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Article snippet: MIAMI — The rescuers from California Task Force 1 had finally dried out. They had waded in the floodwaters left by Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas. They had slept in stalls ordinarily used for horses, and two of the task force’s men had survived being suctioned through a large pipe. But as the search-and-rescue team of about 70 — including swimmers, canine handlers, doctors, communications specialists and even a structural engineer — reached El Paso, commanders received a new order: Turn everyone around, and head toward an increasingly menacing Hurricane Irma. “We’re just firemen,” Mark Akahoshi, a leader of the task force, said later over a late-night package of Oreos in the Florida Keys. He thought for another beat or two: “You know what we really are? Adrenaline junkies. We could sit here, and every time that alarm goes off, everybody perks up.” The powerful hurricanes that crashed into the Florida and Texas coasts this summer left billions of dollars in damage and led to at least 110 deaths in the continental United States. But the storms also offered glimpses into a little-noticed arm of the nation’s disaster response system: the network of 28 urban search-and-rescue teams that the Federal Emergency Management Agency can send into crisis zones. FEMA said it had mobilized all 28 of the task forces to respond to Hurricane Harvey, the first instance that the entire network had been used for a single disaster since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For Hurricane Ir... Link to the full article to read more