ROV Used to Recover Lost Fisherman and Boat
The Emergency & Rescue Squad in Carter County, TN, USA, has located and retrieved the body of a fisherman who went missing after his boat apparently collided with an island on Watauga Lake just upstream of Fish Springs Marina. Using a Deep Ocean Engineering Triggerfish T4H remotely operated vehicle (ROV), the fisherman’s boat was found unmanned. The Carter County ERS located the body within the 16-mile-long lake and recovered it to the shore.
The Triggerfish T4H consists of 4 high-performance thrusters that provide 42 lbs of forward thrust and two “vertrans” thrusters that provide 24lbs of vertical and lateral thrust with a Deep Ocean Engineering camera on a 180° tilting mount. The horizontal thrust can be doubled with a “Power Pack” add-on of two more horizontal thrusters. In addition to the base vehicle configuration, there are options for the ROV to be equipped with a Tritech MicronNav USBL Tracking System, a Teledyne BlueView Dual Frequency Sonar, LED Lights from DeepSea Power & Light, a rear facing black and white DeepSea Power and Light Multi-SeaCam, a Deep Ocean Engineering single function manipulator/cutter, and a whole suite of other 3rd party sensors.
Carter County’s Triggerfish is typically stored on and deployed from a dedicated 32’ pontoon boat which draws 2 feet of water and comfortably supports 4 team members. Anthony Roberts, deputy director of CCERS is one of 3 ROV pilots of the 6 person ROV operations team, and often deploys when the ROV is called upon. Since the spring of 2011 Anthony reports that CCERS has logged 800+ hours of ROV/sonar training with a goal of deploying 3 times per month.
The 29-member team of Carter County Emergency & Rescue Squad (CCERS), headquartered in Elizabethtown, TN, specialise both in terrestrial and marine, rescue and recovery. To complement and enhance their marine search and recovery efforts, CCERS selected the Deep Ocean Engineering Triggerfish T4H outfitted with the Kongsberg MS1171 “minihead,” mechanical scanning sonar. After taking delivery, the squad used this vehicle to search for missing persons or objects of interest in many local lakes such as Lake Wautauga, Norris, South Holston, Boon and the Nolichucky River.
In addition to body search/recovery tasks which can coincide with murder investigations or like in this case, a recreational boating accident, the CCERS have found pickup trucks/cars, truck beds, a coke machine, safes, cash registers, boats, Christmas trees, bicycles, lawn furniture and even a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. In the bulldozer incident, it was stolen, run off a cliff and settled in 126 feet of water still chained to the trailer. CCERS team members located and recovered the air intake with the ROV.
