CENTER TWP — Adrenaline chasers. Underwater adventurers. Extreme rescuers.

These are the members of the Unionville Volunteer Fire Department dive team — a breed apart from typical first responders.

Their ranks are low because few possess the required skills. Even fewer accept the challenges and dangers of water rescue and recovery. There is no monetary payout for these volunteers.

But the occasional pat on the back or a thank you is reward enough.

Nathan Brown assumed the calling five years ago.

“It seemed exciting,” he said. “I like the adventure part of it.”

Matt Wagner, a dive team member for eight years, saw it as a chance to test his physical and mental limits.

“You have to be fit to do it and you have to be somewhat level-headed,” he said. “You can’t panic easy. You have to control your imagination and thoughts sometimes.”

The dive team is the only such unit in Butler County.Its formation came in 1969, the year that Lake Arthur in nearby Moraine State Park was created. The man-made 3,225-acre lake begged for a trained rescue force that could respond to the inevitable emergencies that awaited.Unionville divers, in the more than 35 years since their founding, have answered countless calls to the seemingly calm water of Lake Arthur as well as the unpredictable water of Slippery Rock Creek at McConnells Mill State Park in Lawrence County, just across their home county line.But smaller ponds, streams and abandoned mines and stone quarries in and out of the county are also fair game, not to mention flooded roads that can turn thoroughfares into torrents of sorts.“Whatever is needed and whenever, that’s why we’re here,” said Mark Lauer, a kind of player-coach of the dive team.Lauer, chief of the fire department and head of the dive team, and the 11 other divers all don fire suits as volunteer firefighters as well as scuba suits.They provide invaluable assistance to other police and fire departments in Western Pennsylvania with water rescue, search and recovery operations.More times than not, they are sent on recovery missions; and too often for them, they seek and find bodies of drowning victims.Slippery Rock Creek, with its swift currents, can prove particularly perilous for novice swimmers and boaters. The creek claims two or so unsuspecting victims each year, according to state police and local fire departments.

“Most people get into trouble because of stupidity,” Lauer said. “A lot of them have been drinking and slip and fall.”But inexperience was to blame for the most recent recovery call to the creek.A 16-year-old boy at the George Junior Republic juvenile detention center in Pine Township, Mercer County, drowned last June during an outing at a popular swimming hole at McConnells Mill.Unionville divers found his body, about three-quarters of a mile south of the Kennedy Mills Bridge, following a two-day search. The boy reportedly did not know how to swim but fell victim to peer pressure and went into the water anyway.About 10 months earlier, almost in the same spot, Unionville divers recovered the body of another drowning victim — a 22-year-old Washington County man unfamiliar with the creek.“We know as divers how dangerous that water is,” Wagner said. “There’s so much undercurrent there that it’s like diving into a washing machine.”Large rocks hidden just below the surface pose other obstacles for swimmers and divers alike.Lake Arthur presents a much different problem for divers. The serene waters on the surface belie what waits on the bottom.Visibility, in the murky depths, is barely negligible; at times, no farther than 6 inches.The lake’s bottom is caked with up to 4 feet of muck and mud, making navigating movements a chore and a half.“It’s poor, poor visibility,” Brown said. “You have to feel your way down there and rely on your instincts when you’re doing a search.”“It’s like you’re looking through pea soup,” Wagner added.

It is not uncommon that a police department makes a call to the dive team, seeking retrieval of evidence of a crime some fleeing suspect has tossed into the depths of Lake Arthur or in much shallower Connoquenessing Creek.Unionville divers in such police-sanctioned operations as well as underwater training exercises have turned up all sorts of items. You name it, they’ve found it — safes, jewelry, computers, cars and motorcycles.Yes, even an entire garbage truck.Wagner recalled one training session not too long ago in Lake Arthur, under the Route 528 bridge, in which divers found three rifles — all still in their cases. The guns, as it turned out, had been stolen from the owner’s home and ditched.

There’s always risk for these divers.Two dive team comrades, Anthony Murdick and Scott Wilson, both 25, died in the line of duty in 2001.Murdick, an assistant chief, and Wilson, a firefighter paramedic, drowned in Slippery Rock Creek during an effort to recover the body of a drowned kayaker.The deaths of their fellow team members and friends prompted grief and immediate introspection.“I thought afterward about getting out,” Wagner admitted. “But everyone stuck to it. The feeling was that very few people could do this stuff and this was kind of our mission.”Lauer, himself, in 1993 — just three days before Christmas — had a brush with death in the same creek that eight years later would claim Murdick and Wilson.Clad in scuba gear, Lauer and other divers rappelled down the side of a canyon before entering the fast-moving water. They had been called to recover a drowning victim whose body was hung up on a log.Lauer had tied himself off to maintain position in the water as he reached the victim’s body.“I got caught up in the swift current,” Lauer recalled. “My line went taut and I went under a rock and was getting the (expletive) beat out of me.”He was unable to get his knife to cut the rope.Lauer made it to the surface but became submerged a second time. He eventually managed to untie the rope knot and pulled himself from the water.“That experience gave me pause about quitting,” he said. “It also taught me that I’ll never tie myself off in swift water again.”

Diving is not for the meek of heart. And it’s not for the untrained, either.Unionville divers are required to receive advanced open water certification — a level of dive mastery that comes after numerous hours of intense course training.The certification, in conjunction with the international Professional Association of Diving Instructors, allows for search and recovery dives in 100 feet of water.It requires extensive training in underwater rescue techniques and endurance. That endurance, Brown said, is one of the most important factors in a successful dive.“You have to be fit to be a diver,” he said. “That’s as important as all the training.“It’s a younger man’s job,” Lauer conceded.Divers must not only have to be agile under water, but they have to be agile while wearing more than 50 pounds of equipment.The typical dive requires a wet suit, personal flotation device, breathing tank and mask, hood, gloves, flippers, ropes, knife and sometimes a helmet. Weight belts are also worn to counteract buoyancy.

Key to the divers is their support crew, which accompanies them to every call. These crew members are non-diving firefighters that help carry the gear to the water, and are available for other duties such as first-aid and as emergency medical technicians and paramedics.The costs to equip the dive team are steep. It takes about $3,000 to gear up each diver. And there’s the matter of maintaining the equipment.The dive team uses its own truck that carries tanks, lighting, additional ropes and other equipment. The Unionville VFD also houses its own facility that produces, monitors and tests air for its tanks.The department is looking toward a possible federal grant to replace its 16-foot aluminum boat for a new and lighter 17-foot rubber-type craft.And items on the dive team’s longer-term “wish list” include an underwater camera that would aid in searches while reducing the risk for divers, and an underwater communication system.But the fire department’s annual $160,000 budget typically allots only $3,000 for the dive team.The department relies heavily on fund-raising efforts as well as a 1.5 mill fire protection tax in the township’s budget, and also scopes out state and federal grants to assist the dive team.Lauer noted the Butler County Commissioners last year gave a $2,500 donation to the dive team, recognizing the divers serve the entire county, not just Center Township.Township supervisors, meanwhile, pick up the tab for the department’s liability insurance, which is made steeper due to the dive team.

The expense of maintaining the dive team is high, but necessary, Lauer said. It can mean the difference between life and death.The team in December 2000 reeled in an ice fisherman who sunk in Lake Arthur. The man had barely managed to stay afloat for about two hours while holding onto a 5-gallon bucket.His chances of survival were quickly diminishing when divers, using sledgehammers to bust through the ice, got a boat far enough into the water to pluck the man to safety.Divers were particularly gratified with the job they did during the September flooding throughout the county.“We saved the lives of 40 people from Connoquenessing to Zelienople,” Lauer said, noting the divers put their own lives at risk to help others trapped in their homes by rising and swift-moving waters.“The water got so high on some roads that we had to duck going under electrical lines in our boat,” he said.Diver team member Rick Black recalled other dangers during the flooding.“The worst thing about that was the darkness,” he said. “You could hear trees breaking but you didn’t know where they were coming from.”Divers remembered rescuing an elderly couple in Forward Township who were found trapped in their home chest deep in fast-rising water.During the rescue effort, divers ended up saving fellow rescuers when a boat carrying three Emlenton firefighters and an evacuee flipped in the water in Forward Township.“That was the worst flooding we’ve seen, and it was fantastic that we were able to save so many people,” Lauer said.The exhausted divers had spent 12 straight hours in their wet suits.But they welcome the chance at rescue over recovery when it comes to human life.Still, Lauer sees reward even in recoveries of drowning victims.“We help bring closure to people,” he said, “though it’s not a pretty scene, what we’re doing.”Like late last year, when divers on Dec. 28 found the body of an Ohio woman who died when her vehicle fell through thinly ice-covered Lake Arthur after apparently becoming lost and unaware that she was driving on ice.Unionville divers for two days braved the frigid water, 12 feet deep, before reaching the woman’s submerged car and pulling her body to shore. A week later they were back in scuba suits to help retrieve the car.Wives and girlfriends of the divers, meanwhile, know the risks of the job. They are supportive and often anxious; but usually silent.“They know not to say anything about what we do,” Wagner said. “They know we just enjoy what we’re doing.”“They tell us, ‘Just be safe,’ Lauer added. “And that’s what we always try to do.”And while Lauer acknowledged that many people take the dive team for granted, divers always remember the occasional acts of appreciation.“Sometimes after a call we get a cup of coffee and a thank you,” he said. “That goes a long way.”