Tim is the founder, owner, and head certifying instructor of Northeast Public Safety Divers.
His passion for diving took hold at the age of 11 when living in California. At that time, his parents could not afford more than a discover scuba course, but he was hooked. Fast forward over 15 years and he found the chance to get fully into diving, cutting his teeth exploring the thousands of shipwrecks that litter the northeast coast. After gaining some experience Tim moved into technical and CCR diving where the passion just grew to become a lifestyle and now has logged over 3,500 dives (including over 800 deco dives).
In 2011 the dive team on his fire department had a diver get injured and got shut down by OSHA. At the time, Tim had no interest in public safety diving but at their request consulted on the situation. It did not take long before Tim got involved in rebuilding the team and the instructor at that time took him under his wing. This started Tim’s journey to becoming an instructor and his passion for the PSD community grew by the second.
In 2015, Tim established Northeast Public Safety Divers with the goal of offering more complete dive training to public safety dive teams and in 2016, became a county dive coordinator and consulting liaison for the operational merger between a few area fire department dive teams and the county sheriff. Over the years, Tim has rebuilt his teams’ operational standards to meet new demands and has rewritten the team’s Standard Operating Guideline eight times to ensure our divers can operate safely. Ultimately, thanks to this rebuilding process, we are now one of the best equipped, trained, and staffed dive teams in the area. Tim Said “During my journey I have learned the importance of team building, establishing standards, debriefing to learn and improving our operations, and most importantly focus on how we can fail safely in our discipline”.
Over the years beside running our local operations Tim has also run dive operations for the FBI, US Coast Guard, NY and NJ Port Authority Police, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta Canada, and numerous other smaller jurisdictions throughout NY & NJ.
NePSD also volunteers their services to projects as the USS Ling in Hackensack NJ https://www.preservationnj.org/listings/uss-ling/, Bergen County Historical Society https://www.bergencountyhistory.org/, and has done work on the museum ship USCG Liliac in NYC http://www.lilacpreservationproject.org/.
His expertise is widely recognized in the public safety dive community where he has been a requested speaker at numerous dive conferences and seminars, as well as a requested consultant on emerging dive standards. Tim received the ERDI “Outstanding Instructor Award” for 2016, 2017, and 2018. Tim was awarded The Medal Of Valor in 2011 by the Northwest Bergen Mutual Aid Association for rescuing two victims from the Ramapo River during Hurricane Irene. He is also the 2023 ERDI ambassador https://www.tdisdi.com/erdi-news/2023-erdi-ambassadors/ .
