By Corey Rice
The Sullivan Fire Protection District’s Dive Team was established many years ago due to the demand of water rescues in our district. As you know, the Sullivan area has many people visit over the summer months for floats, camping, and just a relaxing day at the river. With this increase in visitors to our area each year, the rivers and lakes are becoming more crowded.
Water safety is very important and sometimes overlooked by inexperience around water, alcohol, and diving accidents. As we said, we like to teach safety for anytime you are around the water to prevent accidents; but, as you well know, sometimes the unforeseen just happens.
As this demand has increased over the years, the fire district has had to change its response and not only focus on drowning, but also be ready to respond to any water emergency, such as floods, search, diving accidents, boating accidents, ice rescue, and swift water rescues. With this wide variety of tasks thrown at us, we have to be ready and trained to handle these emergencies.
Chief White recognized these needs and changed the name from “dive team” to “water rescue team.” Chief White recruited several divers from neighboring districts along with divers from our district, boat operators and line tenders to fulfill the team’s needs. Several new pieces of equipment have been purchased over the last two years to bring the team up to speed.
The team is equipped with two boats. An aluminum Jon boat with a 90 h.p. jet is housed at station two. At station one, the team has an aluminum airboat, which helps navigate us into shallow water or through flood conditions when the river has a lot of debris.
The dive trailer is equipped with 14 full sets of dive gear, two full face masks with underwater communications, underwater camera, two ice suits, two dry suits, several throw ropes, life jackets, helmets, and several spare tanks. The trailer brings its own power and equipped with heat for the cold conditions.
With all of this high-class equipment and several members, the team’s commander, Jason Hoevelmann, and assistant commander, Bill Windham, have set a priority to educate the public and to train extensively to handle any water rescue. You have seen in the last few papers the various types of training we do, and we have more to come.
The Sullivan Fire District, in the past year, has sent two divers to PADI instructor school. Corey Rice and Chris Williams are both PADI Specialty Instructors. With the team having our own instructors, we will be able to train divers at a lower cost.
“We have set the bar high for this year,” said commander Hoevelmann. “All divers will be certified in Advanced, Rescue and Night Diver by year’s end. This year will be busy for the team, but we want to ensure all divers are trained to the highest degree.”
Appreciation goes out to Wal-Mart, Comfort Inn and Baymont for their support.
The Sullivan Fire District Water Rescue Team will host dive classes for the public for anyone that wishes to be a certified diver. Anyone that attends will be PADI certified.
Class dates will be Mar. 30, Apr. 1 or Apr. 3. Class size is limited so schedule your class soon. For more information, call 573-468-6161.