When Dive Teams Clash

The other day I read an article about two dive teams whose members argued over who was going to perform a body recovery. The initial responders were a fire department team, and the follow-up team was from the local sheriff's office. A person had drowned, and a witness called 9-1-1. The fire department team responded with divers, boats and a sonar system. They searched the area for almost an hour without success. Then the sonar operator got a hit and the team was moving to the location to dive when members of the sheriff's office stepped in and told them to stop. An hour had passed and rescue was not possible, they said, so the incident was now a crime scene, and their divers needed to take over.

Now, I don't have all the facts to this story, and I know my synopsis is not complete. But it does reflect a problem that occurred that day, and it's one that readers should consider. This was not a jurisdictional battle like we've seen when fire department and police dive teams both respond to a 9-1-1 call and argue about who gets to dive. This event involved two identified dive teams with recognized responsibilities: The fire department team was responsible for rescue, and the sheriff's team was responsible for crime scenes. On the surface that sounds reasonable. But in action, it is trouble waiting to happen.

The two primary tenets of public safety diving are to:

1) attempt rescue for the first hour after initial submersion, and

2) treat every drowning like a crime scene.

With this event, both concepts were applied--but by different teams. To me, this is like diving with one fin on. You might eventually get where you want to go, but will most likely end up going in circles.

I have used an illustration in the past that applies to this problem: Over the last 30 years in the fire service, the police department has never called us to bring a fire engine and crew to move a body out of a dumpster to a sidewalk so they can work their scene more easily. Put that body in the water, especially with zero visibility, and that is about all they ask or expect us to do.

When we realized this was our relationship with our police department, we went to them to explain all our dive team was capable of doing. We have undergone a transformation in training, equipment and mentality, and just assumed they knew all we could do, but didn't care. We were wrong.

Since then we have become an underwater investigation team and work with law enforcement to locate, protect, document and collect evidence underwater. Our police department does not have a dive team, so our fire department team works as their underwater extension.

In the opening scenario, both agencies had dive teams. But instead of building a mutual response capability, they seem to have drawn lines that leave little or no room to work together. Each is responsible for a single tenet: The fire department accepts responsibility for rescue, and the SO for the crime scene. There is no true way to define where one stops and the other begins, yet their agreement is apparently based on the "golden hour" rule.

At what point can we reasonably say a drowning victim is dead? Is it really an hour? Some cold-water drowning victims have been resuscitated more than an hour after submersion. But say it is summer, and the water is warm. How deep are the thermoclines? How much of a difference could that temperature differential make to the possible resuscitation of a victim? I don't know either. But I surely do not want to be the one to tell the mother of a lost child, "Sorry for your loss, but we have to stop and let a crime scene team take over. They should be here in another hour or so."

What happens if the team is successful and makes a quick recovery, only to discover the indentation of an oar in the side of the victim's face? What if the victim has a bullet hole between the eyes? Is it still a rescue if an hour hasn't passed, or is it a crime scene? To separate the two functions, and divide them into two sets of responsibilities assigned to different teams, is to invite confusion and problems.