April 2000 Volume 81 Number 4 "serving the protectors"
By Brett Williams

Peril in the Water

To those who love the sun and surf, a job with SAPOL’s Water Operations Unit may seem the perfect career choice. But four officers reveal that water police work comes with many dangers, and extraordinary physical demands.

enior Sergeant Bob McDonald suddenly felt a human hand against his throat as he searched the murky depths of a Naracoorte lake in 1975. He screamed, realizing he had finned directly into the outstretched arm of the dead six-year-old girl for whom he was searching.

He quickly emerged from momentary shock, however, regained his composure and retrieved her body.

Then 22 and a former Naracoorte resident, McDonald would later discover the girl was his cousin. He was then a newly-appointed police diver, and this was his first ever body-recovery assignment.

Now, as the officer-in-charge of SAPOL’s Water Operations Unit, McDonald reflects on 25 years in underwater recovery and sea rescue work. And, since the horror of his Naracoorte experience, he has recovered a further 300 bodies from under water.

Usually the victims of accidents or misadventure, the recovered dead have ranged from two-year-olds to the elderly. “We’ve had them so badly decomposed,” McDonald explains, “that they’re basically falling to pieces.

“(In) aircraft crashes they’re shattered beyond belief. It’s a most horrific thing, and it’s something that can cause you sleepless nights sometimes.

“I’ve had one where we had a young girl who was a pilot. We found her with one of her legs gone, every bone shattered and no organs left in her. Her head and one arm were also gone.”

In another case last February, McDonald took part in retrieving a man’s dead floating body from the River Torrens. The man had been four days in the water during hot summer weather. Journalists reporting the recovery mistook discolouration of his bare torso for a black t-shirt.

Says McDonald of the recovery: “You could actually smell him through your face mask. He was virtually cooked - to the point where I’m having trouble pulling the bloody drumstick off a roast chicken. That’s exactly what his shoulder looked like. It would have just come straight off.”

One of McDonald’s 11 officers, Senior Constable Kevin Doecke, has recovered human bodies equally decomposed and mutilated. And he has often found little remaining of corpses that sea life has had days to devour.

“You just take a body bag down with you and, as best you can, scoop them (bodies) into the bag,” he says. “Any bits you miss, you just pick up and put into a dive bag.”

Doecke, 33, had to recover the bodies of three young men after their car plunged into the River Torrens from the Adelaide Zoo bridge in 1996. The recovery - for which he was recalled to duty from sleep in the early hours of a bitterly cold September morning - remains one of his most powerful memories.

But even as their minds store these gruesome underwater death scenes, divers must, like all cops, maintain emotional distance from their work. “You can’t get yourself too wound up in the personalities of the people you’re looking for - or their relatives,” says McDonald.

“If you work closely with the fellows on a job, you’ll think they sound a bit callous - but it’s a self-protection mechanism.”

Nonetheless, McDonald, 46, knows well that emotion, albeit subtly, plays a part in divers’ work.

“There wouldn’t be one bloke here,” he says, “who hasn’t had some sort of sleepless night as a result (of a body-recovery).

“(But) it’s very important to us to recover a victim, because we believe that a family in grief can’t complete the process unless the body’s returned.”

Attempts to recover drowned or dumped bodies, however, cannot always succeed. Divers’ search for the body of murdered Warlords Motorcycle Club member, Cosimo Castelluzzo, covered over 2.5 million square metres of sea bed at Edithburgh in 1993.

The search - still considered the largest ever conducted in Australia by a police unit - failed after 25 days to recover Castelluzzo’s body. But with such a large search area more than 4km off the coast, McDonald and his men knew the chances of a recovery were slim.

“We certainly gave it a try,” says McDonald. “We would go over for a five-day period, come back home for a few days and go back again. We were quite sure that, had we been in the right area, we would have found the big wheel (used to weigh him down), handcuffs and rope.”

Recovering human bodies, however, is not the sole object of underwater searches. Police divers may, at a moment’s notice, be called to recover murder weapons or robbery proceeds.

“Imagine a bust on a jewellery shop at the Port,” McDonald suggests. “Offenders are being pursued by police over the Birkenhead Bridge and fling a bag of jewellery out of the window; they might fling a firearm out as well.

“Part of the evidence once they’re caught is that gear, so we’ll get a call from the CIB and have to go and find it.”

Beyond guns and jewellery, divers have recovered knives, rocks, bricks, and even dumbbells - all used to rob and murder. In one extraordinary case, a diver found a dumped pistol which had been left cocked.

ut few understand that divers’ greatest dangers lie in the perilous conditions in which they have to operate. Doecke remembers searching an Adelaide Hills dam on Christmas Eve, 1993.

“It was full of urine and animal excrement from a dairy farm,” he says. “The water temperature would have been close to 30 degrees, (and) you’re diving in this yellow liquid with cow manure floating on it.

“At the end of the dive, my partner and I were covered in leaches. We sat for half an hour picking them off each other.”

And most of divers’ underwater recovery work is performed in “black water”. Inhospitable black-water locations - such as the River Murray - allow divers nothing but complete darkness in which to operate.

So how do they find human remains and evidentiary material? They must, with their bare fingers, sift through mud and silt as they crawl along river beds on their hands and knees - with no visibility.

After they descend into what Doecke calls “the blackest black”, divers are deprived of every sense except touch. Their bare hands become crucial instruments of search-and-recovery.

Doecke remembers a training exercise in which he sifted through broken glass and razor-sharp rock for five hours a day over a week. By that week’s end, his hands were so lacerated and swollen that he couldn’t even make a fist.

But divers are not dissuaded from returning to the water where, on their already-lacerated hands, they sustain further cuts. Doecke’s experience of cut-upon-cut has made him “stop and scream in pain”.

And the intense difficulty of searching cold, muddy waters with no visibility is, to some, not obvious. “You could have an area the equivalent of four football fields to search,” Doecke explains.

“People say: ‘Why haven’t you found it yet?’ But imagine searching an area like that on your hands and knees - looking for an object - blindfolded. You could pass by it six inches away and you’ve missed it.

“Searching for a body in the River Murray - where for three days you might be doing four dives per day in a high-flow environment - is extremely exhausting. It’s physically and mentally draining, because it’s like a solid workout: every second you’re there it’s hard work.

“I did a search recently for a weapon from a Hindley St shooting. It was dumped in the Port River, which is high-flow. So you’re swimming against that sort of current for an extended period.”

McDonald says the “non-respiratory environment” in which his divers must work is one of the most hazardous on earth. Breathing equipment failure or human error, he insists, leaves divers “no way out”.

“We’re using very high-pressure compressed gases,” he says, “and operating quite often in environments where somebody else has been killed as a result of that environment.

“(And) if you’re performing an underwater search, it’s your body that’s taking most of the pressure - be it the cold or fatigue.

“We teach the fellows to be very light-handed through the silt, because you will occasionally get cut fingers. Your fingers get so cold and numb that you can’t actually feel what you’re touching.

“Even things like roots and logs you can bang into and hit your head, and we now have the problem of algal blooms.”

Divers’ work takes them into the confronting worlds of subterranean caverns, sink holes, white water, flooded mine shafts, and even shark territory. McDonald and a colleague were themselves once trapped in a sink hole, in which only an air pocket saved their lives.

And one officer had to be retrieved from a dive last year when, on board a Water Operations Unit boat, a lookout spotted an approaching shark.

Even the responsibility of VIP protection on the water rests with police divers. Beneath VIP vessels - such as the royal yacht - divers search for explosives. Visiting dignitaries who travel by water are shadowed by the unit’s officers.

With the approaching Sydney Olympics, divers will search bridges over which the torch relay will pass ahead of the Games’ opening.

The job’s dangers are seemingly endless. But with a 98 per cent success rate in underwater searches, the unit recovers up to 20 bodies per year.

Failure, it seems, is never easily accepted by SA’s dedicated police divers. Some of them have spent as long as eight hours in water in one day.

“The fellows here,” McDonald reveals, “get very upset when they’ve worked for two or three days in lousy conditions and haven’t been able to find a thing, particularly if it’s a body.”

ith its state-of-the-art equipment and boats, the unit is well-geared to respond to open-sea rescue missions in frighteningly violent conditions. Its 16-metre flagship, the Investigator, is an all-weather, long-range patrol vessel worth $1million. It weighs 35 tonnes and accommodates the unit’s recompression chamber.

The unit’s other boats include the Protector - a moderate-weather vessel for search, rescue and general patrol - and the Pedro Warman, a moderate-weather search, rescue and diving vessel.

A five-metre inflatable boat is also used for flood rescue and shallow-water searches.

Dive supervisor, Senior Constable Brenton Allen, 31, knows the rescue drill well, which starts with a flare sighting or distress call, but no precise location. “There’s quite a bit of getting up in the middle of the night,” he says, “being recalled at 3:00 in the morning to do a 10-hour search which results in nothing.

“But we perform a complex and extended search of the area; it has to be done on the chance that it is a genuine report.”

McDonald flew by helicopter into the Great Australian Bight after a night of wild weather in 1997. He set out to rescue a father and son aboard their engine-failed yacht, which by then was far out to sea. McDonald could not be winched onto the yacht’s deck for fear of entanglement in one of its two masts.

The best alternative was to winch McDonald into the yacht’s life raft, which rescuers instructed the yachtsmen by radio to release. But as soon as they released the raft, its rope snapped.

“So there’s this bloody life raft drifting around upside down,” McDonald remembers. “It (the water) was about 500 feet deep with seven-metre seas. I had to get out in front of him, jump into the sea and then, as he came past, grab the side of the yacht and get on board.”

Assisted by a colleague, McDonald helped the yachtsmen sail back toward Victor Harbor.

Many rescue missions involve only the simple recovery of boats which have broken down or run out of fuel, and towage back to docks. But for those so stranded, these seemingly harmless circumstances pose the risks of hypothermia and heat exposure.

“Those jobs can be tricky,” says Allen, “due to the places people put themselves in, like shallow water close to rocks.

“Quite often they break down near the breakwater or harbour entrance. That puts them close to land, and in a difficult position for us to get them out.”

Twenty-two-year water police veteran, Senior Constable Rick Landreth, has participated in thousands of rescues. He insists that officers often need more than their skills alone. “A high percentage of luck goes with you to get out of it unscathed,” he says.

“It might be night time, so you can’t see exactly where you are, and your navigation equipment doesn’t often help you close to rocks. That’s part of the job: anyone who goes out to sea knows the risks involved.”

Landreth, 54, says a quarter of all rescue work is carried out amid the danger of close-to-shore environments.

To the divers’ disappointment, their work is falsely perceived by many outside the unit. Says Doecke of their commentary: “When it’s a sunny day and you come back from a dive in the ocean, everyone takes the piss out of you.

“They make the odd gibe: ‘What a great job you’ve got. How many crayfish did you catch?’ But you don’t see those people when you’re diving in the middle of winter in a freezing cold dam or a sewer pit.”

ollowing a recent Focus 21 review, the unit has won approval to increase its staff to 14. A soon-to-be-published Police Gazette advertisement will invite rank-and-file officers to apply for a four-day pre-selection workshop.

Those who pass the workshop progress to four weeks of diver training, followed by a four-week marine assessment phase.

“We want keen, working coppers,” says McDonald, “particularly patrol officers who have experience in the field. We want those who are prepared to work in uncomfortable conditions, like the cold sea.

“They’ve certainly got to be physically fit, and mentally conditioned as well.”

Female officers have never worked with the unit, nor the underwater recovery and water police sections which combined to form it in 1995. But McDonald hopes women will apply.

“We’re prepared for it here,” he says. “We want this to be an appealing position for everybody. I don’t want this to be a male-only domain.”

But Water Operations Unit positions are, no doubt, already appealing - to both genders. The unit is one of only six bodies in the nation with the capacity to train and accredit divers under the Australian Diving Accreditation Scheme. And with no record of major accidents, it is one of the most incident-free water police units in Australia.

Allen says that, although the job is not as glamorous as people think, and often thankless, he would not work anywhere else.

“Although a lot of our time’s spent in poor conditions with zero visibility,” he says, “we visit some of the most picturesque diving spots in the State. And it can often be quite an adventure. You don’t know from one day to the next where you might be.”

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