When a pile of belongings, together with a journal, turned up at the eastern end of Zuma Beach near Lifeguard Tower 2 on Thursday morning, March 3, indicating a possible missing person, rescuers from across the area convened on Zuma. Based on the “depressed” nature of material in the journal, rescuers had to assume the possibility the person may have entered the water with the intent of self harm.
The missing person, an unidentified female, was later recovered at a hospital in Santa Monica, but the search went on for hours and, at its peak, employed the work of about 20 personnel from Los Angeles County Lifeguards, the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, the United States Coast Guard and Los Angeles County Fire.
The search and rescue mission gave some insight into what happens when the call comes in and an ocean rescue mission is launched.
“Basically, the deputies responded to a call around 6:30 this morning,” Sgt. James Braden with the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station told The Malibu Times Thursday morning. “Someone had located someone’s property out on the beach.”
That property included what appeared to be a journal, Braden described.
“[The property] looked kind of suspicious, possibly some journal … it seems maybe the person was depressed or something,” Braden said. The parents of the possible missing person were contacted.
“They were able to contact the parents, and the [possible missing] person had mental issues in the past, so they’re continuing to search at this time,” Braden said.
Information from the Coast Guard said that by 8:30, they had sent an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew from Los Angeles and a 45-foot Response Boat-Medium boatcrew from the Channel Islands station.
“There has been no witness to any persons entering the water in that area,” the release read.
Ocean Lifeguard Captain, rescue diver and Divemaster Kenichi Haskett, who was on hand for the Thursday mission, described the significance of having a witness for a missing person.
“If it’s witnessed by a lifeguard, that’s what we call a confirmed drowning or a confirmed missing person,” Haskett said. “Usually, if it’s in the water, it’s a confirmed drowning by a reliable witness.” He added that adults and older children can also be reliable witnesses, but none was on hand Thursday, so they began to comb the shore.
“That Thursday, it was more of an unconfirmed missing person — they wanted to rule out the water part of it. We’ll have divers, rescue divers and snorkelers search the area,” Haskett said.
While L.A. County Fire and Coast Guard helicopters conducted aerial searches, divers combed the waters off Zuma looking for signs of the missing person.
“What we did on Thursday morning was, we did a line search,” Haskett described. “If you can imagine a human chain, a line of people that line up shoulder to shoulder and they go parallel to shore and literally sweep the shore, from where you can touch from basically knee deep to about six feet, overhead or high.”
The current was moving east that morning at about two knots, Haskett recalled, which was “a little slower than you and I would walk maybe if we were walking on the beach, but if you’re swimming against it, it creates a bit of a workout.”
Later in the day, Sheriff’s deputies were sent out to search on land.
“They’re searching all the west end of Malibu for the person, throughout the different shopping centers, the beach area, all that,” Braden confirmed Thursday just after noon.
Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s dive team and Lifeguards went on another dive, this time using a tow-bar. The bar, which runs 12- to 16-feet in length, is dragged behind a boat and helps four to six divers comb the water efficiently.
“They can search a vast area and do grid searches in the area. And they don’t have to fight that current,” Haskell said.
In terms of coordination, Haskett mentioned the ICS, or Incident Command System, that helps all the agencies run smoothly together. It’s a way to unify command.
“We work together. We have divers throughout that whole day — we aren’t diving all at once, but we’ll have divers go, four or six at a time,” Haskett said. “We’ll all dive together, searching the same area. We’ll work under unified command as part of ICS to help find that person as soon as possible.”
In Thursday’s case, that happened after 1 p.m., when the missing person turned up at UCLA Hospital in Santa Monica.
No further information was available regarding the identity or state of the missing person.
