ROGERS — New sonar equipment will help Benton County Sheriff’s Office deputies get a look at the bottom of Beaver Lake.

A Sheriff’s Office pontoon boat is outfitted with the equipment and will allow deputies to set up a deep water search, officials said. A tow fish drags behind the boat and its signal feeds up the cable to a waterproof laptop computer on-board. Deputies can view and save the pictures on screen.

The Sheriff’s Office has worked closely with the Missouri State Highway Patrol in the past, including a search for a drowning victim last year, said Capt. Mike Jones, who oversees the patrol and lake patrol divisions. Borrowed equipment and personnel aren’t always available, he said. The Sheriff’s Office staff began considering buying their own equipment two years ago. This year $40,000 was budgeted for the equipment, Jones said.

“When you rely on other agencies, they have responsibilities of their own,” Jones said of the availability of assistance from other agencies.

The majority of Beaver Lake is in Benton County, Jones said. Before buying the sonar unit, deputies used a fish finder to scan shallow water, but there are limits.

If a crime scene ends up at the bottom of the lake, graphics from the sonar equipment can be used in court proceedings, Jones said. The primary purpose of the equipment is to find drowning victims.

In 2011, the county’s dive team spent four days searching for a man who drowned 200 yards from shore in Beaver Lake, said Deputy Doug Gay, who coordinates the 10-man dive team. They had GPS coordinates from the emergency call, but the man was in the water for about 10 minutes when the call came through, and boats drift, Gay said. The Missouri team helped them find the body 95 feet below the water’s surface. Using divers to search at that depth isn’t efficient and there aren’t enough, even with help from other agencies, Gay said.

“We can exhaust that manpower in one day,” Gay said.

The sonar equipment will keep deputies safe, said John De Mille, marketing, sales and operations director with Marine Sonic Technology. De Mille trained deputies at Beaver Lake on Wednesday. A diver could become tangled in trees at the base of the lake, De Mille said. Visibility is severely limited and pressure on a diver’s lungs can be dangerous.

“The less time a diver has to be in the water, the better off we like it,” Gay said.

The Sea Scan equipment can scan a football field size area in a minutes, De Mille said, moving back and forth across the area until deputies find the drowned victim or sunken car or boat.

“The process is kinda like mowing the grass,” De Mille said.

He trained deputies on interpreting the images from debris at the lake bottom. Training on the equipment continues today on Indian Creek.

During training Wednesday, the group found a sunken bass boat near the Prairie Creek Marina and picked up quite a few fish, said Sgt. Rick Holland. The sonar equipment is another tool for law enforcement, said Holland, who works lake patrol.

Today, trainees will scan for sunken boats in Indian Creek.