Liability concerns keep park officials from hiring outsiders

Steve Schafer has a garage full of state-of-the-art scuba gear and enough technical training to serve as a diving instructor for diving instructors. He also holds a federal permit to salvage sunken boats from the bottom of Lake Mead.

So when he heard in June that authorities were searching for an airman from Creech Air Force Base who drowned in the lake, the longtime valley resident offered his equipment and his help free of charge.

What happened next left Schafer angry. It also caused him to question whether the National Park Service is doing everything it can to recover bodies from the waters of the nation's largest reservoir.

Two days after Antonio Tucker, 28, drowned while trying to swim back to a boat on a windy June 23 afternoon, Schafer called the park service and offered to join the search for the airman's body.

It took almost a week for an answer to come: Two different park officials told him that no additional help was needed.

About a month later, Schafer said he was contacted by the relative of a 2004 drowning victim whose body was never recovered from Lake Mead. He told the woman he was willing to conduct a search free of charge, but first he would need information from the park service about the incident. He also needed permission to search the lake using restricted sonar gear and remote-controlled submarines.

Schafer said he sent a request to several park officials. This time he got no response at all.

"Other national parks welcome outside help, but not Lake Mead for some reason," he said. "I sure as hell want the public to know that's their stance."

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Park service officials insist they are more than capable of conducting their own rescues and recoveries.

Since 2000, almost 100 million people have visited Lake Mead National Recreation Area and 112 have drowned there. All but five of those bodies have been recovered, said Christie Vanover, spokeswoman for the park service at lakes Mead and Mohave.

The only drowning victim unaccounted for since 2010 is Tucker.

The park has its own dive team and regularly receives assistance during searches from the Air Force, Coast Guard, Nevada Department of Wildlife, Arizona Game and Fish Department, and local law enforcement agencies including Las Vegas police.

"I'd say that we're doing everything that we can," Vanover said.

Inviting in private, outside parties raises concerns about safety and liability. Vanover said it's one thing to ask a volunteer to cruise around on a boat or walk a stretch of shoreline. It's another to let a good Samaritan do something inherently dangerous like a technical dive.

"We're not willing to risk their lives for something we've already deemed too dangerous for our own people," she said.

The liability issue is no joke, according to Alan O'Neill, who served as superintendent of Lake Mead National Recreation Area from 1987 to 2000.

"At any one time, we'd have $50 million outstanding tort claims," he said.

Many of the lawsuits had no merit, but the service still had to defend itself in court and be ready to pay if it lost, O'Neill said. "The government's got deep pockets - that's what people think."

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Schafer isn't the only volunteer with complaints about being turned away at Lake Mead.

Craig Thorngren owns Submerged Recovery and Inspection Services in Arlington, Wash. He said he has helped recover the bodies of about a dozen drowning victims in the past decade, including four since last year.

"We never charge for looking for missing people," he said. "I just feel for these families who have lost someone."

In the summer of 2009, Thorngren traveled to Lake Mead to demonstrate some remote-controlled subs for park rangers and members of the Las Vegas police search and rescue team. When one of the rangers mentioned that several bodies had never been recovered from the reservoir, Thorngren offered to come back the next morning and spend the day looking for them as a real-world test of his equipment.

The ranger enthusiastically agreed, but no one was there to meet Thorngren when he showed up at the dock the next day. He said he found out later that an administrator for the recreation area would not approve the search.

"The gist of it was we had the gear, the expertise and the technology to do this, and they didn't want us to," Thorngren said.

Gene Ralston called it "a Lake Mead issue."

Ralston recovered his first drowning victim from the flooded Boise River in Idaho in 1983. Since then, he and his wife, Sandy, have located the remains of 81 people across North America and participated in the high-profile searches for Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway.

He said no one ever required him to get a permit.

Ralston thinks Lake Mead takes a completely different approach to recovery operations than do other parks, including Lake Powell, upstream on the Colorado River. At Powell, Ralston said, "they'll put divers in the water" and spend months looking for a body. At Mead, he said, "if they can't find them floating on the surface in a day or two, they give up."

Ralston helped recover four bodies from Lake Mead in 2002, including one that was pulled from the water during a search for someone else. For some reason, he said, the park stopped calling him several years ago. Other agencies - even other places managed by the National Park Service - are quick to ask for the Ralstons' help, but not Lake Mead.

"We've gotten frustrated with them as well," Ralston said. "I really don't know what their problem is to be honest with you."

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Ray Waber bristles at the suggestion that the park service isn't doing all it can to recover drowning victims at Lake Mead. That certainly wasn't the case during his 29-year career as a ranger, dive officer and head of the detective bureau.

He said he never kept count himself, but he was once told he had participated in more than 300 rescue and recovery efforts at Lake Mead. In a few cases, Waber said, he and his team dove to depths that made even him uncomfortable to retrieve a body.

"That was our job," he said. "We didn't recruit the public to come help us on search and rescue. That would be like driving up on a homicide scene and saying to Metro, 'Can I help you with the investigation?'

"You don't start inviting people you don't know into a situation that can be dangerous."

Vanover said that once a rescue becomes a recovery effort, park officials must consider the safety of their personnel and, to a lesser extent, the cost of a protracted search.

The unfortunate reality is the park service does not have the money and resources to look for a body forever, she said.

"We don't want to leave any family without closure," Vanover said. "But we are funded by the taxpayers, and we do the best we can to use the American people's tax money wisely."

She acknowledged a communication breakdown in Schafer's case, but she noted that it happened during one of the busiest times of the year at Lake Mead.

She added that the rules governing the kind of help Schafer offered are spelled out in both federal regulations and the recreation area's own standing policies: Manned or unmanned submarines, certain kinds of sonar gear and even metal detectors are prohibited without permission from the park superintendent.

Vanover said such equipment is restricted because the very things that make it so useful for finding bodies - its ability to see underwater and peer through the dark - can also help someone locate, damage or steal historical and archaeological resources the park service is mandated to protect.

If Schafer or anyone else wants to conduct a search on behalf of a family, they are required to get a special-use permit that generally takes the park about 45 days issue, though the application process can be expedited in some cases.

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Schafer is not convinced. What's really standing in the way, he said, are bruised egos and red tape. Why else would other parks welcome assistance and require no permit while officials at Lake Mead reject free help from people he insists have more training and better equipment than they have?

Schafer took up scuba in 1988 and started diving at Lake Mead 20 years ago. He has the skills and equipment to descend to any depth in the reservoir, and he is certified to train other divers to become instructors on a variety of underwater breathing systems.

He even volunteered with Metro search and rescue's dive team for about a year in the early 2000s, and some current members of the team trained under him.

For fun, he likes to push the boundaries of claustrophobia and common sense by exploring submerged caves in deep water.

His personal record for depth in Lake Mead is 460 feet, which allowed him just 20 minutes of "bottom time" followed by a slow, controlled ascent that took almost five hours.

In 2011, Schafer received what is called a Commercial Use Authorization from the park service to start a marine salvage business at the lake. He also got a remote-controlled submarine that can search an area the size of a football field in as little as an hour or two, "even in zero visibility," he said.

It's a roughly $120,000 rig similar to what the military and the Coast Guard uses, Schafer said. "It's not a trip to Toys R Us and pick one up sort of thing. You're able to search for a victim without having to risk putting divers in the water."

That is, if the park service will grant him permission to deploy his sub at Lake Mead.

Schafer said he already has all the insurance coverage he needs to search for bodies. If the park service wants him to sign some kind of liability waiver on top of that, he's happy to do it.

He has hired a lawyer and plans to keep pressing the issue.

At the moment, he is awaiting a response to a public record request his lawyer filed with the park service seeking full reports on all drowning incidents at Lake Mead since 2000. The request could wind up costing him several hundred dollars, but he said he "can't stop now."

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The search for Airman Antonio Tucker involved as many as 50 people from several different federal, state and local agencies, Vanover said.

"We had professionals out there. We had the help we needed."

The six-day effort was hampered early on by high winds and two-foot waves. Ultimately, though, searchers in boats and in the air covered almost 15 square miles at the surface while a pair of unmanned subs searched two square miles at the bottom of the lake, Vanover said.

All they found was an empty life preserver.

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.