Ally

What rescue and recovery diving lacks in glamour, it makes up for in discomfort.

"It's a lot different than what you see on TV," said Adam Walter, a member of the Sheboygan County Law Enforcement Dive Team and a corporal with the sheriff's department. "They're diving in warm water and see colorful fish and they're having a good time. This is a lot different — it's cold, black and dark."

The 10 members of the county dive team cover Lake Michigan and the county's many inland waters, with responsibilities ranging from the tragic — a father and daughter drowning two years ago in a Cedar Grove retaining pond — to the mundane — retrieving a bicycle gear used in a fight and thrown in the Sheboygan River.

The team responded to about 15 calls last year, five of which required a diver to enter the water, but its members train year-round to be prepared when duty calls, officials said. For several members, that included a six-day training session last week consisting of classroom work and exercises at Sheboygan Quarry and Elkhart Lake.

"It's like anything else, until you need something you really don't understand the importance of it," said Sheriff Mike Helmke. "It's important for (county residents) to know that help is there when they need it, and it's important for me as a sheriff to know we have qualified people to respond to these things."

Helmke said the team — which consists of five sheriff's deputies and five Sheboygan police officers — is an example of a shared-service success story. The departments operated separate teams for decades before merging in 2000, though the county team disbanded for a time due to a lack of funding.

The team's last rescue was in March, when a canoe capsized in the rain-swollen Pigeon River west of county Highway Y. One of two men in the canoe was able to swim to safety, but Christopher Loffler, 22, of the Town of Herman, was left clinging to a tree a few feet above the swift current.

Walter, who launched a rescue craft with other members of the dive team, snatched Loffler after he had been hanging to the tree for more than an hour.

Though seven or eight of the dive team members respond to a typical call, only one is ever in the water at a time, team leader John Rupnik said. Other team members fill the roles of a backup diver, who suits up in case the first gets into trouble; a line tender for the primary or backup diver; or a "90 percent" diver, who is ready to jump in if something goes wrong with the first two divers.

Rupnik, a city police officer, said launching multiple divers is not an option since lines can be easily tangled, with disastrous consequences.

Though some situations require an immediate response from emergency personnel, the dive team is always cautious in its approach, Rupnik said.

"If we're out here … and someone's drowning, we're still going to follow our procedures, but we're going to be moving a little faster," he said. "There's no freelancing allowed. If we can't do it with the training that we have, we call someone who might be able to do it for us or we don't do it at all."

Though the dive team has had only one injury since combining — a training exercise that sent a diver to the hospital for four hours in 2000 — members say they're fully aware of the risk inherent to their jobs.

"There's dangers in the water that I guess I was never really aware of," said police Officer Dan Vlietstra, 31, the newest member of the team. "You get snagged, you run out of air and you're dead."

Communication is one of the biggest challenges in a rescue situation, as the diver and the rest of the team can communicate only through tugs on the tether line. The divers come up every five minutes for Rupnik to check the air supply and OK them to continue the dive.

The team hopes to streamline that with a hardwired communication system, but lacks funding for the approximately $4,000 upgrade, Rupnik said.

Rupnik said it costs about $20,000 to train and equip a diver with the dry suit, mask and other required equipment.

The training

All team members are certified in basic scuba diving as well as use of a dry suit and advanced open water diving, but many members also pursue more advanced training, such as a Dive Rescue 2 school hosted here last week.

The course, focused on salvage and recovery efforts, ran from Tuesday to Saturday and included local and out-of-state participants. During training at the quarry Friday, divers took turns using giant airbags to raise a Ford Taurus station wagon dropped in 30 feet of water near the beach. The technique would be used when investigators need the car intact for forensic analysis.

Since divers are in the water rarely at actual rescue or recovery scenes — Walter estimated three or four times in his seven years — they keep their skills fresh through monthly practices, in which the team primarily focuses on search patterns. In one exercise, divers have to locate and retrieve clay pigeons from the Sheboygan Quarry.

"We practice a lot, and this is all for the people when they need us," Walter said.

(The Sheboygan Press)