BPD dive team on call for water rescue

Several members of the Bloomington Police Department volunteer their time to the Monroe County Search and Rescue Dive Team.

“We are involved in water rescue, recovery of drowning victims, property recovery and evidence recovery,” BPD Sgt. George Connolly said.

Connolly, now a professional assistant diving instructor, has been a member of the dive team for 18 years. He has completed an excess of 200 dives.

The mission of the dive team is to “protect life, protect property and retrieve evidence,” according to the rules and regulations of the dive team located on the BPD intranet.

The Monroe County Sheriff’s Department is the overseeing body of the Monroe County Search and Rescue Dive Team, which was formed in 1991. Besides the Sheriff’s Department, the dive team currently includes volunteer members of BPD, Bloomington Hospital Ambulance Service and Perry-Clear Creek Fire Department.

“We are always on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Connolly said. The team assists in homicide investigations as well.

In one incident, the dive team discovered a murder weapon in Kentucky that killed a Bloomington resident. They tracked the suspect to Kentucky, where witnesses last claimed he was seen.

“The suspect threw his weapon in a retention pond on his parents’ property and we recovered it,” Connolly said.

The divers also have the gruesome task of recovering drowned victims. He recalled an incident last July that occurred on Lake Monroe in which a man was swimming near his boat without a life jacket and drowned.

“Although we were the first responders, it was a joint effort with the Department of Natural Resources to recover the body,” Connolly said. “It took us two to three hours to find him.”

On average the team is called for duty four times out of the year.

The rules and regulations of the dive team call for various levels of training to be obtained.

According to the regulations, the certifications include “basic open water diver certification, advanced open water diver certification and rescue diver certification.”

Each of these requirements is overseen by members of the Professional Association of Diving Instructors.

“There are a number of scuba training agencies worldwide,” said Kelly Rockwood. “But we are the largest.”

Rockwood is a PADI course director whose job includes examining instructional candidates.

The first level of instruction is the Open Water Diver, which includes diving theory and scuba instructions in a pool or other confined body of water.

There are also basic swim tests involved, including treading water for 10 minutes and a 200- to 300-yard distance swim, depending on whether or not scuba equipment is used.

“Besides basic class work, they learn to share an air source with another diver and how to monitor nitrogen tank levels,” Rockwood said.

The next two levels, Advanced Open Water Diver and Rescue Diver, are more hands-on. At these levels, students can obtain specialties, such as night diving and underwater photography.

These three levels are recreational, which Rockwood recommends to all scuba divers. Although always encouraged to dive with a companion, after the courses are completed no instructor is necessary for open dives.

Law enforcement dive teams incorporate a fourth tier in their dive training. Within one year of completing the previous three courses, the law enforcement diver must complete the law diver/public safety diver course, which is taught by Sgt. Connolly.

He explained the greatest chances of resuscitating a victim occur within the first hour of drowning. This, he believes, is one reason the volunteer group was established.
“No agencies at the time had local divers,” said Connolly. “They were burning the golden-hour rule trying to get here.”