Lake Norman Publications

Lake patrol turns 30




by Will BryantCORNELIUS – In October 1981, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department opened up a lake patrol unit at Ramsey Creek Park in Cornelius in order to help serve communities surrounding Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake. Thirty years later, come rain or shine, winter or summer, the unit shows no signs of slowing down.Originally created to provide a small peninsula of Mecklenburg County known as the “Meck Neck” with quicker response times, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Lake Enforcement Unit has evolved from a unit tasked with teaching boater safety to a full-fledged enforcement unit armed with an armada of vessels to track down criminals on the lake.The “Meck Neck” is a peninsular piece of Iredell County that formerly belonged to Mecklenburg County. Back in the early 1980s, the neck caused the county a lot of problems as it wasn’t easily accessible to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police.“You couldn’t get there except by water or driving through Iredell County,” officer T.S. Howard said. “So the Lake Unit originally was built to be a quicker response unit for this part of the county.”Howard, who is retiring from the force in January, has been with the lake enforcement unit for 19 years. “I’ve been coming to this lake since I was born. I’m as old as this lake is,” he said.He has served both part-time and full-time on the lake and has seen the unit grow to the impressive force it is today.“We were the very first agency on the water, beside the state,” Howard said. “We were the first county unit to establish ourselves on the lake.”From the point of its establishment in 1981, 72 officers have worked on the unit and the number of vessels at its disposal has grown from two to five.The pride of the force is their impressive 21-foot Sea Ark patrol boat that can withstand the extremes of the area’s seasons, Howard said.“We use the boat in all kinds of weather. We have been out there in 30 mile-per-hour winds … we patrol out in the winter, and we can stay out on the boat and not freeze to death,” Howard said.The unit has all the boats necessary to deal with nearly any major catastrophe out on the lake. On board each vessel, Howard said the unit has everything from bandages to backboards and defibrillators. All the officers are trained Emergency Medical Technicians, and judging by the stories the force has accumulated over the past 30 years, Howard said every bit of training is necessary.“If you name and think of it, we’ve probably seen it or heard it,” Howard said. “We’ve seen fingers cut off, femur breaks, drowned bodies, broken arms, broken legs. We’ve had everything you can think off. Those are examples of the tragedies we get up here.”And then there are the strange stories.Like that time in August of 2003 when three people in a speedboat hit an embankment, went airborne and hit two cars on Interstate 77.“That’s a crazy story,” Howard said. “A kid coming back to University of North Carolina at Charlotte said he saw a boat go across the hood of his car.”Despite some of the crazy things that the unit has seen over the past 30 years, no officer has died on the water in the line of duty.As Howard reflects on the unit’s 30 years, he said he feels like the unit has really made a difference in the community.“When we first got here, citations for safety violations and boating-while-impaired arrests were going out of the ceiling,” Howard said. “Those numbers are really declining, and we like to think that is because of our enforcement activity.”The lake unit deals with drunken motorists on a regular basis, especially during the summer months when thousands of boaters are out on the lake.But Howard said people are starting to get the picture and are being a little more intelligent when it comes to making good decisions on the water.“A lot of people think that police are on the water to ruin your fun … we are not here to ruin your fun,” Howard said. “We are out here to make sure that everybody else is safe from people that shouldn’t be here causing an unsafe environment.”Other than protecting the public and keeping the waterways safe, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Lake Enforcement also tries to get its citizens involved.Officers in the lake unit visit schools around the area and instruct students on water-safety education. Through such programs, students in learn water safety around pools, lakes and other bodies of water.The unit also works with local youth in the Adop t-an-Island Program, which teams law enforcement with local Boy Scouts to keep the banks of the lakes clean.Today, the lake enforcement unit isn’t the only one out protecting the waters of the lake. The Cornelius Police and Fire Departments have both increased their presence out on the water in the last few years, and Lincoln, Catawba and Iredell counties all have units out on the water as well.Despite all the increased protection, Howard said the lake enforcement unit still has its hands full.“We are few and far between out here,” Howard said. “There is plenty of work for everybody to do and the more help we get out here, the better it is for us. We all work well together and we all back up each other.”Since there are more boats registered in the four counties surrounding the lake than boats registered along the North Carolina coast, most residents might consider Howard is right.

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