Real Live Action Is All in a Day’s Work

Some days, Deputy Mike Berg’s to-do list reads like a cluttered Hollywood script: Rappel from a hovering helicopter down to a crash scene, drop a thousand gallons of water on a burning hillside, squint through night-vision goggles while buzzing the treetops in the outback.

Berg is a crew chief for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Aviation Unit. He sports an orange flight helmet detailed with blue lightning bolts. His co-workers jokingly call him “Ice Man.”

As during most summers, Berg and the handful of men who staff the unit are running a little low on sleep. They are on call around the clock in case a wayward hiker or camper is injured in the wilderness, beyond the reach of an ambulance.

“These past few days we’ve just been busting out all the time,” Berg said last week. Emergency calls pick up during the summer. The team flew 79 missions in July.

The most recent rescue occurred last weekend when a motorist drove off a mountain road near Fillmore, plunging several hundred feet down a steep canyon. Working at night, members of the air unit extricated the injured woman from her vehicle, then rushed her to a hospital.

Each member of the team has a favorite rescue. For Senior Deputy Scott Norris, it’s the time he saved a man who got stuck a couple of hundred feet up the side of a mountain at Rose Valley Falls near Ojai. It was a reminder that you never know what challenges you may encounter on the job, he said.

“I’m hanging from a line about 100 feet from the helicopter,” Norris said. “I get to the side of the cliff and try to get a vest on the guy, but he didn’t speak English. I had to use hand signals to explain what to do.”

Created in 1972, the sheriff’s air unit has an annual budget of $4.7 million and includes four helicopter pilots, three crew chiefs and two search and rescue specialists. It’s one of only two such aviation programs in the state equipped to handle everything from water drops to narcotics eradication to surveillance.

But the air unit is also feeling the county’s budget squeeze these days. Under pressure to reduce expenditures, there are plans to sell one of its five helicopters, which cost $700 an hour to fly, said Capt. Arve Wells, program director.

There is also growing public pressure on the sheriff to farm out some of the department’s duties to other agencies -- and to cut staff.

“By its nature and liability concerns, aviation is an expensive business,” Wells said.

But worrying about budgets is up to department heads and politicians. The team stays focused on its mission.

During a recent flight training exercise, Chopper 8 thunders toward the Santa Monica Mountains at 130 mph, the men inside squeezed into harnesses to practice a hoisting rescue from the air.

At one point, Deputy Rick Harwood shoves open the helicopter’s side door and slides 50 feet down a steel line to the ground.

“It feels like a long way down,” he said. “You’ve got to trust everything -- the guys, the equipment -- everything.”

Beneath the thumping of the chopper’s 1,800-horsepower engine, pilot Ken Williams strains to keep the 3-ton machine level. It handles like a small boat, rocking with even the slightest shift in weight. Helicopter crews tread softly in the air.

So do the dozens of nurses and paramedics who fly with them. Most of the aviation unit’s medical staff are volunteers. They are part of what Wells said has made his one of the most efficient air divisions in California.

The captain has also tried to cut costs by buying used helicopters. A new Huey can cost nearly $9 million. But all but one of the sheriff’s helicopters were rebuilt before the department bought them for $3.5 million each.

But pressure to reduce operating costs is expected to continue. Sheriff Bob Brooks is locked in a legal battle with the county because the Board of Supervisors has continued to cap inflationary increases in his budget, which he contends has left his department with a $10-million budget gap.

There are also outside pressures. Mercy Air, a private medical helicopter service that opened in Oxnard in 1998, also airlifts victims when ambulances cannot reach them quickly. The company bills the patients directly, which has saved the county thousands of dollars a year.

“Obviously we would like to do all the pre-hospital calls in the county,” said Katy Hadduck, a flight nurse and business manager for the Rialto-based company.

In recent months, there has been at least one instance when Mercy Air and the Sheriff’s Department clashed over which was the more appropriate emergency responder.

Sheriff’s officials say it’s important for the county to maintain its own search and rescue aviation unit. They say it is invaluable to have such a program during times of crisis, such as a massive brush fire or flood.

Meanwhile, Williams, one of the county’s four rescue pilots, said his job was simply to help those in danger.

“At the end of the day, I just want to come home to my wife and kids,” he said. “And that’s what we want for the people we rescue.”