Keeping Current

To the untrained eye, water rescues appear to require little more than good hand-eye coordination.

But as Mark Smitley, a Ventura County Sheriff’s Department search and rescue volunteer from Fillmore, tells it, anything and everything unexpected can happen in a raging torrent.

“It’s unpredictable,” said the 39-year-old construction worker. “There are a million different things that can happen and you have to be aware of all of them and be able to react.”

Smitley was one of more than 100 search and rescue volunteers who participated in the Sheriff’s Department’s annual swift-water rescue training exercise over the weekend at Piru Creek.

The two-day exercise brought together search and rescue squads from across the county to hone their skills before the winter rains arrive and turn the county’s now trickling creeks and rivers into potentially fatal roiling rushes of water.

In the past five years, local search and rescue teams have brought about 50 victims to safety. In 1995, the all-volunteer force won the top prize at a national competition that pitted their rescue skills against those from hundreds of other teams.

Although search and rescue teams perform a variety of dangerous tasks--ranging from undertaking back-country expeditions to locate stranded hikers to saving someone stuck on a cliff, the volunteers say water rescues pose the greatest danger to themselves and the victims.

“You don’t really have time to think when you arrive on a call,” said Smitley, a 14-year team veteran. “You can’t discuss how to do it; you just do it.”

While back country and cliff rescues typically afford volunteers time, Smitley said that during a water rescue one minute can often mean a life.

“More often than not, the victims are scared and hypothermic. And the water is rising so fast that we barely have enough time to even react,” he said.

And that’s why such exercises are so important for the volunteers, Smitley said. Exercises are the time when they can think and learn to sum up the situation in a matter of seconds.

“The goal is to make it become habit,” said 67-year-old Les Meredith, a Camarillo real estate broker and 30-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department search and rescue squad. “You want to get to a point where you already know what to do before you’ve even stepped out of the car.”

While every person on the 10- to 15-member teams is proficient in search and rescue skills, each has a particular forte. Some handle the ropes that are used to position rafts near the victim, while others practice techniques used in dangerous swimming rescues or oversee the entire rescue operation.

Over the weekend, the volunteers, most of whom were sheathed in thick wetsuits of insulating neoprene, practiced a variety of rescue techniques ranging from simply throwing a line to a waterlogged victim to actually jumping into the water to retrieve a drifting swimmer.

“That’s the kind we try not to do,” Smitley said. “It’s the most dangerous because it puts our personnel in danger and there’s the potential of adding another victim to the rescue.”

After each brief exercise, the soggy volunteers gathered along the banks to listen as experienced instructors critiqued their performance. And more often than not, the critics found few glaring mistakes, but rather offered advice on how to enhance the rescue for maximum efficiency.

Volunteers--who are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year--don’t receive any compensation for their life-saving efforts, other than the occasional thank you.

Despite that, several volunteers said there is an enormous satisfaction gained by putting their lives on the line for a stranger.

“You get to help out your community,” Smitley said. “And saving somebody’s life always feels pretty good.”