Copter Rescue Team a Victim of Cutbacks : Emergency services: The Air-5 unit is scheduled to be grounded Sunday. Other agencies will fill the void, but no one else has the veteran crew’s expertise and versatility.

After a quarter-century of flying to the rescue of the hapless and the injured, time and money may be running out for the county sheriff’s Emergency Services Detail.

Their big helicopter, code-named Air-5, is scheduled to be grounded Sunday, and 16 members of the 22-man force reassigned to other duties. The recession and a shrinking budget are blamed, but Air-5 supporters say the cuts would be better made elsewhere.

News that the budget ax had fallen on Air-5 shocked other rescue agencies. From Catalina and the South Bay beaches to the Angeles National Forest and the San Gabriel Mountains, lifeguards, firefighters and law-enforcement officers said it will be hard to fill the gap when Air-5 quits flying.

“We’re talking saving lives here,” said one critic of the cuts who didn’t want to be named.

Rescue-unit supporters won a partial reprieve earlier this week, however. While most of the emergency unit will be transferred to other duties Sunday, limited funds have been found to keep Air-5 flying on weekends through July, when the Board of Supervisors will hold budget hearings. The fate of the unit and its helicopter will be decided at that time.

If the unit and Air-5 do fall to budget cuts, other emergency services will have to fill the gap, but the response teams won’t be as fast or as well-equipped, critics say. No other units carry scuba divers who are also trained paramedics and mountain climbers who are skilled in search-and-rescue tactics.

The big, powerful, olive green and yellow Sikorsky S-58 helicopter has been a familiar sight crossing the channel and hovering over the pounding surf just below Catalina’s rugged cliffs, its paramedics rappelling down to help a victim and the county lifeguards who have gone in to save him.

Air-5 is flown by two pilots, and it carries two deputies and a senior crew chief, who runs the rescue operations. In case of an emergency, it has room for up to 10 victims, plus the rescue workers.

“We’ve had a number of extremely dangerous rescues when a boat goes into the rocks and we’ve got an eight-foot surf pounding the beach,” said Lt. John McKay, a Los Angeles County lifeguard stationed on the island. In cases like this, Air-5 is often called in to rescue the injured.

The lifeguards are the first on the scene, swimming to the accident site to save those they can. But too often along those high, rugged cliffs there’s no way to get the victims off the beach.

“Without that helicopter, there’s no way off except to swim out through the surf, and that’s dangerous at best and impossible with an injured person,” McKay said. When there’s enough clearance, the helicopter can hover over the rocky shore, with one skid resting on the rocks, taking the victims on board. If there’s no room, the chopper and its crew can hoist the victims and the lifeguards from the scene, he said.

For 26 years, the unit has been an elite detail within the special-services bureau. Assignment to it is a coveted job for those few who have the strength, endurance and skills of a triathlete, say the unit’s commanders. Each deputy is a scuba diver, mountain climber, SWAT team sharpshooter, paramedic and search-and-rescue expert.

The unit has 17 deputies, four sergeants and a lieutenant and an annual budget of $1.4 million, plus the $944,000 it costs to fly and maintain the helicopter, officials report.

“This isn’t like any other detail,” said Sgt. Mike Connolly, a senior crew chief. “When deputies volunteer for this duty and get it, that’s it. They stay.” Several have been in the unit for a decade or more, and one, Mike Kennard, 52, has spent 20 years in Air-5.

Kennard and three other divers once risked their lives searching a sinking sailboat only to find the expensive craft had been purposely scuttled and abandoned.

“We got a call from the Coast Guard saying they had this boat under tow, but it was sinking stern down and they didn’t know if anyone was trapped inside, underwater,” Kennard said. Jumping from Air-5 in full scuba gear, the divers swam down into the sunken stern in a desperate search.

Within minutes of their arrival, the sailboat snapped its tow and sank, but not before Kennard and his companions searched the flooded cabins and, finding no one on board, “got the hell out” before the boat went down with them in it.

“What we did find while we were in there was that the (drain valves) had all been opened, flooding the compartments,” he said. The divers’ testimony helped convict the boat’s owner of insurance fraud.

Much of their scuba work involves the grisly task of pulling bodies from sunken air crashes or recovering the victims of diving accidents. They often team up with lifeguard divers and the Coast Guard on search-and-rescue operations in deep water off the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Catalina.

Connolly also recalled working a team search in the warm, murky waters of a small pond in an urban park in South-Central Los Angeles. The divers were looking for a pistol used in a murder, groping the muddy bottom until they found the weapon.

Summer or winter, Air-5 is called upon to help forest rangers in mountain search-and-rescue operations looking for missing skiers, small children and injured hunters and fishers.

When an emergency call goes out anywhere in the county, the first response is often by Los Angeles County Fire Department paramedics and helicopters. Frequently, they are backed up by Air-5.

The Fire Department’s three smaller helicopters are crewed by the pilot and two paramedics on rescue missions. However, firefighting is the primary mission of these choppers, fire officials said. And the Fire Department rescue crews are not scuba divers or trained mountain climbers, as Air-5 crew members are.

“Certainly they’re going to be missed. They are a trained, experienced resource--very professional,” Deputy Fire Chief Paul Blackburn said. “Somebody will still be responding when the 911 calls come in, but there’s only so much we can do when you reduce your resources. It’ll take longer to respond.”

Under the original budget-cutting proposal, the unit would have been cut from 17 deputies, four sergeants and a lieutenant back to just four deputies and two sergeants as part of Sheriff Sherman Block’s efforts to trim $27 million from his $812-million budget. The helicopter could be grounded and the pilots assigned to other duties, officials said.