INDIANAPOLIS - Leaders of Indiana's Task Force One have confirmed the elite search and rescue team has been activated to head to the hurricane zone.
  
The team received notification from FEMA and the members organized at headquarters on the city's west side.

Task Force One has all the equipment needed to tackle the effects of the monster storm -- rescue boats, manpower and K9s. 

"(K9s are a) good resource for covering large areas where they're searching and being able to detect people that might be buried," said Athena Haus, a K9 search specialist.

Indiana Task Force One will go anywhere from Virginia to Connecticut, and that is expected to come with challenges.

"This will be a unique situation where along the coastline we'll have a flooding event, and then inland we may see blizzard conditions in some of the high mountain ranges," said Thomas Neal, with Indiana Task Force One.
   
This group is familiar with these kinds of natural disasters -- they responded to Ike in 2008 and Katrina in 2005.  

Eighty men and women from 22 Indiana agencies will lend a hand with the aftermath of this storm.

Their search and rescue operations are geared toward structural collapses.

"We'll go into neighborhoods, areas that are affected, large areas of the storm surge or tornado that has spun off from the storm," said Neal. "We're familiar with wide area searches and we're geared toward that. Depending on what the local areas are asking, we can ramp up to whatever the commander asks us to perform for them."

They hit the road at 9:00 Monday night and headed to Wright Patterson Airport in Akron, Ohio, where they will wait for instructions.

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard stopped by for the send-off.

"They're very good at what they do, and they're very serious about it so they're going to do the state proud, no question," Ballard said.