South Portland’s dive team part of effort to protect the waterfront

SOUTH PORTLAND/CAPE ELIZABETH — Two months ago, Officer Peter Corbett of the South Portland Police Department received what may go down as the strangest radio transmission of his career.

On the surface, it may have seemed innocuous enough. Corbett was working a joint detail with Sgt. Andrew Hutchings of the Portland Police Department when the Forest City officer called in to say he’d found a stolen vehicle. What made it strange, though, was that Hutchings wasn’t on the surface – he was below the Maine Wharf, under 25 feet of water.

At the time, dive teams from both sides of Portland Harbor were working together to find Nathan Bihlmaier, a Harvard Business School graduate reported missing and believed to have fallen in the water. Divers had steeled themselves to fide a body. They had not expected to come across a 1994 Cadillac.

“I was working the headset, to keep the divers in contact with the pier,” recalled Corbett. “I was like, a car? Did you just say you found a car? Like, C-A-R?”

Indeed it was. Once Hutchins was able to find the license plate by feeling his way around the car in the murky depth, Corbett called it in to the dispatch center. As it turned out, the Cady was the same one stolen May 10 on Casco Street. Someone, as yet unidentified, pushed or drove it off the pier.

Bihlmaier’s body was found in that same area two days later, in a spot divers has crossed and re-crossed repeatedly. But it’s the car, said Corbett, which will make the first official mission of South Portland’s Dive Team stick in the memory banks.

South Portland formed its four-member dive team four years ago and recently received a Homeland Security grant that will ensure divers for the first time can work in winter weather. It’s all part of recent efforts to beef up security along South Portland’s waterfront, which also includes the purchase of a workboat for the fire department.

“With the number of marinas and petroleum tank farms we have in our community, having no real water access of our own for the fire department was somewhat concerning,” said City Manager Jim Gailey.

The dive team works various details just as important, from searching for bodies – the team trains for rescue, but considers and promotes itself as a recovery unit only – to locating evidence or stolen items tossed in the bay. Evidence recovery alone is why it’s so important to have a dive team made up of sworn officers, Lt. Frank Clark of South Portland said. The team also works plane crashes, such as its second mission, when a small, antique plane hit the water off Portland Head Light last month, and tactical matters they’re less willing to discuss openly, such as training to deal with explosives or drugs that might come into the harbor attached to the bottom hull of boats.

“In today’s world, it just made sense to try and have that capability,” said Police Chief Ed Googins, when recently explaining the department’s Homeland Security grant application to city councilors.

Through the past year, South Portland has begun consolidating its dive team with the six-person crew from Portland police, under a joint memorandum of understanding.

“We each have our own command, but in the water we work as a single unit,” said Clark, the ranking team member. “Because the Portland members have so much more experience, we pair off, one South Portland diver with one from Portland.

In March, Portland won a $1 million Homeland Security grant, of which netted South Portland $95,040. The funding included $76,000 to the fire department for a Department of Environmental Protection-designed skiff being built by Viking Welding and Fabrication of Kensington, N.H., and expected to be delivered this fall, and $19,040 to the police department for dry suits.

In addition to upgrading waterfront capabilities of he fire and police departments, the recent Homeland Security grant purchased various dive equipment, including fins, ankle weights, two underwater cameras and two “lift bags” used to bring evidence to the surface.

The dry suits, which envelop divers in a layer of air, insulating them from frigid temperatures, will enable winter work for the first time.

“Up until now, we’ve been effectively out of the water from December to April,” said Clark.

But that doesn’t mean the dive team has been used to sitting idle for five months of the year. Pool work helps keep skills fresh for team members who train largely on their own time, meeting every month at various coastal locations for eight hours. In all, it takes 96 hours spread across 18 months to go through all the certification modules, taught by South Portland divemaster Paul Rollins, the lone civilian member of the team.

Starting at open water certification, the levels proceed through advanced certification, rescue diving, search and recovery, law enforcement and public safety.

“These men are sincere and dedicated public servants who put in an amazing amount of work just to be ready for the few times per year they may be called upon to use their training,” said Rollins.

“Because it’s not something we do all the time, it’s a matter of maintaining everyone’s competency and comfort, so when we do use that training, each member has that confidence, and doesn’t panic,” said Clark. “Things can and have gone wrong, so we want to feel confident that we can send someone under water who isn’t going to have an issue, or cause an issue for someone else.”

One thing the divers agree on is that diving along the working waterfront is not a place for anyone with claustrophobia, one reason team members trains by blacking out masks and trying to disentangling themselves in rope while in the pool.

“When people think of diving, they think of what they see on TV, with the Caribbean, where you can look up to the bottom of the boat from 100 feet below, and you can see all the fish darting around. Under the State Pier in the Fore River is nothing like that,” said Clark.

“Most times, you can only see a few feet in front of you, and a lot of times not even that,” agreed Corbett. “Still, it is pretty awesome. We’ve all grown up around Casco Bay but its interesting to be one of the few people to be able to see it from the other side, or what you can see of it down there.”

The dive team may also make use of the new fire department work boat. The 24-by-8-foot aluminum skiff, designed by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, will be used primarily to pull containment booms kept at the seven petroleum storage facilities along South Portland’s 14-mile coastline.

“It’s in no way a fire boat, it’s a work boat,” said Fire Chief Kevin Guimond.

“For the past seven years, I have been working with our waterfront partners on a protection and response plan for a variety of potential emergencies within the harbor,” he said. “One deficiency identified was the department’s ability to fight petroleum fires in a terminal or on a vessel in port. Another deficit was the ability of our first responders to deploy environmental control measures immediately.

“DEP will also be able to utilize this boat at a moment’s notice to get an initial view of any spill in our city, instead of transporting their vessel down from Bangor,” said Guimond.

But the skiff also can be pressed into service as a base of operations for divers in case of an event at one of the marinas. It has been equipped with a “dive door” that allows divers to enter at surface level, without having to go over the side.

“One area of concern is that we have a large number of private vessels on our marinas on a year-round basis – several residents live on their boats 12 months a year – and we have no platform to work off of,” said Guimond, citing fuel and sewage spills, as well as underwater searches, in addition to a boat fire, as possible incidents for which the new skiff would serve as a command center.

In addition to protecting from the cold in winter weather, the dive team’s new dry suits also can be used guard against contaminated water, should an emergency dive be required while contaminants remain in the water.

The fire boat will be mounted with a small water pump, said Guimond, to help battle small boat fires. However, any major waterfront blaze will continue to be fought by the Portland and Casco Bay Lines tugboats, which South Portland equips with firefighting foam, using funding from area oil companies.

It will be a welcome upgrade. The only water vessel now owned by the SPFD is a rubber raft called “The Zodiac,” seized by the police department as evidence more than 20 years ago.

“I spent many hours in the Zodiac,” remarked Councilor Tom Blake, a former firefighter, at a recent council meeting. “One thing I was always sure of was that it was deficient, as far as what we needed to serve our community.”