Dive and Rescue will provide Top Water and Dive Rescue, along with Boats and Jet Skis for the 2012 Iroman Events for the 4th year in a row.

GULF STATES DIVE AND RESCUE Congrats to Gabe King, Chris Harvey & Todd Wedgeworth for receiving BEST SM BOAT CREW at the Arkansas Fire Boat School 2011.

The director and founder of Texas Equusearch, which specializes in finding missing people, has joined the effort to find two 13-year-old eastern New Orleans boys who have been missing since Easter.

In January, Tim Miller, the company’s founder, came to Louisiana to assist with the search for Brian Reed, brother of Baltimore Ravens safety Ed Reed. He combed the river near the St. Charles Parish line. His nonprofit company, which has assisted in almost 1,200 searches in the past 10 years, brought boats, sonar equipment and divers to Kenner. The body of  Brian Reed, 29, of St. Rose, was found in the Mississippi River at Kenner.

Officer Shereese Harper said at this point she does not know the scope of Miller’s involvement.

Eddie Selby, commander of the New Orleans Police Department’s Special Operations Division, has said today’s high winds likely will keep divers and boats out of the water.

On land, trained dogs — Nola, a Belgian Malinois and Tracker, a chocolate Labrador — scoured the former Lincoln Beach amusement park area along Lake Pontchartrain near Hayne Boulevard and Vincent Road Wednesday morning.

“We started about 10 a.m. and finished about 11:30 a.m.,” said Denise Liset, a member of the Louisiana Search & Rescue Dog Team and Nola’s handler. “All we found was a lot of trash and a lot of disappointment.”

Liset and Gary Lea, Tracker’s handler, were accompanied by New Orleans firefighters and three armed escorts, who were requested after someone speculated an alligator might be on the property.

Aaronne Mitchell and Aaronne Russell were last seen Sunday at 11 a.m. walking Buddy, an adult mixed-breed pit bull, and a pit bull puppy. Buddy’s owner, Angela Kinler, said the boys told her they were going to Lincoln Beach, one of the historic swimming areas on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

State, federal and private agencies have participated in the search. More than four thousand nautical square miles — covering land and water — have been covered by the New Orleans Police Department, the New Orleans Fire Department, New Orleans Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Louisiana Search & Rescue, New Orleans EMS, Gulf States Dive and Rescue, U.S. Coast Guard, the St. Tammany Sheriff’s Office, EquuSearch and the American Red Cross, according to NOFD. NOFD crews performed deep boat and shallow water searches using skiffs and flatboats. One rescue boat with 2-person dive team and side scanning sonar searched the waters of  Lake Pontchartrain.

Harper said she was not aware of any other developments.

Dive and Rescue were asked to be evaluators for this exercise.

Published: Thursday, September 27, 2007, 2:39 PM

Jefferson Parish first responders and the U.S. Coast Guard staged a rescue exercise involving a bus going off the Causeway and dumping numerous people in the water to be found and rescued Thursday morning. The purpose of the exercise was to test the effectiveness of using the National Incident Management System Unified Command Training to manage the response to a large emergency. The exercise placed commanders from all agencies in one command post to make joint decisions.

STAFF PHOTOS BY CHUCK COOK