After the break Jim Murphy spoke about "Twenty Years of Emergency Services Diving." He said he was a member of the Toronto Police underwater recovery team. He had worked for Dr. George Harpur for a few years as well.

Jim Murphy and Dr. Harpur speaking to Dave Eaton.

The Toronto URT is part of the Marine Unit and consists of a 10 man team and a Sergeant who is in charge and serves as a buffer to administration. The dive team supports the Marine Unit and the Marine Unit supports the whole Toronto Police Service. The team often works with homicide or intelligence. The team also works with other police services such as Durham. The team has a decent budget to keep the team well equipped and thus they are able to provide diverse service to others. Diving is done in the harbour, rivers, sewers, treatment plants, the Trent Severn, Lake Scugog and many other bodies of water. An important point to emphasize is that our diving is not rescue diving. We recovery things like evidence, knives, guns, bodies, cars, just about anything you can think of. But we do not do rescue diving even though many underwater search and recovery team members do call themselves rescue divers. There are many other police dive teams but we are one of the only full time dive teams. Others work part time and that offers a lot of disadvantages which we do not have. Since diving can be in any water location, difficulties are universal. We are governed by the Ontario Health and Safety Regulations for diving which are very strict and present a difficulty because of the requirement of very expensive equipment to dive safely. Police diving has been going on for 30 years and started as a voluntary activity. Initially, recreational SCUBA was used and a lot of early work was improvised. Now we have advanced to much more commercially based operations. Major equipment changes started to be made in the early 80's with dry suit use and using AGA masks. Before that skin rashes and ear infections used to be the norm. Budgeting for and acquiring new modern equipment has been and continues to be a major effort.

Jim showed a short videotape of the crash of the British Nimrod at the Air Show a few years ago and then about the difficulties encountered by the police divers who were first on the scene. There was lots of debris on the surface but even more on the bottom where visibility was very poor. Much of the debris on the bottom was hazardous to the divers. Many dives were made to recover bodies and recorders before the Canadian Navy clearance divers arrived and then the Royal Navy divers. The police team originally used SCUBA but quickly saw the advantages to surface supplied diving with a hard helmet like the Superlite. We all went to Seneca College and trained in surface supplied diving using the Superlite helmet and dry suits and even went to Wiarton to take the Seneca deep diving training where the team dove to 165 feet on air. We have also trained with the Navy, other police services, several US groups and the Royal Navy.

Most dives are done in the harbour and there is a lot of pollution, garbage, dead animals and sewage overflow. Most diving is shallow but sometimes we dive deep. We also do sledding where the diver is towed behind a small boat to look for large objects. We use two divers together on one sled. We recover a lot of property including a lot of cars.

Public service diving has evolved a lot in the past 20 years but still has ways to go. Some teams are not well equipped and do not have budgets to advance to safe commercial equipment and practices.