‘I’ve done more than 20,000 dives’ — Q&A with Paul Rollins

SOUTH PORTLAND — For nearly a quarter century, when police officers in the Greater Portland area have needed to perform their jobs under water, they’ve turned to Paul Rollins, 63, of South Portland, for the requisite training. His business on Washington Avenue, Rollins Scuba Associates, keeps him busy when he is not certifying new divers or working at his other job, as director of special services for Alpha One, a South Portland company that helps the handicapped with mobility issues.

Last week, after leading officers from Portland and South Portland in their monthly training, he took time to recount how he got his start, and what it takes to do the job.

Q: How were you chosen to train dive team members for the Portland and South Portland Police Departments?

A: I actually created Portland’s dive team 23 years ago and South Portland’s four years ago. The original dive team in Portland originated from a case on the waterfront where a kid escaped from the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland, stole a bicycle, went down on the waterfront and cut the throat of a lady. He then threw her in the water. At the time the city had no capabilities to do anything under water. They basically got her out and then I went in under the piers and did a metal detector search for them. As a spin-off from that, the Portland Police Department decided they wanted some divers.

Q: How did Portland find you for that job?

A: I was actually working for the city at that time, and everyone knew of my interests in diving – I’ve been teaching it for almost 40 years now. But, most importantly, I think, I had the equipment. Early on, they were using all my equipment. So, I helped a couple of officers get certified and that kind of created the team.

Q: How did the dive team develop from there?

A: Well, t wasn’t until about 10 years go that Portland decided it actually needed to budget for a dive team. Until then, there might have been two or three guys at any one time certified, but no more because you can’t have a team and expect the guys to provide all their own equipment. They had to pay for the courses, supply their own equipment and have it always ready on call if needed. Now that it’s a budgeted item, we have six certified divers in Portland and four in South Portland.

Q: What is the most important thing the public should know about the dive team?

A: I would never profess a law enforcement team to be a rescue team. That creates a false sense to the public, which I will not do, that you might actually be able to save somebody. We are a search and recovery team. If your kid is under the ice and someone says, ‘They’ve got a rescue team, they’ll come to the rescue.’ No, we won’t. We’re only going to recover the body, if you’re lucky. So, the public always needs to exercise extreme caution around the water.

Q: What else to police divers do?

A: Most of our work is recovering guns, safes and other stolen items that get thrown in the water. It’s very important that those are recovered such that they can be used in court in a legal manner, with a documented chain of custody and proper preservation.

Q: In addition to certifying divers, what do you do at your business, Rollins Scuba Associates?

A: I do three things – I teach diving, I do consulting work, mostly in the area of diving with disabilities and appearing as an expert witness for diving accidents throughout the United States, and I do commercial diving, including most of the work for the Coast Guard, under ships and stuff.

Q: The Coast Guard does not have their own dive team?

A: Again, if they had a dive team they would create the false impression that they do rescue. That’s not their primary function.

Q: How did you become interested in scuba diving?

A:  I got into diving because I grew up on the Lloyd Bridges show, “Sea Hunt,” on black-and-white TV. I was a very fat little kid. I wasn’t going to run very far. But I could swim well and hold my breath a long time. I started out looking for fishing lures and golf balls for fun, but promised myself that once I got done working my way through college I would take a scuba course. I finished college in June and by August I was a certified diver. Within a month I was helping the instructor teach and kept right along with that until I go my own instructor ratings.  Since then, I’ve probably certified 5,000 or 6,000 basic students in Maine and I’ve done over 20,000 dives worldwide.

Q: How does training a police officer differ from the usual dive certification you do?

A: The regular Joe is there for recreational activities, the police officer is there for adverse diving. I’m not about to talk about bodies coming apart under water with a basic course, but I am with the law enforcement guys because, at one of the first recoveries I ever did, the arm came off in my hand.

Q: How to police officers themselves differ from your usual students?

A: Initial courses from both are pretty much the same. But I find most police officers understand what I call the paramilitary chain of command. If you ask or direct them to do something they do it, whereas the civilians are more like, “Why do I have to do that?” Sometimes, it takes more finesse and negotiating to teach laypersons than police officers.

Q: What agency backs the certification?

A: There are several certifying dive agencies. The one I work mostly with is called the Profession Association of Diving Instructors. They’re also the one the state police use. The public safety diver and law enforcement diver programs are what’s called instructor-authored programs. Essentially, I wrote it. PADI reviewed it and gave me credentials to teach it based on my experience. They now have a public safety program of their own, but I still teach the one I wrote.

Q: How much do you get paid to train the officers?

A: Everything I do is all volunteer. The only time I charge either city is for the actual certifications. The monthly trainings, all the paperwork and a lot of the call-outs, that’s all volunteer.

Q: Why do you do that?

A: Just to give back to the world. I do a lot of different volunteer stuff and, for me, this is fun volunteer stuff.

Q: How dangerous is a recovery dive?

A: The pubic needs to understand that this is a high-risk activity and that people do die, as did Dave Rancourt in Auburn a few years back. He had a heart attack while on an operation in the river. His death, and one other near death, was the direct reason the Department of Labor created standards for public safety diving, which is now the law in Maine. There were about eight of us on the committee that wrote those standards, myself included.