Fifty Years of Community Service!
We are essentially an underwater recovery agency which assists other public safety teams in our community and throughout New Jersey and the surrounding states. Our primary mission is recovering the bodies of those who have drowned; however we also participate in water-rescues, public safety stand-bys and underwater recovery operations in or around all types of water. Occasionally we even do semi-commercial jobs such as water-treatment plant repair work and bridge piling inspections. We also teach basic and advanced water safety with emphasis on the skills necessary to operate in a swift-water environment. These skills include: SCUBA diving in many different environments; topside support of diving operations; underwater salvage, handling rescue/recovery boats; ice rescue, and operating in floods and other swift-water environments.
We are, however, a little bit different from most other public safety agencies. In the first place, we have no other function or mission except that of responding to water-related incidents wherever our help has been requested. We don’t fight fires, we don’t extricate people from auto accidents or rescue them from collapsed trenches. We do take our boats, dive gear and marine equipment just about anywhere in NJ or the surrounding states where an accident or tragedy has occurred in or around a body of water, as long as the agency needing assistance has requested our help through official channels. We also do safety stand-bys at events such as the “Around the Island Swim” – a 23-mile open-ocean race that takes place each August in Atlantic City, NJ.
In addition, unlike most fire departments or rescue squads, we are entirely self-supported and receive no financial assistance from any municipal, state or federal agency. This means that we must do our own fundraising by such means as coin-tosses, a yearly fund-drive letter campaign, grant applications and book sales.
Our meetings are held each Thursday evening at the building from 19:30 until about 21:00. The first Thursday of each month is devoted to our business meeting, and the others are spent in training drills, either at the building or on a local body of water. Occasionally, the drill is a building clean-up where we make sure that all of our equipment is running and ready for action at a moment’s notice.
