Brainerd Dispatch:
“Thompson, who aptly is nicknamed “Seal,” says Tri-State Diving does anywhere from 10 to 15 salvage operations in a typical winter. As of mid-January, the company already had pulled nine ATVs, vehicles or fish houses from lakes across the region, and more jobs await them when weather conditions improve. “It’s getting to be more and more because of how well we’re getting known and insurance companies calling us direct,” Thompson said. “‘Dirty Jobs’ put us on the map.”
Tri-State shoots photos or video of all of its retrieval jobs and posts the footage on Facebook, Thompson said, which also helps to spread the word. “Plus, there are a lot of the areas where conservation officers know the kind of work we do, and they refer (people) to us,” he said.
Tri-State uses a device called a SUVE (pronounced soo-vee)—which stands for Submerged Underwater Vehicle Extractor—for retrieving vehicles. In very basic terms, the SUVE is like a big teeter totter with a winch on the top to raise whatever’s submerged to the surface. Thompson has patents on both the apparatus and the teeter-totter concept it employs, he says. “It’s just two rails (the vehicle) rides up, and once it’s up on top and gets past center, we just bring it down on the ice,” Thompson said.”
