Suited up, dive team feeling heat to be ready for next time

BENTONVILLE -- Even before he hoists the 35-pound air tanks onto his back, Benton County Dive Team training officer Rick Downum is already sweating inside his dive suit under the rising July sun.

The suit is designed not only to keep divers dry and buoyant, but also to protect them from hazardous materials likely to be in the water at a dive rescue or recovery site. It's a hallmark of the dive team, which assembled Friday morning at Bentonville's Memorial Park pool to begin three days of advanced training in boat-based dive operations.

Sealed around the neck and wrists with thick rubber cuffs, the suit makes every moment under the sun -- but out of the water -- hotter than the last. But it's the kind of protection divers ultimately rely on when conducting search operations under water. Materials divers might swim through can range from chemicals leaking from automobile engines to bodily fluids and gasses escaping from the bodies of drowning victims.

"Any time you've got a body that's been in the water for more than an hour, you're going to encounter some hazardous material," said Steve McGregor, the dive team's maintenance officer.

Members of the 10-member Benton County Dive Team were joined by wildlife officers with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Dive Team for the training, which was conducted by John Soderberg, an instructor with Colorado-based Dive Rescue International. After about three hours of reviewing basic dive safety techniques in water at the Memorial Park, participants spent about four hours receiving classroom instruction in the afternoon.

They are scheduled to spend a total of 16 hours practicing boat-based diving techniques today and Sunday at Beaver Lake.

Downum said the Benton County team is typically activated between five and 10 times each year, assisting in the recovery of human bodies, vehicles and weapons or other potential evidence for criminal investigations.

In August 2009, the Benton County Quorum Court and then-County Judge David Bisbee adopted an ordinance establishing the all-volunteer Benton County Dive Team, thus unifying two existing teams, those of the Benton County sheriff's office and the county Department of Emergency Management. The ordinance also established a dive team board to administer funding and manage the team's logistics.

In 2014, the county has budgeted $70,199 for equipment, training and maintenance, according to the Benton County accounting office. It can cost more than $4,300 to fully outfit one of the team's rescue and recovery divers, including dive suits, air tanks, regulators and more. The budget does not provide for actual manpower, however.

"It's on our own time, on our own dime," Downum said.

Recoveries are often hampered by a need for expediency that requires divers to search at night for someone who is missing far below a water body's surface. When the team was deployed earlier in July to help locate the body of 19-year-old Elijah Watson, who drowned while trying to swim across Beaver Lake without a life jacket, Downum said he found the man's body almost by accident.

After a witness directed searchers to where Watson had been seen last, wildlife officers dropped buoys in the water with weighted lines that reached the lake's bottom, about 35 feet below.

"For me, it was actually a happenstance," Downum said. "I got down to the bottom, and I just happened to put my hand on the young man. That's how we found him. There was zero visibility. With the silt at the bottom of the lake, as soon as you hit bottom, it clouds up, and it makes the visibility even worse."

Downum said that in addition to training to perfect dive and search techniques, the team also concentrates on dealing with the emotional effect of recovering a human body.

"The way we do it as a team, we always talk through every scene," Downum said. "Any of our new people on the scene, we talk them through what they've seen and what they've experienced, because it's not every day you have to handle a person, or even a vehicle, or be in that stressful situation."

"I've recovered 20-plus people, so I'm accustomed to knowing what I'm about to encounter," Downum said. "But it's challenging, and it's emotional for some people, to deal with a body in the water. But you learn, in this particular field, to kind of put it in another place in your mind. You're there to do a job. You're there to locate an object and to bring it back to the surface. Everybody handles that a little different."

Metro on 07/26/2014

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