Buffalo divers provide perspective on first responders in Potomac

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — Dozens of divers continued to work the icy waters of the Potomac on Friday after recovering more than 40 of the 67 people who died Wednesday night when a Black Hawk helicopter collided with a commercial jet in Washington, D.C.

Those men and women are responsible for recovering bodies and giving families closure, preserving evidence for a critical investigation, and keeping themselves safe in a dangerous and always changing environment.

The Buffalo Underwater Recovery Team is intimately familiar with this work, often deployed in some of the most dangerous conditions in the country. We caught up with members of the Buffalo Underwater Recovery Team as they gathered Friday at Cazenovia Pool for routine bi-monthly training.

The day’s mission — ice rescue — corresponded with the season.

Lt. Peter Kocol, commander of the Buffalo Underwater Recovery Team, saw the fallout from Wednesday’s crash from a unique perspective after spending the last 20 of his 30 years in law enforcement with the URT through good days and bad.

“Like any recovery mission, and being on the team, it brings you back to that, whether it’s one of our own, a tragedy, or some other kind of recovery,” Kocol said. “It just automatically brings the awareness to what could happen and what we never want to happen.”

The Niagara River is far deeper and runs faster than the section of the Potomac where scattered pieces of two aircraft now rest as mangled, watery graves. But divers in Washington, D.C. are having to deal with low to zero visibility, rapidly changing currents, ice and freezing conditions, as well as working among hazardous materials that can cut through wet suits.

While Friday’s training was in the controlled Cazenovia Pool, the URT regularly trains in far more intense conditions like Lake Erie.

“The best way I can describe it is quite literally if you take our fingers and we put them to our mask, most of the time we can’t even see our fingers,” Kocol said.

Kocol was also in the water for days in October 2017 as the city’s URT worked to recover one of their own — Lt. Craig Lehner, who died during a training exercise in the Niagara River when his tether became entangled on a boulder on the riverbed.

“Now you have added things (in Washington, D.C.),” he said. “You have shards of metal in the water. You have hazardous materials, like the jet fuel and the oils that are leaking. And that whole dive site that they may have dived over a million times — maybe it’s one of their normal training spots — has just become a totally different dive.”

Water is unforgiving, meaning team members have to be prepared for failure even when they’re training for success.

“You see things that nobody thinks of, right? You’re recovering bodies. And we do that out of respect for the family. And families deserve closures,” Kocol said. “But you also have body parts, mangled bodies. Like potentially kids, teenagers.”

And that sticks with people, he said.

“It has to,” Kocol said. “We’re human, you know what I mean? People don’t think of it, but nobody wants to see that. We do it. We love it. We love what we do. We would never give it back. But, yeah, it absolutely affects you.”

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Dave Greber is an award-winning anchor and reporter who has been part of the News 4 team since 2015. See more of his work here.

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