Not mundane, definitely not pointless but there’s no other forum for this.
I spent my afternoon humaning. If when you get on a boat & cast a line in the water trying to find a fish it’s called fishing when you get on a boat & cast a line in the water & try & find a person what would you call it?
Report of someone possibly jumping off a bridge; when the boats couldn’t find him they called us in, the dive rescue team. I got one turn underwater search but then moved over to primary tender for the rest of it. What’s a tender? When you’re searching a river, pond, lake, quarry or other body of water with low visibility it’s very easy for the diver to get their direction changed because they don’t have a point of reference. Double that when you’re in a river with a current that can move you from where you were w/o you realizing it & not even uniformly. The diver is attached to a line that the tender is holding; it can just be a simple rope with hand signals but we were using comm cable so we could talk to each other. Since I was standing in the boat & could see their bubbles I knew where the diver was & could tell him which way to move as he was my ‘hands’ doing the actual search where I wanted him to be. Ultimately we never found anyone in our search area & since it wasn’t a confirmed / witnessed jumper we called it off as unfounded. Luckily, we don’t get to do it all that often but it is good to put all of that training to use.
Nope, we don’t use hooks as we don’t want to damage what we’re looking for, whether that’s a person or a evidence (gun/knife). Also, hook might miss it if it twists the wrong way. It’s literally a search by feel, hand & forearm.
On the one hand that’s kind of frustrating to do all that work and come up empty-handed. On the other hand you didn’t find a hand, or a foot, or a torso, so were spared that unpleasant experience.
It’s always neat to hear a day-in-the-life story from the folks who have unusual cool jobs. Thanks for sharing.
A friend of mine got hired as IT director for a county. On his first day the sheriff came in. My friend thought may be to discuss IT needs. turns out the sheriff wasn’t comfortable with technology and wanted my friend to run the side scanning sonar unit to search for a possible body in a nearby lake. IIRC my friend was out two days and they did not find the body.
I opened this thread expecting an afternoon of ‘humaning’ to be shunning electronic devices, perhaps feeling the grass with your bare feet. The OP was considerably more interesting though!
He would have been too fresh for that. OTOH, the construction workers from the Key Bridge & Maryland crabs…
We’re a VFD-based team, so I’m volunteering to do it, as is everyone else on the team.
I had a line in the water & bait on that end of my line; just my bait was a live human who was feeling around & not a minnow on a hook. In this case, we had enough visibility at times that it wasn’t all by feel; unless they kicked the bottom & stired everything up, but being in current that water quickly moved away. In current, it’s easier to move downstream but to search upstream because you’re not looking thru the mess you just created by stirring up the bottom
In the air accident investigation biz they refer to bodies underwater as “Purina crab chow”.
What gets recovered almost anywhere seems to be pretty well chewed on by the time it gets brought to the surface. There’s damned near nowhere where bottom feeders of some sort are completely absent.
15 days later, on a warm, sunny morning, I hear a call go out for a water rescue. My ears perk up; oh great, here we go again (water rescues are obviously much more common in either in flash floods or hurricanes/tropical events & there’s a much higher likelihood of calling out divers on a water rescue on a sunny day). Listening further, it’s for a DOA, about 6 miles downstream from our original call. I have subsequently heard that the body had been in the water some time so the timing lines up but have not yet heard if the clothing description matches the person we were allegedly looking for. Because our call was unconfirmed & uncorroborated our search was called off late on the first day & we stood down.
We caravaned over an hour away to dive with another unit. I hop in the back of what started out life as an ambulance; however, the air wasn’t working & the (tank fill) blast door was rattling. The other guy in the back with me was not a happy camper & found a seat in a different vehicle for the ride back but I soldiered on. About halfway home I cried uncle as I too, was getting car sick also - lesse, riding backwards, no windows except for small ones high in the door so you can’t really see out of them, no air, & metal banging. We radioed the other vehicles to see if there was an open seat. One of the other vehicles did have one seat left so we pulled into a strip mall & waited for them to catch up (they caught a red light somewhere behind us). We see them drive by the other side so someone calls them on the phone to say we’re over here. Next we see them driving the other direction with their lights on & then see them stopped, still with their lights on. Calls both over the radio & to a phone go unanswered so we hightail it over to them. They were flagged down for an unconscious subject sitting in a parked but running car. Turns out someone had ODed in the fire lane in front of the supermarket. Luckily a bystander had Narcan but didn’t know how to use it so we took it & administered two doses until they eventually came around.
The only reason we were in that parking lot in the first place was because I was getting car sick so the save was attributed to me.
We do have first aid kits but don’t carry any medicines; that will now be a discussion point as to whether we should. Folks, if you’re around anyone who does drugs get yourself some (frequently free - call your city/county health dept) Narcan. It’s a single dose of nasal spray that can & does save lives.
Good advice~I don’t do drugs (not out being a prude, I already have a traumatic brain injury, don’t want to add insult to injury) but I do volunteer teaching in a refugee literacy project downtown twice a week. As it happens it is at the public library, which is one of the few places downtown that is welcoming to our homeless street population. Being a retired nurse I know how lifesaving narcan can be in the hands of a willing bystander, so I found a public health initiative that sent two doses of narcan to me free, in an unmarked poly envelope. Threw it in my purse, it goes everywhere with me.
Do it, folks! Easy to save a life and Good Samaritan laws protect all actions taken with good intentions.
