Posted: Fri, 26 Jun 2015 11:10 AM - 16,864 Readers

By: Amanda Brandeis

For Travis County sheriff’s deputies, a search on land — compared to a search under water — is like day and night. A special team, the Travis County Sheriff’s Office Underwater Recovery Team, is tasked with the difficult job of missions under water.

“What he’s looking for now is basically the size of a small pistol,” said Dive Control Officer Darrell Gibson, as one of his divers searched through the murky waters. “If we get him trained on this, then we know he’s going to be able to find what we’re looking for in a real scenario.”

The team trains four times a year for the various scenarios they may encounter. From recovering bodies due to accidental incidents, to crime investigations, they must skillfully learn to navigate the dangerous waters of Lake Travis.

“It’s hard to get people on the team,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Michael Stroh, who helped start it back in 1998. “We don’t really have a waiting list of people who want to come on team.”

Deputies say Lake Travis is the deadliest lake in the state, an unfortunate reality for decades. Divers on the 10-member team must be able to recover bodies 100 feet deep with little — to no — visibility.

“It takes somebody who has the mental and spiritual composition to be able to recover a drowning victim,” said Gibson. “Doing it for 16 years now, that’s an awful lot of people to have to pull off the bottom of the lake.”

Gibson says it is critical to know the last point a person was seen.

“The only reason we were successful in this last dive with Sarah Pool was because we were able to locate here with sonar through Parks and Wildlife — found her on the sonar image and did the dive,” said Gibson. “That’s the first person we’ve ever been able to locate using sonar and doing a dive to recover them. Sonar isn’t really effective in Lake Travis.”

That’s because it picks up a lot of other things on the lake floor, like debris.

With higher lake levels, more swimmers and boaters are anticipated on Lake Travis this summer. Unfortunately, the recovery team says the risk of more accidents also increases.

“It’s sad to say; some of the folks we’ve had to recover could have had their life saved with a 99-cent noodle from H-E-B,” Gibson added.

It’s money well-spent to protect something you can’t put a price on.

*  Story Contributed by: Amanda Brandeis