Brian McKinley Mize is a 7th-generation Karns guy living on the family’s original 20 acres on West Emory Road near Beaver Creek. He’s been a diver for 39 years, and during those years, he has recovered approximately 100 bodies, a word he does not use. To him, he’s recovering “treasures.”
He has two primary jobs – one as a volunteer, the other as an employee.
Mize, 57, has served our community as a rescue/recovery diver with Knox County Rescue (KCR) for 21 years. He is a K-9 specialist lieutenant on the Technical Search Team and an operational K-9 handler on the KCR Water Rescue Team. He’s also a Tennessee Special Response Team A K-9 handler in area and human remains on land and in the water. He’s also been a canine trainer, specializing in training dogs to search for drugs, various odors, explosives and people.
His real job – when the weather is not too cold – is being a seasonal diver and field technician with Dinkins Biological Consulting (DBC), one of the few commercial diving companies in the eastern U.S. based in Powell. It is owned and managed by Barbara Dinkins. This job is all about finding underwater treasures – endangered mussels, fish, crawfish and snails.
These are some of the items found below
Boyd’s Bridge in the Holston River by Dinkins
Biological Consulting divers Brian Mize and
Hugh Foust.
When he’s not working on a KCR call or for the Dinkins in a creek or river, he stays busy. He has to, he says. “I can’t stand doing the same job day after day or just not having anything to do.” His DNA does not allow idleness. He’s easily bored. “I like to fix things, repair things, like building a friend a new patio, doing electrical and plumbing repair work on rental properties, and landscaping and excavating jobs,” Mize says. “I’m good at construction work too.”
He’s done dam inspections. He worked in Houston and Charleston for close to two years, scraping and clearing debris, like barnacles and trash, from the mooring docks used by major ocean-going tankers. “If it’s underwater and needs fixing, I can handle it,” he says.
Just recently, his work with KCR came into play in downtown Knoxville.
An 89-year-old Knoxville man, Burrell Harris, died when his truck accidentally crashed through barriers above a steep embankment near Calhoun’s on the Tennessee River. The truck ended up in 11 feet of water between the bank and a dock walkway. KCR Dive Team Lt. Zach Tyree was on the scene quickly and removed the victim from the truck. Harris was pronounced dead at the scene after first responders worked to revive him. Mize and fellow KCR diver Noah Sloan went into the murky river to rig the Nissan truck to be pulled out.
Brian Mize
Mize’s hardest KCR team recovery was in 2009. He was part of the land search team walking around Carl Cowan Park at 7 p.m., looking for a little 3-year-old boy who walked away from his parents at a birthday party. KCR’s dive team eventually found the child in 40 feet of water. “That was very traumatic for me, the worst thing I’ve been part of, finding that little guy,” Mize says. “They worked hard on him. But unfortunately, it happens too often.”
Here are a few other things he’s done:
- Worked security at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge for four years as a canine handler looking for explosive ordinance and odor detection.
- He joined KCR in 2005 as part of its Search and Rescue team. He had trained a Belgian Malinois to detect human remains that would help the dive team know where a body could be located from the boat. In 2015, he became part of the KCR dive team.
- While at KCR, he was also part of the Ohio Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in Dayton staffed by a network of state, regional and non-profit volunteer teams. The teams provide ground searches, K-9 tracking, drone (UAV) operations and disaster response and generally only deploy upon direct request from law enforcement, fire departments or emergency management agencies, as in Tennessee.
His paying job with the Dinkins family business began in 2016. The “treasures” in that job involve searches and surveys for protected and endangered mussel species, mostly in the southeastern U.S. The Dinkins consulting company specializes in surveying to identify aquatic and terrestrial organisms. In the last 10 years, it has been awarded contracts to conduct ecological studies in 20 states. DBC does underwater surveys for freshwater mussels in large rivers across the Southeast, using multiple divers equipped with wireless underwater communications.
Mize, of course, is one of DBC’s divers. “Working with the Dinkins family is the only really fun job I’ve ever had,” he says. “The entire team is full of really good people who I enjoy working and being with. It’s exciting to do something like this that other people can’t do.”
There is, he says, one aspect of the job he does not enjoy. Work in Louisiana and Florida may mean alligators. “Snakes not so bad, but the gators are heavy on my mind. That gets to me some. I’m under that water for four or five hours. You feel vulnerable, and I am constantly praying. Most times it’s negative zero visibility, and you’re feeling for mussels blind on the bottom, and you hope that’s all you find.”
Two years ago, and closer to home, the Dinkins team was diving in the Holston River at Boyd’s Bridge surveying for mussels. But Mize found and saw “treasures” of a different kind that called for a follow-up, off-work dive. He and fellow Dinkins diver/biologist Hugh Foust returned. Their “find” was fascinating.
“We found 24 guns (handguns, rifles and automatic weapons), three safes (still in the river), money bags, a lot of knives and a hatchet, plus a 4-foot monkey wrench from the 1800s, sterling silver items obviously stolen, pottery, Indian artifacts, an old wagon wheel and horseshoes, and even a horse’s bit. They also found two ground stones from a cemetery still in the river.”
“It’s treasure for sure and it’s just sitting down there in the river,” he says.
But the “real” treasures he loves are for the families. “Recovering a treasure for the family and the community is a big adrenaline rush for me and something that is truly important for their loved ones and for me personally,” Mize explains. “It’s hard to talk about for me. But I love doing it for them. It can be very emotional for everyone and usually is.”
Tom King has been the editor of newspapers in Texas and California, and also worked in Tennessee and Georgia. If you have someone you think we should consider featuring, please email Tom at the link with his name or text him at 865-659-3562.
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Neat article, thanks for writing about this salvage diving operator!