The Sport in Public Safety Diving

One of these days I would like to write a book on some of the public safety diving operations I have had the honor of participating on. Each one comes with their own story of how the body, vehicle, evidence or item got into the water as well as what the divers had to go through to make the recovery. For 33 years I have been conducting underwater criminal investigations so there are a few stories to tell.

One day you find yourself searching a small farmer’s pond for a murder weapon with leaches in the water and cow paddies on the embankment and the next you’re diving below the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 60 feet of water for a tractor trailer that went off the bridge the night before with its driver still inside. A few days later you drive across the state to a man-made lake to search in 120 feet for the body of a young man who, in his intoxicated state, thought he could swim across the lake. If the depth was not challenging enough, at 60 feet you hit the tree tops of the oak trees that still stand in for forest that was never cleared before the lake was created. As you might imagine, every operation challenges your search as well as your diving skills. So your success and survivability depends on them.

Recreational dive training agencies play a vital role in the development of our public safety diving professionals. Recreational dive training can lay down a solid foundation for public safety diving if the diver has continued their diving education by going beyond their initial open water certificate. As you know, each level of training (Open Water Diver, Advance Diver, Rescue Diver, etc.) builds off the other and if taught to the level the courses were intended, you have a solid foundation to produce a highly trained and competent public safety diving professional.

To convert to public safety diving, all that’s needed are qualified training programs that address the needed skills and abilities of the public safety diver’s potential missions and conditions they will be asked to handle. The key to this conversion are the courses and instructors who teach them. The courses must be written and then taught by highly trained and experienced public safety diving professionals who’s been there and done it and who understand what’s needed to succeed and survive.

Your abilities and diving skills are what you bring to the dive site. Training and experience are what gives you those skills and abilities. The more you have the more you bring to every mission and the better your chances of succeeding and surviving that mission. If your diving skills are weak, you have a weak diver on the bottom unprepared, uncomfortable and not focused or ready for the mission.

You might be asking by now, “What skills, knowledge and training does today’s Public Safety Divers need?” Well it depends on the environment, conditions and mission of the individual team. But to point you in the right direction, the basics include: body recovery, vehicle recovery, evidence recovery as well as rescue diving. To understand these operations, you need to know: the physics of body movement in water, rescue and recovery procedures, vehicle entry dynamic, oxidation, fingerprint diminution, underwater evidence collection techniques, standards for documentation, crime scene sketching and photography, search patterns, chain of custody and courtroom procedures just to name of few.

Add to this mix conditions like deep diving, low or no visibility, swift water, and contaminated water you can quickly see where training should be on going and never ending. You should also be able to see why a solid diving foundation is needed and why advancing your dive credentials beyond the Open Water Diver level is so important.

In this post 9-11 era, our abilities to properly and safely respond to and handle a wide variety of public safety diving missions has never been so important. We can be proud that we have divers around the world who have committed themselves to not only train to meet their mission challenges but who use their diving skills to provide a valuable and needed service.