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 ”
