Volunteers Team Up to Provide County With Life-Saving Service

Plodding through the mud along Revlon Slough in Camarillo, Ed Evans was looking for a suspected car burglar Tuesday who had jumped into the fast-running channel in a desperate attempt to evade authorities.

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Evans, one of about 150 volunteers with the Ventura County Search and Rescue Team, was not looking to arrest the teen-age suspect. That was a job for one of his sworn, badge-carrying colleagues. Evans was hoping to rescue the youth or at least recover his body from the rain-engorged waterway.

“We’ll be out here until we find him,” said Evans, 47, a Fillmore resident who has served on the team for two years. “It’s not always pretty work, but it’s satisfying. I think that what we do is important because it is helping people often when their lives are on the line.”

Tuesday’s search was typical for the all-volunteer team, which has been finding lost hikers in Ventura County’s outback, plucking homeless people out of raging rivers and saving injured divers off the coast for the better part of five decades.

“I think our volunteers like the challenge of what we do,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Earl Matthews, the group’s coordinator. “When you come to work here, it’s not like a regular day at the office.”

The search and rescue team is divided into several units based throughout the county. They include mounted, swift-water rescue, canine, diving and mountaineering specialists, in addition to a corps of doctors, nurses and off-duty paramedics who regularly volunteer their time, Matthews said.

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In 1993, the latest year for which statistics are available, the team found 295 people, of whom 262 survived and 33 perished.

And when the volunteers are not saving people, they are repairing electronics, selling insurance or building houses. But to qualify and remain on the team, they must undergo extensive rescue training and then attend monthly seminars to sharpen their techniques.

The volunteers can spend hundreds of hours each month depending on the operations in which they participate, said Matthews, a 23-year veteran of the department, with 18 years as head of the search and rescue team.

Based at the Camarillo Airport, the search and rescue team performs many of its activities in cooperation with the Sheriff’s Aviation Unit, which maintains and flies three helicopters.

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Pilots of the aviation unit, working with members of the swift-water rescue team, were credited for saving more than a dozen homeless people from the raging torrents of the Ventura River during a heavy rainstorm earlier this month.

“When you have a hand in saving someone from certain death or severe injury, there’s nothing like it,” said Mark Smitley, 36, a Fillmore general contractor and member of the swift-water rescue team. “It really makes you feel good inside.”

Likewise for Robert Loop, a 40-year-old Simi Valley electronics repair technician, the team has become an important part of his life.

“We spend a long time training, but I think we get as much out of it personally as the people we help,” said Loop, who has spent six years on the team.

Sheriff Larry Carpenter said his department’s ability to serve county residents would be greatly impaired without the services of the volunteer team.

“Just by looking at the terrain of the county, you can see how invaluable they are,” Carpenter said. “We really couldn’t do without them. I think of them as our bridge to the community.”

On Tuesday, ground search teams looking for the missing teen-ager were prepared to cover the entire length of the Revlon Slough from the Ventura Freeway to the Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station where it empties into the ocean.

But at 3:15 p.m., the search was called off abruptly. The 16-year-old burglary suspect had called home to say he was safe.