I'm sorry. I thought you said it's a...

As you probably know from earlier posts like: That water is deep...almost as deep as those misconceptions; that I find a lot of entertainment in what I do. A certain January evening was no exception.

I was out with some SRD divers who were training with me down here in Miami, at a canal that we frequently find cars in. It was late afternoon and the searching was coming to an end for the day. I checked in with the last team at the end of the canal and asked what they had discovered in their search area.
The team had been doing a parallel search, so there had only been one diver in the water. The diver then proceeded to tell me about all the random garbage and nick-knacks he found on the bottom. He got to the end of his list of findings when he hesitated for a moment and then said, trying to sound confident, "I also found a Jet-ski............with wheels."

Now I have learned that when someone tries to explain something that is out of the norm to others who have never seen it; those that have never seen said item, become instant experts on it. It's basically a sport. People start forming teams by recruiting others to their view. Wild ideas are now simple logic, and suddenly the only person who has actually come in contact with the object of interest, is the only person who is wrong.
So pretty much with the divers comment, this was shaping up to be a big enough event that ESPN2 should probably send out a van and crew to cover it.

"I'm sorry. I thought you said it's a Jet-ski with wheels." I said this thinking he was just making up something for all of us to have a good laugh at. After all, that's my kind of humor. "Um, yeah...it's a Jet-ski...with wheels."


I have a rule with my company. There is to be no shouting at the surface between divers and surface support while on an operation. Even if you're at the other side of the lake, you handle all your discussions close enough to whisper if need be. It's just plain professional. There is no need to be yelling all over the place, especially if you're dealing with a sensitive situation like a body recovery.
So this being the rule, I called the diver to the waters edge and asked again what he had found.

The audience at the time was myself, the Lieutenant from the auto theft division, and an special agent from an insurance firm. So, in the interest of not having the diver embarrass himself, I called him over close and asked what it was he saw. He repeated his answer doing his best to sound like he wasn't second guessing himself. "I'm not crazy Jordan. It's a jet-ski with wheels." I told him to go down again and confirm his claim.
Now while he was down, another unit pulled up and two officers joined the discussion of the mystery vehicle. Some said it was on it's trailer. Others said it was probably a go-cart. The Lt. said it was a Quad (Four wheeler) because they would come out in that area and ride around. I was the team captain for the "On a trailer" team.

After about 5 minutes, the diver surfaced and came over to an eager group of experts just waiting for their moment to tell all the non-believers, I TOLD YOU SO!
Unfortunately the story was the same, and the diver was more confidant now. He explained how he had investigated the USO (unidentified sunken object) and described again in more detail about how it was a Jet-ski with wheels.  

Ok, I'm sure there is a simple explanation for this. Like that it's on it's trailer and it has two wheels and a tongue and straps tying it down (Go team Trailer!).
So with my new found assurance that I was right, and with the encouragement of my newly drafted teammates, I told the diver to go down once more and look for the trailer. I then gave him a quick lesson on how to tell if it's a trailer underwater and off he went.

Now the above water scene is down right hilarious. We have the original characters, plus those 2 officers, plus another 3 officers. Also the tow truck is on it's way. Unnecessary you say? Well we can't just leave all those people in suspense!
So once more the diver surfaces, spit's out his regulator, and just starts smiling! "I knew it! I was right! It's on it's trailer." I said to the Lt. as I nudged him with my elbow.

Ok, this guy is on his own now!!! No more trying to bail him out of embarrassment! He will just have to learn his lesson the hard way! Some diver he'll turn out to be. Can't even identify a trailer underwater!!!

The tow truck showed up. Bet's were placed and battle lines were drawn. The moment of truth had arrived.

And here it comes...

It's on it's trailer I tell you...

A little further...

It's a...it's a........What the....

   

Well then. It's a Jet-ski....................with wheels.
I know the picture is as blurry as one of Sasquatch, but it's real. That right there my friends is why I love my job! You just never know what you might find!

Apparently, the engineer who created this beauty, had taken out the motor and everything else inside, and installed something similar to a go-cart frame. There was no seat and no engine, but I bet that thing rolled down hill like a champ!

This has gone down in my memory books as one of my favorite recoveries. It's also the favorite of all those "experts" that were on scene as well. It's times like these that remind us that we only know what we know. And I know now, there was no trailer. Maybe next time team. Maybe next time.

Search negatively my friends,

Jordan

Did you think we drowned?!

Sorry to disappoint, but we did not. So all y'all out there are stuck reading this blog...all 3 and a half of you.

So what's been up?! Big things I tell you! As you probably noticed, the Blog name has been changed to CETi Diving Blog. I was told by my website consultant that this was a great branding move, so we shall see. We also updated the website. It's pretty cool. You should go check it. Click here.

Another thing that I am personally excited about is what the NAPD is gonna be rolling out over the next couple of months. They will be doing some online commercials as well as interviews with the President of the NAPD, Mr. Michael Gast himself! There will also be a video blog series that they will be doing, and we will be featuring some of those on this blog! Sweet, I know!

In addition to all of the awesomeness mentioned above, I'm also pumped about the multiple Special Response Diver classes we will be teaching around the country this year. There are some departments and organizations that will be hosting their first class and becoming training hubs for their communities and surrounding areas.
That's really what we are trying to accomplish here at CETi Diving: Develop places that want to be a host

location for this training, and build up that region's ability to handle the Underwater Search and Recovery needs that arise. We know it's very important for everyone who gets involved with these kinds of investigations and/or recoveries to be on the same page. When a fire department is called to the scene of a drowning and then the sheriff's department has to get involved because it could be a homicide, it makes things so much better when all divers and surface support are on the same page. And what better way for that to happen than for them to train together!

Well my friends, we are back. And we will be bringing you some cool stuff on here in the coming weeks! Gear tips, more great stories from the Pro's, interviews, and other stuff that I think is cool!

So stay tuned, and search negatively my friends!

The positives of negative buoyancy!

Finally, some clear thinking on the importance buoyancy has in the diving community. Wait a minute, what diving community is it important to? As a matter of fact, how many diving communities are there? Why don’t you just think about those two questions while I continue with the first thought.

Buoyancy is all about Archimedes, who was a Greek mathematician/scientist living in the 3^rd century BC.

Using scientific methods he determined that “…an object immersed in a liquid partially or totally is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the liquid displaced”.

Well, have you thought long enough on those two diving community questions? The answer is… understanding and mastering  Buoyancy is important in every diving community.

In the recreational diving community the attainment of Neutral buoyancy at any depth is the desired objective to be considered a competent diver. However Positive buoyancy is the most sought after and taught skill for a dive profile to have a happy conclusion. Then there is Negative buoyancy which has become the bain of sport divers and those who teach them.

In the Commercial diving community the knowledge, skills and abilities  (attitudes) when it comes to buoyancy is more a job for job tool and capability. That means that Positive, neutral and negative buoyancy is mission dictated and performed professionally to a successful conclusion.

In the Special Response Diving community Negative buoyancy is king! This community includes Police divers, Public Safety divers, emergency response divers, tactical divers, military divers, forensic divers and any other group that performs underwater search and recovery missions. Believe it or not trying to find something on the bottom while neutrally buoyant is a fools errand. Now some will argue that neutral buoyancy keeps the diver from disturbing the bottom, and that may work once in a while, but if you want to find something on the bottom you must become the bottom. This is achieved only with negative buoyancy. The only way to constantly have a positive resolution to an underwater search is becoming proficient in the use of negative buoyancy.

Remember, in underwater search & recovery you get positive results when negative buoyancy is king!

Written by - Michael W. Gast

The rise of technology, and the fall of common sense.

We got the call at about 9:30 AM. We loaded up, headed out, and arrived at a small lake that was nestled in the middle of a highway interchange. We were informed by Florida Highway Patrol that the incident had happened the night before, when a person driving a pickup truck, had lost control and driven off the interstate and gone into this lake. The driver had gotten out and was fine, but the truck was now making friends with the fishes.

I geared up and walked to the waters edge as my partner got the search line. We could see the tire tracks where the vehicle had gone in, and so using that as our LSP (Last Seen Point) we started an arc search. About 10 minutes later I located the vehicle that was, in fact, a pickup truck. It was just sitting there on all four wheels glistening in the early morning sun, about 120 feet from shore.

Well, to make this story short so I can talk on what this post is really about; we recovered the truck and all was good. But when I had come up after locating the truck, the wrecker operator was just laughing and shaking his head. He told us about a recovery he was at a few days before, where 6 off duty police officers had spent 6 hours using side scan sonar, looking for a 20 foot box truck in a 50 foot wide canal that was only 20 feet deep. He just laughed and said, "It took them 6 hours with all those guys and technology, and you two come out here, and in 10 minutes, find a pickup in a 40 foot lake with a piece of string!"


Does the title make sense now? You see where I'm going with this? Dive teams get sold on all kinds of new gadgets and gear, and pay for it by trading in there knowledge of the basic principles of Public Safety Diving. A sad side note: the amount of money these teams try to get to buy said gadgets, is money that could be used for upgrading basic equipment, or be used to pay for additional training days.
Give me money to pay a team some overtime to train with the basics, and I'll give you better results then any piece of technology can produce. You think that's a bold statement? Let's take a look at a recent event in New Orleans.

I have a few things I would like to point out. First, is the amount of people who had been involved in the search. Multiple departments and volunteers assisted in looking for this missing teacher. The State Rep. in the video says that the area had been searched before but the vehicle had been missed. Now whether that was with side scan sonar or with search patterns I don't know.
Second, is the relative closeness to shore where they located the missing teachers vehicle.
Third, there were a lot of other vehicle recovered! This tells me that they do not go into these areas regularly.

As I researched this story, I kept asking one question. Why was that car missed? If divers had been in there and they were proficient at their search patterns, why was that car not located?

We have to be careful that we are not sold into the thinking that big expensive toys make it all easier, or even more effective. You can only have one of two answers. I located the object, or the object was not in the search area. Are your search methods ingrained into your team so well that you can confidently give one of those two answers? Or do you have doubt when you get done with a search?

I'm not some stone age diver that thinks that technology will take over the world. I think that there some applications where side scan sonar is very useful. Heck, I was interviewed on the Nancy Grace Show one time about the use of side scan sonar in an investigation. In that investigation it was very helpful in locating the missing person. Things like side scan sonar and metal detectors can definitely be useful tools to assist your team, but I believe that you need to know and be able to perform effectively, the basic search patterns first!

So what I'm really trying to say is: Don't sell your common sense to buy technology. That's my point. Ok, I'm done.

Search negatively my friends!

Jordan and the missing dead.

I had been a Special Response Diver for only 4 weeks. I was about to move into my 3rd phase of training at the International Alert Academy. I had chosen to go into Aquatic Operations as my specialty and it was the Friday before we were to start. We had just finished our end-of-ERT training ceremony and promotions and were ready to kick it back for the weekend, when the training officer over Aquatics, came up to those of us that would be going into his unit and said, "Pack your bags boys, we leave in the morning. We're getting deployed to help with a body search that's part of a murder investigation."

After myself and the other guys had a mild heart attack from excitement, we tried to act cool and put on faces that said whatever, it's just another day in the office. But who were we kidding?! This was the ultimate call out! We would be putting all that training to the test!

All through our training in Miami, we had found cars that were either stolen or insurance fraud. But this was huge! We were heading to Lubbock, Texas to assist the local Sheriff there. The whole trip out there, we thought about what our Instructor had taught us about searching for a drowned person or murder victim. "You never find a body. Bodies find you." Cool as cucumbers. Ok, maybe cucumbers in a microwave.


We showed up to a very warm welcome from the requesting agency, who was just happy to have body's there for this work. As we pulled up to the marina that was the staging area, we noticed a few other divers that would be coming out with us. We were told that these were Public Safety Divers who had been diving for many years. Great. Our first public performance, and now we have to deal with the pressure of impressing these veterans with all the stuff we think we know.

Our team of greenhorns quickly learned a valuable lesson. Don't be intimidated because of titles. Let me explain what gave us this revelation.
First let me explain these two men that were gearing up with us. One guy was 6'2" and probably weighed about 350 pounds. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. While putting on his wetsuit, through his grunts and groans, and winded banter, was telling us about how his wetsuit was custom made because he was so big. It cost him over $600 for this thing, and was a wonderfully bright yellow and red with purple accents. He was so proud! He needed almost 40 pounds on his weight belt!
His partner was next to him putting on the most complicated looking harness I've ever seen. One of my teammates asked him why he had so many knives and shears. He proudly answered that they never get in the water without a minimum of 5 cutting tools. You know...in case you drop the first 4 trying to cut your way out of the giant fishing line factory you plan on swimming into down there.
So as these two gentlemen were putting on their rescue helmets (again, not joking) we boarded the boat and set off to search.

The lake we were searching was not really deep in the search areas. Sometimes it was only 2-4 feet deep, but it still had to be searched. Where this lake lacked in depth, it made up for in vegetative growth. A lot of saw grass and decomposing saw grass root balls were along the bottom in our search areas.
You may be asking yourself right now why this is important. To most experienced Public Safety Divers it's not really important; however to a straight up newbie it is. You see, the visibility was about 8 inches, and every time my hand touched one of these decomposing root balls my thought process would go something
like this...

*Hand touches slimy root ball and inhales regulator down esophagus*
"Ahhh I found a body!"
*Realizes it's just a root ball*
"Woohoo! It's not a dead body!"
*While pulling out regulator from esophagus comes to realization*
"Crap. Now I have to keep searching."

And repeat.

So for two days this went on. We did not locate the victim, but we did recover a shotgun that was used in a different homicide. To say the least we learned a lot! Our first call out taught us some things that only the real world of public safety diving could teach us.

1st - We learned that just because they have a bunch of cool toys and expensive wetsuits, does not mean they are good divers. Their methods and equipment prevented them from searching effectively and efficiently. Don't feel like you have to impress anyone. Just do your job and let others decide by your actions if you're good enough.

2nd - Just because you did not locate a body or a gun does not mean you failed. Remember, there are only two answers... I located the object, or, the object was not in the search area. It takes a team to cover the area we covered in those two days. And as a team we accomplished our mission.

3rd - You can still breathe out of your regulator even if it's down your esophagus! I would not have believed it unless I had experienced it so many times. I wonder if there is a specialty card for that...



Search negatively my friends!

There are 2 kinds of divers in the world... -Post by Michael Gast

As a full time police diver for over twenty five years I have had the blessing and the curse of observing in-service training and its effect on the dive resource capability of various agencies. The purpose of in-service training is to hone the knowledge, skills and abilities (attitudes) of the diving resource so as to maintain a level playing field among the various diving personnel. The other side of the coin is simply training for the sake of training. This being said, what is the circumstance when your team meets for in-service training?  Since most of you reading this are in some way involved in underwater search & recovery or rescue I will leave you to decide the type of training the team in this story practiced. 

One evening my partner and I were dispatched to a possible drowning in the south end of the county. Upon arrival the fire rescue divers were just exiting the water after searching for over forty-five minutes. Their on-scene commander had determined it was no longer a rescue, but is now a recovery for the police divers.

Since the first order of business was to gather information and determine the last scene point (also referred as a datum), and never having worked this rock pit before, I asked two of the eight divers about the depth and bottom condition. They both stated that the depth was over 60 feet with zero visibility.

With the sun setting and having talked to the one witness who claims to have watched the victim go under, my partner and I swam out to the last seen point with an anchor, down line, float and a search line. Because of the reported depth the down line was over sixty feet long, although when the anchor hit bottom I still had over forty feet of line in my hands.

After securing the excess line to the float we descended to twenty feet and landed next to a Ford van sitting on its wheels. Being over two hundred feet from shore in twenty feet of water on its wheels this van was an enigma to be solved later. Being able to see the whole van in this twilight the visibility was established as fifteen feet horizontal. Using the van as our base I tended my partner as he conducted an arc search starting out ten feet and arcing 180 degrees on each pass with ten feet increments each time. On the second pass my partner signaled that he had located the victim and secured the line around the victim’s chest.

The search that we conducted lasted less than five minutes.

What did we do differently than the eight divers who searched for over forty five minutes?

When I told the last fire diver on the scene that there was a Ford van in the middle of the lake, his response was,  “ I know, we put it there for training. This is one of our training lakes”.

Well it is your turn to determine the type of in-service that goes on here!

REMEMBER!

“HOW YOU TRAIN, IS HOW YOU PERFORM WHEN IT GETS REAL ”

EBZ

A Gentle Reminder. Gentle Like A Belly-Flop.

Last time I checked, you can not inhale water. Actually you can; but in doing so there have been reported many health risks. One of those risks is death. I'm not joking. People actually die from drowning! And you know what's even more amazing? Public Safety Divers still do it! Even understanding there is a risk of dying, they still try to inhale that H2O. Why?!

Apparently no one told them that it's no bueno. (Free Spanish lesson. You're welcome.) If someone had, then maybe they might have been more careful. They might have had a different outcome. But where can one learn this kind of wisdom? Where can you go to understand what not to do?

It's really not a question of where you can go, but who you can go to. The who you learn from is more important than where you learn. There are a lot of places you can go and learn advanced/specialty diving. Almost every sport diving agency has some kind of Search & Recovery certification. And if you are an advanced open water instructor with your agency, you're all good to teach it. But has that instructor ever actually done it? Have they been down and located what was missing and brought it back? I'm not talking about a weight belt that fell off the boat in the ocean; I'm talking about zero visibility water looking for a gun that's been pulled apart and tossed in piece by piece with every news station for 50 miles watching your every move. How would that instructor perform
then?

Sadly this is happening. Police and fire departments across the country are finding and hiring sport diving instructors to train their people in something the instructor has no experience in, or business teaching. They are learning in clear water and comfortable conditions. If it's raining they go home. Somehow this seems acceptable. Amazing.

Let me ask you a question. Why would you train anywhere other than where you would be performing the job? Pools are really nice; in fact I was in a pool last night. But I was teaching open water newbies, NOT people that need to be bringing their A-game at the worst times in the worst conditions! We need to get away from this mentality of trusting an instructor because they have a card that says they can teach a class. Take the time to interview someone who is going to train your department. Ask them what their experience is. I don't care how many people you have taught, I want to know how long you have been doing recoveries and what kind of cases you have worked on. Tell me stories and some of your mistakes you have made.
Tell me why you teach what you teach! Are you doing this because it's a good gig and the money is good, or are you doing this because you want to bring the very best training to those that serve our community's? It is OK to ask these questions! If someone is going to get all defensive because you are challenging there credibility, then something is wrong.

So to sum this whole thing up in two words...be annoying. Ask questions, do your research, and don't condemn you and your team to failing before the class even starts. Write down what you want to accomplish, and every question you can think of before you interview a potential instructor. Then get at it!

Search negatively my friends!