Emergency Corps is trained for water rescue & recovery

It's tempting to credit Billy Williford with saving the underwater search operation on the first full day of looking for clues on the downed plane in Toledo Bend, but that would be slighting the other Jasper County Emergency Corps volunteers who each bring different talents to the job.

Each JCEC boat carried an underwater camera, but one camera is a heavy-duty professional model with powerful lights that was acquired during the search for shuttle pieces. The other camera is a $99 special with an underwater flashlight duct-taped to it.

The cameras were both checked before the JCEC boats left shore, but bouncing across choppy water did something to the monitor of the big camera. Williford, president of the JCEC, owns an air-conditioning business and quickly went to work on the unit. He isolated that the problem was a transistor, but by then the boats were at the crash site, about a mile from shore, 11 miles from the nearest parts store.

Fortunately, game wardens had just delivered barbecue sandwiches wrapped in foil. Wiping off the sauce, Williford rolled a small piece of foil into a make-do part, and the search continued for the next four hours without a hitch.

Joe Wells compared the camera search to trying to watch a baseball game through a straw. You get a clear image if you hang the camera a few inches off the mucky bottom, but you can only see about a foot in diameter. Raise the camera and you expand the field of view, but the green-brown water obscures the light.

In hours of crisscrossing the site, the searchers found it littered thickly with small pieces of plastic, twisted metal and wire, but very few pieces more than a few inches long.

Searchers had many hours to speculate on the crash. Some knew that the Cirrus SR22 has extra safety features like a parachute that is supposed to gently set the plane down in an emergency.

The parachute was one item searchers were asked to look for, but the debris field was bigger than anyone expected and in water 25 to 40-feet deep and full of trees and stumps.

The pilot was Daniel McIntire, 54, of Humble and passengers George McFadden, 67, of New York and Heather Hardin, 34, of Louisiana.

JCEC formed for

water rescue

The Jasper County Emergency Corps was organized in 1972 by Aubrey Cole. They are often the first ones called in any water emergency. Although the boats say "sheriff," members of the Corps are volunteers from all walks of life. Some are scuba divers, and a few like Williford have undergone highly specialized dive training with law enforcement officers in Galveston.

There, they learned to dive in muck where you can't see an inch, how to recover evidence, and how to extricate yourself without panicking if you find yourself trapped under an obstacle.

But JCEC does more than just water rescue and recovery. They also assist with community events and with searches for lost children and hunters.

In the case of a hostage situation or an escaped prisoner, they might set up the command post, provide lights and a generator, and help secure the perimeter.

You might expect that, the JCEC would be supported in full by county and municipal budgets, but in fact they receive only nominal amounts. The rest comes from fundraisers, tips from grateful boaters who have been towed, and donations from fishing tournaments for whom they provide safety support.

Debbie Littlefield says she applies for all the grants she can, but grants are based on the number of call outs. Last year, the good news on the lake was fewer call outs, but that means fewer grants that the Corps can qualify for.

Grants have purchased some top-notch equipment like underwater communications, but there are some simple and relatively inexpensive things that would have been a big help on the lake last week. Neither of the cameras has any kind of video capture or recording device. Countless times the FAA inspector thought he saw something of interest.

"Hold on, wait, go back," he would say, but a pontoon boat anchored and drifting in wind and current doesn't stop.

Once they thought they saw a tire, another time maybe the engine cowling, but there was no "play it back" and look again.

Most equipment the JCEC has was donated by various organizations, is military surplus, or was seized by law enforcement in drug raids.

JCEC never has enough volunteers. Even though thirty or more may attend meetings on the third Tuesday at 7 p.m., you never know how many volunteers you will be able to reach.

One thing that keeps people in the Corps going is the community support you find in East Texas, according to Williford. Customers and employers understand when you are trying to recover an accident victim; they would want you to do it for their family, so they are willing to put their needs on hold.