 60 variations of accelerant.

For the demonstration, Seidl stashed Sam in the department’s new state-of-the-art K9 truck while he added literally two drops of accelerant ― what remained after gasoline evaporated, not even enough to start a fire ― to one cup in eight rotating on a bicycle wheel. When Sam came out of the truck and received the command to start, he sniffed while passing several containers. He paused, sniffed, sniffed again, sat down and put his nose on the “hot” cup. Bingo!  That mad skill that can penetrate through about a foot of debris, Seidl said.

Next, Sam sniffed out accelerant drops in one of 32 holes in a board, with the same sniff, sniff, sit and nose on the spot procedure.  And he pinpointed that drop on state Rep. Jim Marshall’s shoe, just as if it were a trace residue from an arsonist standing back to watch his work.

As is typical nationwide, Patty’s tenure correlated with lower arson rates and increased convictions, Seidl said; fire departments without arson dogs have about a 10% conviction rate, while the conviction rate soars to over 50% with a K9 officer on the case. While children playing with fire accounts for nearly half of all arsons, Seidl said the local rate of juvenile arson has dropped by well over 50% since Patty arrived on the scene, and he expects an equal impact from Sam.

Overall, western Pennsylvania has more than its fair share of arsons, State Farm’s Griffith confirms. This fact makes solving cases, educating the community and preventing the crime significant; about $200 of every homeowner’s yearly premium is earmarked to help cover the costs of arson. 

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“Arson is one of the most expensive property claims in the United States,” wrote State Farm spokesman Dave Phillips in an email. “Each year hundreds of lives are lost and billions of dollars in property damage occur as a result of fires set by arsonists. Insurance fraud costs the property-casualty insurance industry ― and its customers ― about $30 billion a year, the National Insurance Crime Bureau estimates. … Arson dogs played a key role in helping to determine the cause of many of these fires.” 

Sam and Seidl now form Pennsylvania’s fifth arson dog team, joining Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Boothwyn and Altoona ― and building on Patty’s record.