The Ventura Fire Department recently upgraded their underwater sonar equipment to make their job easier and faster. The department has been using upgraded technology since 2021, creating a high demand for their underwater rescue services. The newly purchased, latest model Humminbird sonar helps them stay ahead of the curve and helps the rescue divers they work with spend less time in harm’s way.
Ever since the Department’s first victory in locating Iowa State University students that had drowned in Little Wall Lake in Story County in 2021, the Ventura Fire Dept. have been deployed a number of times all around the state of Iowa.
“The Sheriff’s office and Iowa DNR know that we have this asset and a team of people who know how to deploy it,” said Ventura firefighter Jim Sholly.
The Department had already upgraded their equipment in 2021 to a, “generationally better sonar system than what we used to have,” said Sholly, who explained that after a 2020 deployment, when they couldn’t find the person they were looking for, they decided they needed to be better. “Our group, we don’t take defeat lightly. This technology upgrade was born out of the idea that better tools exist to do this and nobody had those.”
In 2023 the Ventura Fire Department decided another technology upgrade was in order. If a small sonar screen could rapidly identify an “anomaly of interest” in a very large lake, with no other GPS coordinates to guide them, imagine what a larger screen could do.
“We wrote another series of grants and the Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa has been very generous with our department…We were successful in getting a grant that allowed us to purchase the larger Humminbird screen.” The larger screen allows them to locate the target they are looking for more quickly.
When the ice went out on Clear Lake Sholly said they were asked to assist with a search of a vehicle reported in the lake. “We went out with [the new Humminbird] and we located the vehicle that thankfully turned out to be one that had been down there for a while, with nobody in it,” Sholly said. “But that was a very rewarding call because we had divers [from the North Iowa Dive Team] operating out of our boat. We had wireless radio communication with them as they were underwater and they had no visibility.”
With the fire department’s larger sonar screen and radio communication they were able to accurately see and guide the divers along the lake bottom to the car, and then around it to check for anomalies.
Sholly said the Ventura Fire Department is starting to train more regularly with the North Iowa Dive Team and a couple of their firefighters have officially joined their team to provide the recovery sonar service, because it lowers the risk for the divers. He said, “For every minute that divers are underwater, there’s a risk of accidents and injuries. This kind of technology means they spend less time in harm’s way.”
“The next big evolution for us is that we want to be able to help by teaching the experiences we’ve learned and help other departments,” said firefighter Lt. Matt Schroeder. “We don’t mind being called, but let’s educate and let’s train.”
Schroeder said they are also working to improve communication – taking the information they learn on the boat and getting it back to the incident commander more quickly. “And then we’re going to be looking at investing in some software that’s almost like Google Earth, that can take this data and map the whole bottom of a structure. We’re working with community partners again to try to secure that,” he said.
