Community Corner

Rocky Hill Scuba Master's Lessons for Emergency Responders [VIDEO]

Scuba Shack owner Ed Hayes is teaching the intricacies of underwater rescue to emergency responders downstate.


It's not often that the dive teams of area police, fire and emergency medical service units are called out for duty.

But when they are, it's a dash to make efforts a rescue operation as opposed to a recovery effort — read: no one survived.

To that end, 24 officers from the Greenwich, Milford and Westport police departments, and the Stamford Fire Department and the Westport EMS Unit, are training together for two weeks to learn the intricacies of their equipment and basically, get on the same page of how underwater operations will be conducted. That's where Rocky Hill's master scuba diver Ed Hayes comes in.

In the balmy swimming pool facility at the Boys & Girls Club Greenwich, a dozen officers have been spending the last three days under water this week. Another dozen officers from those departments as well as the Connecticut State Police will begin the cooperative training effort — thanks to a $28,000 a federal Homeland Port Security Grant. 

In total, the officers will receive two weeks of classroom and pool training, in addition to another couple days of in-water training — in Greenwich Harbor, according to Greenwich Officer Tom Etense, captain of the Greenwich Police Department's dive team.

"We get in our cars, we know how to operate the vehicle. We know the equipment on our service belts. You're in the water, you want to know that we're all on the same page and know how to do search-and-rescue, recovery," said Etense.

The classes are led by Hayes, the founder of Scuba Shack in upstate Rocky Hill, which is the only Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) training facility in the Northeast. Hayes's booming voice echoed through the pool area of the Boys & Girls Club Greenwich Thursday morning. The dozen officers in this class were clad in dry suits — dive suits that keep the body dry and free of contaminated water, listened intently as Hayes explained the rigors of slowly sinking to the water's bottom before initiating a search operation.

Later this spring, all 24 officers will continue training in a water-filled quarry Hayes owns in upstate Portland where they will learn how to conduct searches of submerged cars, school buses and even an airplane. That training session also will be paid for with another Port Security grant of $9,000, according to Etense.

"We haven't worked together let alone dive together," Etense said. "This gives us the opportunity to learn what equipment we have and how we can work together."

This regional training will help officers better coordinate their efforts such in situations such as the one about a year ago when a boat crashed into the stone hurricane barrier in Stamford. Both the Stamford Fire Department and the Greenwich Police Marine Division responded to the incident which killed a New Rochelle, NY firefighter and led to the rescue of at least one victim.

"Our goal was that there is some much variation, we don't want to wait until the last minute to have to work with one another to find out what equipment we have, what our expertise it," Etense explained. "Some of the officers here have 30 years of experience, others have a couple years."

Etense added, "This isn't like recreational diving where you're swimming in Cozumel looking at pretty fish."

All told, Greenwich can rest assured that it has a marine unit that's ready to roll in a moment's time. "We have 11 Greenwich Police officers who are divers — there always are divers working throughout the course of the day...," Etense said. 


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