Geared up in a seven millimeter thick wetsuits, buoyancy compensation devices, air tanks and face masks complete with radios, the divers practiced searching for and recovering Oscar in less than 20 feet of visibility.
Since North Tahoe and Truckee are blessed with lakes and rivers, the dive team is trained in SCUBA and swift water rescue. Their main responsibilities include search and rescues, evidence collection, vehicle, vessel and, as in Oscar’s case, victim recoveries.
“It’s a startling thing to find a human form at the bottom for the first time,” said Placer County sheriff’s Sgt. Dave Cutting. “Especially when you come face to face with him.”
Cutting leads his North Tahoe team of five deputies and two civilians out of Carnelian Bay, where the deputies serve as both regular patrolmen and dive and rescue specialists.
They train, Cutting said, for anything under the water, including finding Oscar. Cutting threw the dummy, 160-plus pounds when wet, overboard a few days before the training session.
Duties of the deep
Underwater life encompasses interesting and often dangerous duties. The dive team can be called out to salvage airplanes, boats and cars for evidence recovery and for rescues. They are summoned to incidents like submerged runaway cars to suicide victims to ice skating accidents.
The team can be called out anywhere in Placer County, but generally work on Lake Tahoe and Donner Lake, as well as surrounding reservoirs, rivers, creeks and even golf course ponds.
In order to be part of the dive team it is necessary to already have serious underwater interest and experience, Cutting said.
“We prefer divers who want to be on the dive team, not deputies who want to be divers,” he said.
All five of the deputies previously received their open water certification, and the volunteers have extensive professional experience. These standards exist, said
Cutting, because there is too much material to cover — like learning search patterns, dark water dives and ice rescue practice — in 12 yearly training sessions.
Without prior experience, even recreationally, he could not adequately train the deputies.
“It’s not going down to look at pretty fishes,” Cutting said. “It’s work.”
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