LAFD Dive Team Cover Story

The LAFD Dive Team was featured in a cover story by Alive Magazine.  Alive is the official monthly publication of the City Employees Club of Los Angeles.  Divers Chris Curtis, Al Serpa, John Torres and Gil Garcia were featured on the cover.  We would like to thank Club CEO and Editor, John Hawkins, Editor John Burns, Director of Member Services, Angel Gomez for their interest and for highlighting our service.  Additionally, a big thanks to Battalion Chief Ray Gomez, Battalion 6-C for making it happen on our end.

You can read the full story by opening link below: (It may take a few moments to download)

Feature Story

Public Safety Dive Training in Florida

Fire and law enforcement dive teams from all over the country attended the class

Mate Dave Bender, Fire Station 49-C attended a public safety dive training course in Florida.  The class, Dive Rescue II, taught by Dive Rescue International (DRI) is the second in a series of public safety dive courses that meet NFPA standards for dive operations.  In the near future the LAFD dive program intends to become NFPA compliant with its dive operations .  All divers, mates and dive support staff will be required to be certified at the operational and technician level.  

The course topics were: 
Light salvage, diver survival, equipment setup and a med-diver class.

Lift bag operations

Shipboard Firefighting School

Ship Fire Prop

Over 20 members from around Battalion 6 attended shipboard firefighting school through Texas A&M.  Members traveling to the school participated in a five day comprehensive course that included classroom lectures and hands on firefighting. The class was paid for through a Port Security Grant.

"This was a great opportunity" says Captain Jim Porter from Fire Station 85-B.  "There are many of us new to the battalion that haven't had this exposure. It was an eye opener.  My team from 85's found it highly beneficial" Porter said.

Under Fire Conditions

Firefighter/Divers L to R John O'Conor, Mike Padilla, Gilbert Garcia, Gerald Durrant

LAFD Dive Team in Action

Sinking Vessel

Boat 3, Engine 49 and Light Force 38 investigate an sinking vessel.  Captain Martinez, Engine 49, checks the bow.  Boat 3 prepares for de-watering operation.   It was later determined the vessel could not be saved and not an environmental hazard.  

Dive Team Training - All Boat Dive Drill

Boats 1,3,4 and 5 tied off at Fire Station 112

Demobilizing and rehab after the dive

Waiting for the drill debriefing

Boat 3 tied off at 112's new small craft dock

LA Port Police Featured in LA Times Article

How I Made It: Ron Boyd, L.A. Port Police Chief

Ron Boyd didn't plan to be a cop, but some well-timed dry cleaning trips, an appetite for learning and a habit of follow-through landed him the top law enforcement job at the nation's busiest seaport.

February 20, 2011|By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times

The gig: Ron Boyd, 53, is chief of the Los Angeles Port Police, the 200-member force assigned to the nation's busiest seaport. That includes 43 miles of waterfront, about 7,300 acres of water channels, terminals, docks and rail yards, cargo ships, cruise ships and tankers, as well as a few thousand recreational boaters. In addition to that high-profile job, Boyd is president of the International Assn. of Airport and Seaport Police.

Unintended results: Boyd was studying to be a radio or television broadcaster at Los Angeles City College when he took a job as a security guard at Universal Studios. "I took the job because it was quiet and gave me a chance to study," said Boyd, who was born and raised in South Los Angeles. "I had no intentions of being a cop."

Next stop, Ray Charles: A buddy Boyd made while working security promised to take him along when he found a better job; he wasn't kidding. Boyd found himself in an office waiting for an interview to become singer Ray Charles' personal valet. Charles wanted to know two things: Was Boyd willing to help him get where he needed to be, on time and with dignity, and did he have a passport?

Boyd hadn't even flown on a plane, much less have a passport. He worked for Charles for the next five years, however, traveling abroad so often that he filled three passports. "Now, I look back on that as my internship with an internationally well-known executive of the entertainment industry," Boyd said. After leaving Charles' employ, Boyd considered a business career in the music industry and figured a law enforcement job might help him pay for his education.

Ask the right people for advice: In 1978, Boyd was looking for career advice when he noticed the African American Los Angeles police captain who used the same dry cleaner. One didn't see very many blacks with that rank, thought Boyd, who started timing his dry cleaning visits to those of the Los Angeles Police Department captain. Boyd summoned the nerve to approach the captain, Bernard C. Parks, who 19 years later would be named chief of the LAPD. Parks had some unexpected advice based on Boyd's uncertainty about a police career: Try the Los Angeles Port Police, then usually composed of retired motorcycle cops and airport police officers.

Docking at the port: Boyd joined the port police in 1982 and was made a sergeant in 1986. Back then, he enjoyed the laid-back atmosphere punctuated by flashes of action at the nation's busiest seaport and at one of its busiest airports, Los Angeles International, where he worked after making captain, from 1999 through much of 2004. "I realized that I was involved in a lot of very exciting stuff, a lot earlier than any of my old friends and colleagues," Boyd said.

A reputation for taking on any task: Boyd took on all assignments, including undercover work. He threw himself into every form of training offered, including Coast Guard classes on the proper way to board a potentially hostile vessel. He even studied at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., in 1992. "I was really into the tactics and personal skills training," he said.

Boyd became known as someone who could be counted on to finish a given task, regardless of how long it might take. "Ron's an integral part of our organization," said Jay Grant, chief executive of the International Assn. of Airport and Seaport Police in Washington, which is trying to rebrand itself as being key to the fight against international terrorism as the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks approaches. Boyd recently agreed to serve another term as the organization's president. "We're going through such major changes that he didn't want to leave things unfinished."

Big job, big changes: Boyd was named port police chief in 2004, in the harbor where police work has lost any connection to its old, pre-9/11 relaxed atmosphere. That's something Boyd thinks about every time he's in a major retail store. "Nearly half of everything we touch, from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, is a shipped good, and much of what you will find on shelves at any Wal-Mart, Target or Home Depot was shipped through this port," Boyd said. "This isn't just a local port, it's a national resource."

Taking the port police to a new level: A new $43-million, port-funded police headquarters is set to open this year. The port police fleet, which had just three patrol boats when Boyd arrived at the department, now has 10 and is still growing, with new boats expected this year. Boyd is most excited about what he hopes will become an internationally recognized maritime law enforcement training facility. Boyd said the port police already have one of the country's most highly regarded underwater dive teams, which gets requests for training from other law enforcement agencies.

"A world-class city with a world-class port deserves a world-class port police department," Boyd said as he stood on the stern deck of a patrol boat cruising slowly through the Los Angeles side of the harbor one late weekday afternoon. He found it unnecessary to hold on to anything for support because "I got my sea legs a long time ago."

"This," Boyd said, "is my dream job."

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/20/business/la-fi-himi-boyd-20110220

Ship Hits Oil Island in Long Beach

By Kristopher Hanson, Staff Writer LB Press Telegram

Posted: 02/22/2011 08:38:52 PM PST

LONG BEACH - Coast Guard personnel have completed inspections and found no significant damage to a giant freight vessel that drifted into one of the rocky manmade oil islands off Long Beach's coast during weekend storms.

The 624-four-foot Ocean Sunrise ran into Island Freeman, the largest of four artificial oil islands off the city's coast, after somehow breaking loose from anchorage Feb. 19.

The incident didn't lead to any injuries or damage, but left many shaken.

Coast Guard investigators are looking into the cause of the incident, but indicated Tuesday it appeared to be a simple accident caused by rough seas and weak ship anchorage.

"The freighter (vessel) broke loose from its mooring spot and drifted into the rocks surrounding the oil island, but we're still trying to determine how exactly that happened," said Trent Kelly, a Coast Guard Long Beach-Los Angeles spokesman. "Ultimately, there were no injuries and no environmental damage, so we were fortunate in this case. But there was the potential for danger. Divers determined the (vessel's) hull suffered some scrapes and minor damage, but no punctures."

Crews believe the freight ship drifted loose during seasonally high tides and unusually rough winds reaching 40 miles per hour as storms swept the region.

Long Beach Fire Department and Long Beach Lifeguard crews joined Coast Guard officers in responding to the scene, and within a few hours, several tugboats had pulled the Ocean Sunrise from danger. 

By Tuesday, dive teams from Long Beach Harbor, Long Beach Police and the Coast Guard had scoured the giant ship's underbelly and found no major damage. 

The Coast Guard port captain is expected to clear the ship for transit within a few days, Kelly said.

Kelly said the freight ships, barges, oil tankers and auto carriers regularly parked in the harbor don't pose much of a risk, with the breakwater offering protection from most large swells, but strong storms and high winds can still rock vessels loose from their moorings, creating potentially dangerous situations.

During high winds and storms, ships will often reposition to point toward the coastline to avoid heavy rocking from swells, a practice advocated by the Coast Guard as a safety measure.
The islands, named after four deceased astronauts, are equivalent to the oil platforms prevalent in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coasts of Huntington Beach and Santa Barbara.

Built in the 1960s, the islands are essentially giant rock piles disguised by landscaping from which hundreds of wells pull oil in a process known as "slant drilling," where wells snake along at tilted angles reaching 12,000 feet.

Current estimates put daily production from the islands at about 14,000 barrels per day.

Freighter Off Belmont Shore Dragged Anchor to Oil Island Nearly Half-Mile Away

Unusual circumstances combined to drag an anchored Panamanian freighter, two football fields long, nearly a half mile into the rocky shoreline of a manmade oil island  off of Belmont Shore, the U.S. Coast Guard said Saturday.

The 624-foot cargo ship Ocean Sunrise traveled farther than would be expected because it was empty of cargo and fuel, having been ordered by the Coast Guard a week earlier to rid debris in its oil tank that might cause engine failure—and risk a runaway freighter in the country's busiest shipping port.

"Something lighter moves faster," First Class Petty Officer Adam T. Eggers noted Saturday, the day he videotaped the Coast Guard and Long Beach Harbor Patrol diving team inspections (see right). "There were other ships in that same area and they didn't drag anchor.… They were not empty; they had varying degrees of cargo and fuel."

Eggers had said Friday that a freighter running aground happens from time to time, but Saturday he added that nobody recalls it happening here in the relatively sheltered and waveless waters off Long Beach. Extensive oil and gas production operations are ever-present in the form of four man-made islands named after astronauts killed in the line of duty in the 1960s. Three of them are about a mile offshore. The most recognized, Chaffee Island, is usually aglow in peach and orange landscape lighting. The island that the freighter ran aground on, Freeman Island, is behind it, about a mile and a half offshore.

"It's very rare that this can happen inside a breakwater. There are designated areas in Long Beach Harbor where you can and can't anchor a ship of that size, and a lot of it has to do with the shipping lanes, including fast lanes, depth of the water," Eggers said. The anchorages also are assigned to pose no risk to environmentally sensitive plants or animals, nor to natural or manmade gas and oil pipelines that run like mineral veins across the ocean floor.

 "It seemed very unlikely," Eggers added, "that this would occur had the ship been full."
According to the Coast Guard, the Panamanian ship was loaded with general cargo just over a week ago when the Coast Guard boarded it for routine inspection at the docks and found debris that could cause mechanical failure in its oil tank, Eggers said. The ship was ordered unloaded and assigned an anchor, D3, from which it would need to get the tank cleaned in one of the many repairs served by specialized companies. The assigned location is .41 miles from Freeman Island.

About 25 crew members were on board the considerably lightened ship at about 6:30 p.m. Friday night when Ocean Sunrise went aground on the rocky ocean floor ringing the oil island, Eggers said. As is routine, the crew was tested for drugs within two hours after the incident. Inspections went on that night for any leaks but none were seen in the high-wind darkness. Tugboats towed the vessel off the rocks and it remained anchored at a location Saturday that is actually closer to the island than it was before, Eggers said.

Such vessels are equipped with equipment that measures ocean floor depth, informs the crew how much anchor chain to release and even shows a ''red halo" image of where the ship would be if it swung 360 degrees from its massive single anchor. Alarms sound to alert the crew that the ship has drifted and give enough time for it to either fire up its engines—which could take a half hour—or call for outside help.

Even had the Sunrise spun 360, the sweep would still leave a quarter-mile distance from Freeman Island, Eggers said. That plus the length of the anchor chain that would safely be 150 to 175 feet.Which is what made the circumstances fairly unique, he noted.

"We've got guys who've been doing this 15 or 20 years and they've said, 'Wow. That's a long way for that ship to drag anchor,' " said Eggers, who personally saw the ship and footage of its paint-scraped hull. There was no damage to Freeman, not even to shrubbery; it all went on underwater amid the smooth stones that cover the ocean bottom around the island.

An ongoing investigation will check for crew response, equipment failure and what was happening aboard the vessel at the time, and how personnel responded, Eggers added. The ship Sunday was anchored at D2, a bit closer to the oil island.

On the one hand, one mile offshore equals 12.4 lengths of the ship. On the other hand, Eggers said, "you've never heard of this ever happening here before, and there are a lot of ships moving off this shore every day.… It's among the busiest ports in America."

Long Beach Dive Teams Get Coverage

By Tracy Manzer, Staff Writer LB Press Telegram LONG BEACH - They dive deep where few would dare to dip a toe, looking for hazards ranging from bombs to drugs and bodies to shipwreck debris.

Visibility is limited, often to less than a foot in local waters teeming with sewage runoff and large debris - we're talking washing machines, telephone poles and occasionally vehicles - especially after major storms.
Searches are exacting and often dangerous and require a great deal of manpower. Divers, equipped with special tanks, can spend as long as 90minutes below water searching an area by feel, moving inch by inch."
"If we can see two feet in front of us it's a good day," said Capt. Alan Miki at the Long Beach Fire Department's Lifeguard Beach Operations Division. "But any day you get into the water is a good day," Miki added.

The Port of Long Beach has three local dive teams, as well as access to county and federal teams if needed, at its disposal. They divide their underwater duties into three categories - security, law enforcement and rescue operations.
Under- and above-water security is covered by the Port of Long Beach Dive Team, a subset of the Port's Harbor Patrol.  Nine team members conduct underwater inspections of facilities throughout the port, ensuring the safety of every boat and commercial ship that passes through the port's waterways.  The port divers do so with the help of underwater cameras and robots and though their jurisdiction is technically confined to the port area, the team is able to deploy just about anywhere in the region aboard their 50-foot dive boat, the Sea Guardian.

Handling law enforcement is the Long Beach Police Department's Port Security Dive Team.
The crew of more than a dozen divers - most of them former Navy and U.S. Coast Guard veterans - also trawl beneath the murky waters looking for hazards and contraband, including the recovery of criminal evidence discarded in local waterways and the bodies of victims dumped or lost.

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Police divers regularly search ship hulls, piers and the ocean floor and enforce boating laws within the port and along the city's coast as well as in local marinas, the Los Angeles River and various flood control channels.

But it all began more than 50 years ago with the Long Beach Fire Department/Lifeguard Dive Team.
That team, which consists of 14 Lifeguard Marine Safety Officers and two firefighters, divided among three platoons, started in the 1950s when scuba began to catch on in the area.

Though they weren't officially recognized as a dive team until 1968, they are credited by many California agencies with being a leader in the industry, helping to train the many teams that followed.
In the event of a plane crash, a drowning or a car in the water, the Lifeguard dive team is first on scene and handles the first hour of any rescue operation.

After that, most rescue operations shift to a recovery phase and are turned over to the Long Beach Police Department, or similar agency with the Fire Department/Lifeguard dive team staying on scene to provide safety backup if needed.

This team usually arrives by truck, not boat, but the vehicle is loaded with high-tech gear, dry suits and full face masks to protect the divers.

It can carry four divers and a supervisor anywhere in the city at a moment's notice. It is also equipped to take local crews to help out in other jurisdictions for up to three days.

"We work with each other very well all the time," Miki said of the three local teams. "But there's a reason we're all independent teams, because we all do very different jobs."

Local Diver Deaths

Man Dies During Certification Dive Near Catalina Island

January 17, 2011 2:08 PM

AVALON (AP) — A 61-year-old man has died while on a certification dive with his instructor near the west end of Santa Catalina Island.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Fred Keelin said Sunday that the man, whose name has not been released, died around 3 p.m. and the cause has yet to be determined.

The diving instructor told authorities the man’s body went limp as the two ascended together.

The Torrance Daily Breeze reports that the instructor performed CPR for 20 minutes before paramedics arrived to put the man in a hyperbaric chamber, but he was pronounced dead nearly two hours later.

The coroner will conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Legendary Rock Bassist Mark Tulin Dies At USC Catalina

Mark "Professor Psychedelic" Tulin, 62, bass player with the influential '60s group The Electric Prunes and an experienced deep-sea diver, collapsed while performing volunteer work for the USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber in Avalon, California. Tributes are pouring in to the USC-CHC page on Facebook under the post:

It is with deep sadness and a very heavy heart that I inform you of the death of Mark Tulin. He collapsed today while helping out at the Avalon Underwater Clean-Up and had immediate response by Baywatch Avalon and Avalon Fire Department medics, but he could not be revived.

Christian Lambertsen, Inventor of Scuba Precursor, Dies at 93

By Dennis Hevesi
When American commandos slipped into the sea off the coast of Burma in the last months of World War II and swam underwater to attach explosives to Japanese vessels, Capt. Christian J. Lambertsen often led them. After all, he had trained them to dive and had invented the breathing device that allowed them to stay below the waves.

Christian J. Lambertsen invented an underwater breathing system that was used by Navy commandos during World War II. “He wasn’t someone to let someone else do it,” recalled Walter Mess, who had been commander of a near-silent 85-foot vessel that ferried the divers, usually in the dark, within 2,000 feet of shore. “Sometimes they were recon missions, sometimes to bring back downed airmen.”

Captain Lambertsen, an Army doctor, did not have to go on those missions. His assignment was to train members of the maritime unit of the Office of Strategic Services to use the device he had invented while in medical school. The Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit, or LARU, made those covert operations possible.

Dr. Lambertsen, an expert in respiratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, died on Feb. 11 at his home in Newtown Square, Pa., his son David said. He was 93. 

The LARU is considered a precursor to modern scuba technology, and Dr. Lambertsen is widely believed to have coined the word scuba, an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. 

Although he started tinkering as a teenager, Dr. Lambertsen fully developed a closed-circuit, pure-oxygen rebreather in 1939 while a student at Penn’s School of Medicine. Using filters from anesthesia equipment, he built a back-mounted tank from which the diver inhales pure oxygen. Carbon dioxide in exhaled breath is then scrubbed out through a chemical filter and returned to the diver as purified oxygen.  “It means that it doesn’t emit bubbles, so if you are swimming under a ship there are no telltale bubbles,” said Tom Hawkins, a historian for the Naval Special Warfare Foundation in Virginia Beach.  When Dr. Lambertsen demonstrated the LARU to the Navy in 1939, the Navy showed little interest because its deep-water salvage missions required helmeted divers to breathe through long hoses tethered to boats. But the O.S.S, a forerunner of the C.I.A., saw its stealth possibilities.

Once Dr. Lambertsen graduated from medical school in 1943, he joined the Army and was assigned to the O.S.S. as lead trainer for its underwater operations.  After the war, Dr. Lambertsen joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he converted an abandoned altitude chamber into a laboratory that was soon drawing experts and students interested in undersea and aerospace environmental physiology.

By 1948 the Navy had adopted Dr. Lambertsen’s improved version of the LARU and hired him to train its divers.

“The naval special warfare community and the special operations community recognizes him today as the father of U.S. combat diving and swimming,” Mr. Hawkins said.  

Dr. Lambertsen taught at Penn for more than 40 years. In 1968, under his direction, the university established the Institute for Environmental Medicine, which has conducted multidisciplinary studies of oxygen toxicity, diving-related diseases and aerospace medicine. 

Christian James Lambertsen was born in Westfield, N.J., on May 17, 1917, one of four children of Chris and Ellen Lambertsen.

Dr. Lambertsen’s wife, the former Naomi Hill, died in 1985. Besides his son David, he is survived by three other sons, Christian Jr., Richard and Bradley, and six grandchildren.

After graduating from Rutgers in 1938, Dr. Lambertsen began his medical studies at Penn and was soon delving deeper into a childhood fascination.

“He spent a lot of time on Barnegat Bay with his grandfather collecting clams and started wondering how to go deeper underwater,” his son David said. “He had his cousin in a rowboat using a bicycle pump and a hose to pump air 15 feet down to him.”