I know it’s been a while since I’ve made an update. I’ve been busy! Last week I had to set up four new employees with computer equipment and when Saturday rolled around things got really hectic!
I got a call bright and early on Saturday and was asked if I could head to Monroe County which is about 2 and a half hours away to run sonar to help find a drowning victim. A page went out to rustle up a full sonar crew and we headed out. We get to the scene and find out a 15 year old had been swimming in the Buttahatchie river with two friends, struggled with the current and was last seen about 50 yards from the bridge they were swimming near.
We made several passes with the sonar and had to stop the search due to a torrential downpour. During this time I reviewed all of the sonar images and found what looked to be a person laying on their side up against debris underwater. Nothing else we scanned resembled anything like a body. There are several factors about running sonar in a river that makes getting a result very difficult. For one, rivers are FULL of debris. The more debris there is, the more likely the debris is in the line of sight of the sonar. Also, since interpreting sonar images takes some creativity in picking out patterns it is also easy to look at a log with branches and interpret it as a body. The last factor with running sonar in a river is the dead area under the towfish. The towfish is a torpedo-like sensor that is pulled under water. Since the sonar can’t see directly below it, there is a good possibility that you could run right over the top of something and never see it. In open water you can direct the boat in a pattern to cover the entire floor, but you cannot do this in a narrow river.
The search continued and divers weren’t allowed to enter the area of the sonar hit due to the high current. A couple of days later when the flood waters receeded, divers were able to reach the potential hit and found out it was a 6 foot long piece of carpet rolled up and was up against a submerged tree.
After hearing this news I wanted to make another sonar run to hopefully locate the victim. We had a boat operator that knew the river very well and were able to position the boat and the towfish so we could see areas we weren’t able to see before. After about an hour on the river we came back to review the images. A few interesting items were marked so we left the authorites on scene the location of these items and came back home.
None of the interesting items turned out to be the victim, but the use of sonar was able to image the river floor and rule out the areas of interest they had from looking at the river from above.
Sonar isn’t perfect, but it is one great advantage that not a lot of teams have and we’re grateful for it. We have located submerged vehicles, drowning victims and other submerged items that would have taken much, much longer for divers alone to find.
They recovered the drowning victim early this morning. The family can now have the closure they need.
I have some tricks up my sleeve to try and make the sonar imaging work better in the narrow channels of a river. I’ll be exploring them in the upcoming months.
This weekend? I’ll be camping at Arkabutla Lake and patrolling the lake with my SAR unit.
I loved the way it looked. When I got home, I plugged the TV in hoping to see an image on the screen but was instead met with a blank screen but fantastic sounding audio. I was slightly disappointed, but what do you expect for a as-is, where-is sale? I shuffled it into a spare room where it sat for all that time. As you can see from the picture to the right, it was a TV, but also a TV stand in itself! That’s no way for a classic RCA to live…
I started out by removing the guts of the TV. As you can see in the picture to the left, it had a lot of guts! Heavy, too.
d where to make the cuts so the LCD panel would fit. I had hoped to leave a few of the original tube support mounts to use to secure the LCD, but due to it’s width they had to go.
