http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/16977198001?isVid=1&publisherID=245991542
Dave Riggs wanted to do the right thing. But can something be right if it’s likely to leave you dead? “We need to go!” he shouted through his face mask.
Riggs was one of three commercial divers stranded near the end of a pitch-black, oxygen-deficient tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean floor, more than 9 miles from shore. They had just backtracked 1,200 feet along slippery terrain to get from the very end of the tunnel to their Humvee, only to make a crushing discovery about the two other divers on their team. Tim Nordeen was slumped over in the driver’s seat of the Humvee, while Billy Juse was lying just outside the passenger’s side, his legs under the vehicle and his torso pinned in the narrow space between the door and the tunnel’s side wall.
Riggs assumed Tim and Billy had been felled by the mixed-gas breathing system they’d been given for their high-stakes journey into the earth on July 21, 1999. It’s the same system that he, DJ Gillis, and Donald “Hoss” Hosford had been breathing off while they were at the end of the empty tunnel, removing safety plugs so the Deer Island sewage treatment process could finally work. They’d survived, thanks to Hoss’s quick instincts back there, switching them to their emergency high-pressure air at the first sign of trouble. Still, their prospects for making it out of the tunnel alive were dwindling fast.
They couldn’t trust their main breathing system, since the regulator atop its liquid oxygen tank was now as frozen and glistening as a snow cone. They couldn’t trust their main backup system, since the canisters of air strapped to the Humvee roof had been opened by Billy or Tim before they went down and therefore couldn’t be ruled out as the source of bad air. And while they knew they could trust the canister of air they had dragged back with them on a wobbly aluminum boat, it was about to expire. They were burning through it fast, especially since Riggs’s malfunctioning face mask was blasting so much air that he had to kink and unkink his hose for every breath.
Riggs looked over at DJ, who was doing everything he could to try to revive Billy, short of the suicidal move of removing his own face mask and attempting mouth to mouth. He looked through the Humvee window to see Hoss trying to revive Tim from the driver’s seat. Riggs, who had a 1-year-old and 4-year-old back in Nevada, was sure that Billy and Tim were already dead — probably had been since the moment Hoss lost communication with them half an hour earlier. Riggs was just as sure that if he and Hoss and DJ didn’t get the hell out of the tunnel right now, they would soon be dead, too. If they made it out, he figured, a rescue crew could come in and get Billy and Tim’s bodies.
Around 1:45 p.m., Riggs watched as DJ picked up a phone and called Tap Taylor, his friend and boss who was monitoring the mission from topside on Deer Island. “We’ve got two men down,” DJ said. “We need medical assistance on standby.”
“What happened?” Tap asked.
“I don’t know what happened,” DJ said, “but everything went to hell in a handbasket down here, and we’re trying to get out!”
Riggs was a veteran diver, a member of the brotherhood. It went against his every instinct to leave a brother behind. But his mind raced back to a month earlier, when the divers had been trained in mine rescue operations and been taught the protocol for handling a man down: Don’t try to resuscitate him, especially if he’s been down for a while. Focus on safely getting yourself out, or you’re likely to add to the body count. “We’ve got to leave them,” Riggs said.
Hoss was only 24 years old — Riggs was 38 — but he had a preternatural air of authority about him that matched his imposing 6-foot-5 frame. He had been foreman of their crew for that day’s mission. After quickly taking everything in, he let out his verdict. “We’re not leaving these guys.”
Hoss’s decision was so firm, so calm, so right that Riggs instantly felt good about it.
Hoss turned to Riggs. “Get those rebreathers ready.”
“I’m on it,” Riggs replied, hustling to the back of the Humvee.
The rebreathers consisted of face masks attached to bulky backpacks that looked like roller suitcases. Inside each rebreather was a small bottle of oxygen and a soda lime filter that absorbed the carbon dioxide from exhaled air, so it could be reused. Because the “scrubbed” air burned hot, each rebreather was supposed to have an ice pack installed in it. If everything went right, those units would give each of the guys four hours of air. But, of course, almost nothing had gone right on this mission, so they continued to brace for the worst.
Hoss could see Riggs struggling with the complicated rebreather assembly, mainly because he still needed to devote one hand to kinking his hose after each breath. Standing there, shoving the hose between his legs and trying to use his knees to do the kinking, Riggs began quietly saying the Lord’s Prayer. Unlike Riggs, Hoss wasn’t religious, but he called over to him. “Pray for us, Riggs.”
Before long, Riggs had managed to get one rebreather ready, though
he hadn’t yet had a chance to retrieve its ice pack from a cooler in the Humvee.
In the meantime, Hoss retrieved a different emergency breathing device, which sent a short supply of oxygen directly into the mouth while pinching off the nose. He gave one to DJ, put on one himself, and gave a third to DJ to give to Riggs. At last, Riggs could take off his mask and stop the madness of all that kinking. Hoss figured they could safely count on the devices to provide 30 minutes of air, so he hit his stopwatch.
To lighten their load, Hoss decided to unhitch the trailer from the Humvee. That meant cutting the hoses that tethered the liquid oxygen and nitrogen tanks on the trailer to the controls inside the Humvee. He called Riggs over, asking to borrow his knife, while DJ took over the task of assembling the other rebreathers, with ice packs.
As Hoss was about to cut the first hose, he looked down and was startled by what he saw. His hand was shaking uncontrollably. He turned to Riggs and asked him to do the cutting. The panic may have skipped Hoss’s mind, but it had found its way to his fingers.
Then DJ yelled over to them. “All stop on cutting the trailer loose!”
Hoss shot him a puzzled look.
“We’ve got to get these guys out of here, and we can’t load them into the Hummer,” DJ explained. On their drive in, they had taken two opposite-facing Humvees, but they would be leaving behind the one pointed toward the end of the tunnel. With all the equipment jammed inside, it would have been tight to try to fit all five guys into one Humvee. With three of them wearing the bulky rebreathers, it would be nearly impossible. “We can put them on the trailer,” DJ said.
Hoss agreed to leave the trailer attached.
By now, the rebreathers were ready. Hoss grabbed one and DJ helped him maneuver it onto his back and get him switched over, a complicated process. Then Hoss helped Riggs do the same. DJ put his backpack on himself, by laying it upside down on the tunnel floor, sticking his arms into it, and flipping it over his head, like a preschooler learning how to put on his jacket.
They moved Billy’s body first. DJ slipped several times trying to pull Billy out from under the Humvee, his own legs sliding under the vehicle next to Billy’s. He tried one last time to try to revive Billy by tipping his head back and blasting air into his mask. When nothing happened, he removed Billy’s mask. Looking at Billy’s motionless eyes above his trademark mustache, DJ said, “Tap would not want to see this.”
Hoss did what he sensed DJ could not bring himself to do, closing Billy’s eyes. With Billy on the trailer, they moved to the driver’s side to Tim, a big, bearded guy whose easygoing confidence Hoss had always admired. Once more, they tried to revive him. Once more, they were unsuccessful. When Tim was out of the driver’s seat, Hoss directed Riggs into it to get the Humvee started.
Hoss stood at the back of the vehicle and turned on the oxygen injector that the Humvee needed to run in the tunnel. Then he gave Riggs the sign to turn over the engine. Nothing. They tried it again. Nothing.
That’s when Hoss, whose poise and quick thinking had kept the three of them alive this far, found despair washing over him. He knew they had nowhere near the air they would need if they had to slog on foot more than 9 miles to the start of the tunnel. And he knew how long it had taken to get the Humvee going when they’d had trouble starting it during the previous two days of missions. He looked back at the trailer, fixing his eyes on Billy and Tim’s lifeless bodies. And he thought to himself, Is that our future?
DJ knew his carefree, party-boy reputation defined him, but the 29-year-old prided himself on being nothing but serious on the job, when it mattered most. His mother had always said there was nobody better in a crisis than DJ, and he had proved her right so far on this wrenching afternoon. Still, like Hoss, he felt panic set in when the Humvee wouldn’t start. How many more things can go wrong? Yet he was able to find comfort in an unexpected source: Riggs. The guy DJ thought had wanted to run was now sitting behind the wheel, projecting calm determination. Riggs was going to get this damn thing started.
Riggs seemed to have gleaned from the previous days’ engine troubles exactly what steps he needed to take to trick the oxygen injector into working, and how to do it without draining the battery, as had happened the day before. He coolly waited for the electronic sensors to reset, then, to override the injector, he flooded the intake with oxygen and ground the starter way longer than seemed wise. All of a sudden, in a thunderous groan, the engine turned over, belching a plume of diesel smoke out of the exhaust that filled the tight section of the tunnel as though it were a shotgun barrel.
“Keep it running!” Hoss yelled from the back. DJ jumped into the rear seat, Hoss in the passenger’s seat, and Riggs stepped on the gas.
As they drove off, a new worry surged into DJ’s head. Because they had kept the trailer attached, that meant they were still carrying the old breathing system’s three tanks of liquid nitrogen and one tank of liquid oxygen. If the Humvee took a hard turn in the unforgiving tunnel, which varied greatly in width and whose conditions went from simply damp to up to 3 feet of standing water, the trailer might jackknife. DJ knew a crash could turn those tanks into bombs.
“Riggs, stay on your toes,” DJ said.
The tunnel was measured in “rings” of roughly 5 feet. Every 1,000 rings or so, there was a marker. At some of those markers, there was a phone receiver hanging on the wall, providing a connection to topside. As they drove past those ring markers in descending order, Hoss didn’t want to stop for fear the Humvee might conk out. But then he realized that if he didn’t check in with Harald Grob, the engineer overseeing the operation from the surface, Harald might dispatch a backup crew on another Humvee. That would create a dangerous logjam. So at 2:40 p.m., as the Humvee approached ring 6,000 — with about 5¾ miles left between them and the shaft that led to the surface — Hoss got out and picked up the receiver.
“What’s going on?” Harald asked.
“Tim and Billy are gone,” Hoss said, curtly.
“How?”
DJ could tell Hoss had absolutely no interest in talking to Harald. After all, the divers had complained repeatedly to Harald in previous days about problems they were experiencing with the breathing system he had designed, but they were sent back into the tunnel on the same system.
“They’re dead and we’re at 6,000,” Hoss said, “and driving in with these two guys.” Then he hung up.
Back in the Humvee, Hoss started yelling that his lungs were burning up. The chemical reaction going on inside the rebreather made wearing one the equivalent of breathing out of a blow-dryer. That’s why it needed the ice pack to cool it down. But Hoss had grabbed the first rebreather, which had been set up without an ice pack. From the back seat, DJ reached into the rear of the vehicle to find the cooler and grabbed an ice pack. Then he pushed Hoss forward in his seat, pulled the back off his rebreather, and shoved the ice inside, to cool him down.
After DJ’s first call to topside, Tap had ridden down the shaft to wait for their return, so he’d never heard Hoss’s unvarnished report to Harald about Billy and Tim. Beginning around ring 5,000, the Humvee entered close enough range so DJ could reach Tap on a hand-held radio. He called in a couple more updates to Tap but could never muster the strength to tell him the news was much worse than Billy and Tim just being unconscious. DJ knew how close Tap and Billy were, how they’d even developed their own language when they were talking to each other on walkie-talkies, such as converting the standard “Roger” reply to “Rog-oh.” No, DJ didn’t want to deliver news this devastating over the radio.
Just shy of 2 miles from the shaft, DJ had his last communication with Tap.
“How’s Billy?” Tap asked.
“Well,” DJ stammered. “Billy’s gone.”
“What do you mean Billy’s gone?” Tap asked in an agitated voice. “Where did he go?”
DJ couldn’t continue with the dance. “Tap, there’s no lefts or rights down here,” he said. “He’s gone. He’s expired. He’s not here. Billy’s dead. And so is Timmy.” DJ asked him if he understood.
There was a pause, and then Tap answered softly. “Rog-oh.”
After they had traveled a bit farther, Hoss asked Riggs to stop the Humvee. He had once been part of a team of divers hired to retrieve the body of a worker killed in a hydroplant accident, and had to confront a scrum of media photographers waiting to capture the victim on film. Fearing there might be camera crews rushing to Deer Island, Hoss got out of the Humvee, determined to preserve Tim and Bill’s dignity. Standing beside the trailer, he noticed Tim’s foot and his heart sank. Somehow during the frenetic ride back, his leg must have gotten caught on something and been dragged, because his boot was worn off and so was part of his foot.
Hoss straightened Tim, closed Billy’s mouth, and then he and DJ unfolded a couple of blankets and carefully placed them over the two bodies. They then climbed onto the trailer and rode on it the rest of the way back. They weren’t going to let anything else happen to Tim and Billy.
At 3:36 p.m., Riggs navigated the vehicle up the ramp at the base of the shaft. A crew of paramedics swarmed the trailer to begin CPR on Tim and Billy. Seeing the blankets on the bodies, they complained to Hoss and DJ that they shouldn’t have taken Tim and Billy’s masks off and covered them with blankets, telling the divers they didn’t have the authority to pronounce people dead. Hoss was fuming. He looked down at his stopwatch, which he had started back when they’d put on their first emergency air devices — at least half an hour after Tim and Billy had been struck down. It read: 1 hour, 40 minutes. If those paramedics only knew the hell they’d just been through, the heroic lengths they had gone to in the hopes of trying to save their friends. After tossing out a few choice words, Hoss and DJ walked away, too drained to defend themselves.
DJ stepped into the basket with Riggs and Hoss, to be lifted up the shaft. But just before the gate shut, he remembered something and hopped out, bounding back toward the Humvee. It was his hard hat. Topside, when someone told him that he and Hoss and Riggs were lucky to have made it out, DJ turned over his hard hat and caressed his grandfather’s Virgin Mary medal that was hanging on a piece of twine inside. “This,” he said, “is what got us out.” Then he cut the twine, and put the medal in his pocket.
On July 20, 2009, a radiant Monday almost exactly 10 years after the accident, Olga Juse stood on the pedestrian walkway ringing Deer Island. She said a prayer, the same one she says every morning and every night, asking that Billy and Tim’s souls be at peace. Then she leaned over the railing and tossed a bouquet of gladiolas into the water resting atop the tunnel that had claimed her son’s life.
There was something remarkable about that cold coastal water. Its hues of blue and green were so clear that Olga and Billy’s sister, Jolene Juse-Paige, could actually see striped bass flitting around the granite rocks at the bottom of the shallow water. Not long ago, it would have been inconceivable to find rollerbladers and power walkers jockeying for space along the edge of this island dominated by a sprawling sewer plant, where sewage once expectorated without embarrassment right into the sea. Fighting back tears undiminished by the years, Olga said, “People here should never forget the lives that were sacrificed to give them a clean harbor.”
Every summer, Olga, who lives in Florida, and Jolene, who lives in California, travel to New Hampshire to attend a memorial Mass for Billy. His father, Bill, who lives in South Carolina and lost interest in his business and most other pursuits after the accident, visits on his own schedule. Olga deals with the loss by talking about Billy often — how he loved people so genuinely that he favored bearhugs to handshakes, how so many people loved him back that his funeral procession stretched for 4 miles.
Tim Nordeen’s widow, Judy Milner, and his parents came to Deer Island in 2002, when the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority unveiled a pair of benches and plaques in Billy and Tim’s honor. For them, the sting of Tim’s loss remains fresh. Judy first knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Tim when she watched the brawny guy lovingly carry a puppy to safety. As a psychiatrist in the Seattle area, she now recognizes how denial helped her look past the risks associated with his line of work so she could build a life with him.
In the end, who is to blame? Investigations by the State Police and US Navy and a subsequent wrongful-death and negligence lawsuit answered many questions, though perhaps not the biggest.
The surviving divers point first to Harald, the engineer who managed the project for Norwesco Marine. An analysis by the US Navy’s Experimental Diving Unit concluded that the breathing system he designed “was inadequate in its ability to support working divers. The lack of appropriate monitoring equipment contributed to the death of two individuals.” The report said that after Harald turned up the regulator inside the MAP Mix 9000 gas mixer, following advice he’d apparently been given by the machine’s local distributor, the regulator on the liquid oxygen tank simply could not keep up. That’s why it froze like a snow cone, turning the mixed gas being sent to the divers into a deadly supply of mostly nitrogen.
Why did Billy and Tim die while Hoss, Riggs, and DJ survived? To get to the three guys at the end of the tunnel, the bad air had to travel more than 1,000 feet, which made Hoss’s quick switch possible. But to get to Billy and Tim, it only had to go 10 feet. The Navy concluded that an in-line analyzer should have been installed — as Riggs had suggested — and that the MAP Mix 9000 should never have been used. That mixer was designed for industrial uses only, such as packaging food. It was not meant to blend air for human consumption.
Although it might be tempting to blame Harald and leave it at that, the plan wasn’t only his. He was working for Norwesco and had help from a Spokane company, A-L Compressed Gases, in designing the system. And, as Harald stressed in his comments to investigators, the MWRA, construction manager Kaiser Engineers, and tunnel contractor KAK all “went back and forth” in reviewing his proposed plan, so he felt comfortable with their buy-in. Local lawyers Robert Norton, John Prescott, and Nina Pelletier found plenty of blame to go around when they filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of the Juse and Nordeen families. The families settled in 2001 with the MWRA, Kaiser, KAK, Norwesco, A-L, and tunnel designer Parsons Brinckerhoff, agreeing as one of the conditions not to disclose amounts. Kaiser, KAK, and Norwesco also received fines from OSHA. Norwesco owner Roger Rouleau admits he should have supervised Harald more closely and taken Hoss’s concerns more seriously. But he argues that OSHA itself is not blame-free, since he showed OSHA officials the plan long before the divers went into the tunnel, and the officials raised no major concerns. Looking at it now, Roger says, “We should have never been in there.”
That gets to the larger, lingering question: How could this idea of sending divers to a place as remote as the moon, asking them to entrust their lives to an improvised breathing system, have made sense to sensible people?
The answer would appear to lie in the dangerous cocktail of time, money, stubbornness, and frustration near the end of the over-budget, long-delayed tunnel project. The major players desperately needed the project to surmount its last enormous hurdle. It’s almost as if, amid all the fatigue and expense and mutual distrust that had built up, they looked at Harald’s dazzling plan, then closed their eyes and hoped that it made sense. If they had kept them open, they might have had to confront the ways in which it didn’t.
They also might have hatched a better plan, like the one ultimately used to get the plugs out. In the summer of 2000, crews working off a barge in Massachusetts Bay dropped a 110-foot steel “straw” into the water, connecting it to diffuser riser No. 3, whose safety plug Riggs had already removed. Using jet fans and that giant straw, they sucked out the bad air from the tunnel and pulled in good air from the shaft end. That gave workers plenty of ambient oxygen to remove the remaining 52 plugs. Afterward, the tunnel was flooded, and treated sewer water began flowing way out into the bay, making possible the stunning transformation of Boston Harbor.
A sensible plan, but a far more expensive one. While the diver operation was expected to cost around $1 million, this final solution rang in around $15 million.
“Two colleagues died on the Deer Island Outfall project and it deeply affected all of us,” Harald Grob writes from his home in Canada, declining a request to be interviewed. “Over the years we have learned to live with this tragedy. For my part, I do not wish to start the healing process over again.”
Others at the center of this story continue the struggle to heal.
For two years, Donald Hosford stayed out of the water and barely left his house, battling painful memories and nightmares. Eventually, Hoss returned to the water, starting off slowly, following his counselor’s advice to put on his gear and sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for longer and longer spells. His marriage ended in divorce. These days, he’s once again working as a commercial diver. In fact, now he specializes in the most sophisticated, intense work in his field: saturation diving, where he stays underwater in a pressurized chamber for up to 30 days at a time. Hoss says his confidence these days comes from working for a company, Global Diving and Salvage in Seattle, that has built its business model around safety.
“Life,” says Dave Riggs, “has never been the same since the accident.” He struggled with marital strain and drank more than he should, but he’s happy to be in a more stable place these days. Now working as a certified welding inspector in California, he hasn’t been back in the water professionally since the accident. On weekends, he drives about nine hours round trip to spend time with his wife and two children, now 14 and 11.
Tap Taylor continues to run Black Dog Divers, although the 14-hour days are a distant memory. He says the accident made him finally understand the lesson Billy had been trying to teach him, that life is more important than work. Because the anniversary of the accident falls on his birthday, Tap always finds it difficult to celebrate.
Roger Rouleau closed down Norwesco and, with a colleague, formed a new business in 2002, doing the same kind of diving work, under the name Associated Underwater Services. At a job in Washington state in the summer of 2007, a piling detached from a vibrating hammer and killed a Massachusetts native working for his company. OSHA levied two safety-violation fines against Associated Underwater and several more against the general contractor. Roger says the incident dredged up bad memories from Deer Island and contributed to his decision to leave the business. In June, his partner bought him out.
DJ Gillis has had the rockiest post-accident path. Like Hoss and Riggs, DJ found that the traumatic memories of Deer Island made him reluctant to return to diving. Also like Hoss and Riggs, DJ received money from a legal settlement that made a return to work less pressing. He resumed his hard-partying ways, but unlike the past, he didn’t have his diving job to rein him in. He was haunted by survivor’s guilt, especially when it came to Billy, with whom he had switched positions at the last minute. He had a recurring nightmare where he’d find himself in the tunnel and didn’t know which way the exit was. He’d wake up breathing heavily, sweating profusely, crying. “So I didn’t like to go to sleep,” he says. “Instead, I would stay up all night, in loud bars, until I passed out.” He eventually got hooked on OxyContin and other opiates, and then heroin. He returned to diving briefly, heading to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina hit, only to lose another friend on the job.
That was the buildup to May 10, 2008, when DJ, desperate for cash to get a heroin fix, sat behind the wheel of a black Honda Accord while a longtime friend and now fellow heroin addict walked into Village Bank in Newton and handed the teller a note demanding “big bills.” And that was the backdrop to June 3, 2009, when DJ stood in Courtroom 10 before US District Court Chief Judge Mark Wolf and was sentenced to 18 months in jail for his involvement in the robbery. Wolf allowed that his sentence was lighter than federal guidelines would suggest, but he said the departure was justified. The case, the judge said, was about drugs more than theft. After reading about DJ’s role in the Deer Island accident, he told him, “It doesn’t exclude your involvement in a bank robbery, but it helps explain it.” The accident, he was suggesting, must still loom large over DJ’s life.
There was evidence to support his hunch beneath DJ’s off-white long-sleeve shirt. There, on his upper right arm, is the tattoo DJ sees every morning when he looks in the mirror. It’s a drawing of a diving mask. Billy and Tim’s names sit below it. Above it are the words: NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN.
August 31, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: aluminum boat, backup system, breathing system, face mask, liquid oxygen tank, ocean floor, Olga Juse, sewage treatment process, Virgin Mary | Comments Off
By Neil Swidey
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/16977198001?isVid=1&publisherID=245991542
The plan was ambitious but simple: Build a 9.5-mile sewer tunnel hundreds of feet below the ocean floor to help clean up Boston Harbor. But 10 years ago this summer, five divers went deep, deep into the project for one final step — with deadly results. Their harrowing story has never been told, until now.
The divers packed themselves into the basket and prepared to be lowered by a crane down the 400-foot shaft. But they couldn’t move until DJ Gillis got into the basket with them, and he wasn’t about to be hurried.
“C’mon, DJ,” one of the guys yelled. “Let’s go!”
Tap Taylor, who was DJ’s boss, started yelling, too. “Let’s go!” It was a radiant summer morning, and they were standing on Deer Island, a peninsula that hangs down like a comma from Winthrop into Boston Harbor, curling in front of Logan Airport. It also happened to be Tap’s 36th birthday, and he didn’t want to waste it waiting for DJ to move his tail.
The two of them had a close if combustible relationship. Tap was a hard-charging guy who logged one 14-hour day after another with the singular focus of building his small New Hampshire commercial diving business into something bigger. Still, he had a soft spot for DJ, treating the 29-year-old more like a kid brother than an employee. A 6-foot-2, solidly built charmer, DJ had developed a reputation as a talented diver who worked hard and partied harder. He’d show up late to job sites many mornings, often dropped off by some blonde or brunette. As DJ would be hurriedly changing out of his dress shoes and pants from the night before, Tap would start cursing, threatening to kick him off the job. But those outbursts usually ended the same way. Before long, Tap would calm down, laugh, and begin pumping DJ for details from his latest adventure hopping bars and beds.
“C’mon!” Tap shouted again.
“If you’re in that much of a hurry,” DJ barked back, “then go without me!”
It was the morning of July 21, 1999, a Wednesday, and the tension was thick, mainly because so many problems had surfaced on the project that Monday and Tuesday. Getting down the shaft would be the easy part. The challenge would come when the divers had to make their way to the end of a dank, dark sewer tunnel that began at the base of the shaft and kept going and going, for nearly 10 miles. Tap, who would be monitoring their progress from topside, was in no mood for DJ’s same old antics.
In reality, neither was DJ. The only woman he had on his mind now was the Virgin Mary. He had been searching the construction trailer for a piece of twine. He needed it to tie a small oval religious medal to the underside of his hard hat. The medal had once belonged to his grandfather, a carpenter who helped construct the Prudential Building that defined Boston’s skyline.
DJ had asked his mother for it the night before, remembering the story of how his grandfather had kept the Miraculous Medal in his pocket the whole time he worked on the Pru, taking comfort in the Blessed Virgin’s protection. Seeking comfort himself, DJ had gingerly asked his mom, “Is that still around?”
“Yes,” she said. “Why?”
“I’m a little concerned about the job.”
As much as he downplayed his growing uneasiness, he hadn’t been surprised to see fear flash over his mother’s face. He had broken one of the cardinal rules he’d learned early on in his career as a commercial diver, when he’d seen oil rigs capsize and cranes collapse: Never tell your family the truth about how dangerous the job was. It wasn’t fair to dump that kind of worry on them.
Still, this wasn’t like any job DJ had worked on before. In fact, it wasn’t like any job anyone had worked on before. That challenge to make history in his field, to do the seemingly undoable, was what had sold him on this Deer Island assignment in the first place, what made him leave a steadier gig doing more conventional work as a pile driver. Yet with everything that had gone down in the last few days, he was having buyer’s remorse.
Finally, he found the twine, fastened the Virgin Mary, and put on his hard hat as he strode over to the basket. Tap was still heated. “What the hell were you doing? We’ve got a job to do here!”
DJ took off his hat and turned it over, so the guys could see the medal dangling from it. “I’m taking care of myself,” he said.
Tap’s steam instantly lifted. “It’s getting that bad, huh?”
Imagine entering a tunnel that’s been bored into the earth hundreds of feet below Massachusetts Bay and continues straight out, for 9½ miles. There is no light, besides what the bulb on your helmet can give off. There is no sound, besides the water dripping overhead or sloshing around your boots. There is no air, besides what you brought in with you, a lifeline pumping through a hose and into your face mask. At the end of the tunnel, there isn’t even enough room to stand up straight, since it chokes down to just 5 feet in diameter before ending abruptly. It’s the world’s longest one-way tunnel, so there’s no way out other than turning around and making the hazardous trek back to where you started.
This is where DJ and four other commercial divers were headed on that Wednesday morning 10 summers ago. They’d been dispatched on a high-risk mission to fix a problem that had confounded some of the world’s top engineering and construction companies for a decade. If they were able to solve the problem, the empty tunnel could be flooded, allowing up to 1.3 billion gallons of treated sewer water to flow out to sea on a heavy day. Left unsolved, the problem threatened to turn the new tunnel into a $300 million white elephant, if not render the entire court-ordered cleanup of Boston Harbor a $4 billion waste of money.
This is the untold story of how a vast engineering marvel of a public works project ended with a handful of divers being given an improvised, untested plan and then sent into the darkness. And how their mission turned into a harrowing race to get out alive.
Boston Harbor was once a national embarrassment, a waterway indivisible from the nation’s history but blackened by the smothering amounts of sewage and sludge dumped into it every day. Musicians mined its sorry state for song, comedians for laughs, and George H.W. Bush for political advantage, hopping aboard a ferry during his 1988 presidential race against then governor Michael Dukakis and leading camera crews around “the dirtiest harbor in America.” It is now considered one of the country’s cleaner harbors, an unambiguous environmental success story.
The state-of-the-art treatment plant built during the 1990s by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority on Deer Island was the centerpiece of the harbor cleanup. On the same spot from which Eastern Massachusetts’s barely treated sewage once flowed directly into the cold coastal waters, the plant now puts the sewage through a sophisticated two-stage treatment process. The sludge is removed and converted into fertilizer pellets, while the treated water travels through the tunnel. In its final mile, the horizontal tunnel connects with 55 vertical “diffuser risers,” pipes that climb up to the ocean floor and are each topped with a domed cap the shape of a mini Apollo 11 command module. The treated water flows through the tunnel, up the risers, and then out into the sea through sprinkler heads in those diffuser caps. It’s an intricate process designed to slow down and spread out the flow of the treated water, limiting its impact on marine life and water quality.
While the tunnel was being built, there were covers fitted to each sprinkler head, to prevent sea water from getting in. But the tunnel’s designers worried that they wouldn’t offer enough protection. What if a ship anchor dragging along the ocean floor accidentally ripped off one of those space-module diffuser caps, opening up the tunnel to a raging tidal wave? As a secondary measure, they insisted that fiberglass safety plugs be installed near the base of each diffuser riser, to protect the hundreds of subterranean construction workers — known as “sandhogs” — from the ocean above.
Yet after the sandhogs left, those 55 safety plugs still had to be unplugged. While the sprinkler covers could be yanked out by divers swimming down to the seafloor, it would be much harder to pry out the internal safety plugs. And neither the MWRA nor its big-name design firms of Parsons Brinckerhoff and Metcalf & Eddy spelled out how it could be safely done. Instead, they left the responsibility for figuring that out to the construction company that won the contract in 1990 to build the tunnel, a joint venture called Kiewit-Atkinson-Kenny, or KAK.
It should have been clear early on how perilous a task it would be to remove those 65-pound plugs, which resembled industrial-kitchen salad bowls and were nestled deep inside 30-inch-wide pipes way at the end of the tunnel. That’s because the MWRA’s team did make one important stipulation: The plugs could be removed only after the tunnel was done and the sandhogs had cleared out, taking their lighting, transportation, and ventilation systems with them.
Yet if KAK managers were worried, they didn’t let on for years. They had their hands full building the tunnel. So, as with the Big Dig and other mega construction projects, in the end a massive, breathtakingly complicated puzzle would nearly be undone by a relatively small piece.
By 1997, with KAK way behind schedule and late fees piling up, it began a battle over the safety (or “offtake”) plugs with Kaiser Engineers, the company managing the tunnel project for the MWRA. KAK wanted permission to yank the plugs while it still had the main ventilation and lighting systems in the tunnel. Kaiser said no, insisting that “all work in the tunnel be complete before the offtake plugs are removed.” Each side claimed worker safety was its paramount concern. Kaiser said it would be unwise to endanger the lives of hundreds of sandhogs by leaving the tunnel exposed to a possible flood for the months it would take to remove the utilities. KAK countered that the diffuser caps had been undisturbed for their six years on the ocean floor and it would be insanity to put a small number of workers at extreme risk by sending them into the tunnel with no air or light, all in the name of protecting a larger group of workers from an exceedingly small risk. By waiting until the end to pull the plugs, KAK said, “the risk of catastrophe would be exponentially higher.”
After a year of sharply, sometimes theatrically worded memos, Kaiser suggested in 1998 that KAK install a new, smaller ventilation line, which could be taken down quickly after the plugs had been pulled. KAK said that would cost millions and asked the MWRA to pay for it. Kaiser said no, it will be on your dime. Not long after that, KAK did an about-face and called in the dive team.
DJ and his fellow divers were used to danger; they were Navy SEAL sort of guys who run toward it when everybody else is running away. They had been hired not because they would be submerged in water — at the time, there was no more than a few feet of standing water in the tunnel — but because they knew how to do construction work in dicey settings where they had to supply their own breathing air. As it turned out, they would be asked to do something so experimental, requiring them to be so utterly cut off from civilization, that they might as well have been working on the surface of the moon.
Two weeks before that radiant Wednesday morning, as the divers were converging in Tap Taylor’s backyard in southern New Hampshire to begin mobilizing, Tap pulled DJ aside. “I know you’re not going to like this guy Harald,” he told DJ. “But I need you to do me a favor. Keep your opinions to yourself.”
Although they were using Tap’s yard as their staging area, Tap was not in charge. Harald Grob was.
When KAK managers had been casting about for a bold team to solve their safety-plug dilemma, Tap had eagerly stepped forward. He presented a plan that would supply divers with compressed air from tubes stacked on a tractor-trailer and sent as far into the tunnel as possible. But his company, Black Dog Divers, was too small to get the bonding insurance that KAK managers demanded. So they awarded the roughly $800,000 contract to Norwesco Marine of Spokane, Washington. Still, Tap’s company stood to earn more than $100,000 for its junior role providing some of the divers, logistical support, and good relations with the Boston unions.
Norwesco’s man in charge was Harald, a bright engineer from British Columbia who had just turned 40. Tap was used to dealing with engineers who always believed they were the smartest guys in the room. But Harald, whose CV distended over seven pages, including attachments, struck Tap as someone who took this self-assuredness to a new level.
That’s not to say Tap wasn’t dazzled like everyone else by the adventurous, military-ops feel to Harald’s plan. Divers would use souped-up Humvees to travel in the tunnel and get their air from a mixture of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. The liquid gases would be combined right there in the tunnel, and just a few tanks could go a long way. This would make his breathing system easier to transport into the tunnel than Tap’s and allow the divers to work for longer shifts.
In addition to DJ, Tap would be bringing to the project his close friend and former business partner Billy Juse, a friendly MacGyver type whose dark mustache had edges as squared off as tape cut with scissors. A year earlier, Billy had asked Tap to buy out his share of Black Dog. He had been frustrated that he was in his mid-30s, but his 100-hour workweeks were keeping him from building a life with his longtime girlfriend, Michelle. Still, he remained committed to the company’s success and was looking forward to the Deer Island job and working with DJ again.
Standing in Tap’s backyard, DJ had complete trust in Billy. But the handful of divers from the West Coast were a blank slate for him. At first, both camps eyed each other like rival rappers from opposite coasts.
Yet the more they got to know each other that week, doing run-throughs with a sample plug and pipe, the more comfortable the divers became with one another. DJ had originally assumed the West Coast divers were all an extension of Harald. But when the equipment was not coming together the way he had planned, the divers started to bond over their shared frustration with how Harald seemed to be drawing more inward rather than turning to them for input. They also wondered aloud why the centerpiece of his plan, a gas mixer called a MAP Mix 9000, was not on-site for testing. For reasons they could not understand, it was being shipped from Europe, and its arrival had been delayed.
Despite DJ’s growing confidence in the other divers, he regretted that one of his mentors wouldn’t be among them. A few weeks earlier, Ron Kozlowski had pulled DJ aside and told him he was backing out of the job. He suggested DJ do the same. DJ put a lot of stock in what Ron had to say. After all, he had served combat tours in Vietnam, allowing him to see how human nature takes over in life-or-death situations. He told DJ that the way he saw it, the divers were being asked to remove the safety plugs that had protected the sandhogs from a tidal wave tearing through the tunnel. Just what would be there to protect the divers?
“The only way I’d go in is with a boogie board and a .45,” he told DJ. “The boogie board to ride the wave out, and the .45 to keep you guys off my boogie board.”
Donald Hosford, one of the West Coast divers, hoped that when the guys finally began working in the tunnel, the tensions would ease. Instead, they only continued to build. It was clear to him and the other divers that the tunnel project had been going on for a long time and a lot of important players wanted it to be wrapped up yesterday. Hoss — hardly anyone used his real first name, not even him — had a ropy 6-foot-5 build, spiky sandy hair, and the rugged looks of someone who might appear in a magazine ad for the Copenhagen chew he always kept wadded under his lip. He was just 24 years old, but he was already a rising star for Norwesco.
On Monday, July 19, Hoss was one of the five divers who went into the tunnel for the first time using the mixed-liquid gas system, while several other divers stayed back, preparing equipment for the next day’s mission. Just three days earlier, the MAP Mix 9000 had finally arrived at Deer Island. By this time, all ventilation and lighting, except at the start of the tunnel, was gone.
They rode into the tunnel on a Humvee, its engine fortified to handle the oxygen-deficient air. Because there would be no room to turn the vehicle around when it came time to leave, they towed a second Humvee facing the opposite direction. At the base of the shaft, the tunnel was about 24 feet wide, but toward the end it got progressively narrower. After the 9-mile mark, the Humvee could go no farther. Two of the divers stayed on the Humvee, monitoring the main breathing system. The other three left on foot, slogging to the very end of the tunnel, where they would start removing the first of the safety plugs, eventually working their way back.
Hoss was part of the three-man expedition team. They dragged a flat-bottomed metal boat carrying a manifold — a rack with multiple inputs that connected them, through a 1,200-foot hose, to the main breathing system on the Humvee. The hose was called an umbilical because the divers could not survive without it any longer than a baby in the womb could survive without his. In addition, the three divers each had his own umbilical that allowed him to move up to 300 feet away from the boat. As a backup, if their main mixed-gas breathing system failed, there were four canisters of high-pressure, or HP, air strapped to the roof of one of the Humvees, as well as a small supply in the boat.
It didn’t take long for the divers to realize the system was not producing enough air for them. Hoss felt his mask getting sucked into his face, so much so that he’d have to pull it away to take a breath, briefly inhaling the bad tunnel air. The Humvee crew called Harald, who was in his trailer topside. He told them to switch to the backup air, which could be sent through the same umbilicals to Hoss and the other divers who were on foot. Not much later, with the HP air dwindling, they aborted the mission for the day.
Because of the low air quality, the Humvees needed their own air supply and oxygen injection system to work. But when they went to start the Humvee to leave, it wouldn’t work. They ended up having to monkey with the O2 injector for some time until it started.
On Monday night, Harald called the local representative of Topac, a distributor of the MAP Mix 9000, and asked him about the problem of low air production. Harald told the divers the next morning that, at the advice of the rep, he had turned up the regulator inside the mixer.
Around the same time, Hoss called Roger Rouleau, Norwesco’s owner in Spokane, and told him the breathing system was flawed. In his five years with the company, Hoss had grown to view Roger as a businessman focused on dollars and cents, but Hoss hoped that, as a former diver, Roger would take Hoss’s concerns seriously. Roger had stayed back in Washington, but the unusual nature of the Deer Island job had drawn him attention from Spokane’s Journal of Business a few days earlier. “We’ve done a lot of wacky stuff,” he told the journal. “That’s what makes this business fun. The weirder and wackier it is, the better it is for us.” After getting off the phone with Hoss, Roger dialed Harald. Even though Roger was the boss, he had always felt a bit intimidated intellectually by Harald. So when Harald assured him he had worked out the kinks and “this is going to work well,” that was enough for Roger.
In fact, Tuesday didn’t go much better. Among the divers on plug-pulling duty that day was Norwesco’s Dave Riggs, a 38-year-old who had two young children back in Nevada and a touch of his native Texas in his accent. He had one of those last names that sounded like a nickname, so that’s what everyone called him.
Again, the divers complained of not getting enough air from the mixer. And, again, they had trouble starting the Humvee. This time, its battery died, so they spent more than an hour removing the battery from the Humvee they had driven out in and which was now loaded onto the trailer, and installing that battery in the Humvee that they would be driving back to the shaft.
With all the air problems, not to mention the absurd difficulty of crawling around a slippery 5-foot-wide tunnel and through 30-inch-wide pipes, all while wearing breathing equipment, the divers in two days had managed to pull the plugs from only diffuser No. 1 and No. 2. They still had 53 to go.
Out of the tunnel, several guys complained that the system had them worried for their safety. Riggs tried striking a helpful tone, asking Harald if the Norwesco shop back in Washington had an in-line analyzer. The relatively inexpensive gauge, which could be plumbed into the system, would tell the divers precisely what the oxygen level was in the breathing air after it had gone through the mixer but before it made it into the divers’ umbilicals. The in-line analyzer would be far more reliable than the attached air sampler and hand-held monitor they’d been given. “Can we get one of those hotshotted out here?” Riggs asked.
Although he never really answered Riggs’s question, Harald assured the divers that he had made the necessary adjustments. Nonetheless, the complaints intensified out of his earshot, as the drivers rode back to the Howard Johnson’s in Revere. From his motel room, Hoss talked to both his wife and his parents. Uncharacteristically, he opened up about the pit growing in his stomach. They implored him to leave the job, but he said he couldn’t abandon the other guys.
The other divers were feeling similar pangs of worry. That same night, DJ was having his uncomfortable conversation with his mother at their home in Waltham, asking for his grandfather’s Virgin Mary medal. And at five minutes to 6 the next morning, Billy called his mother, Olga, in Florida, to ask a last-minute question about homeowner’s insurance for the New Hampshire house he and Michelle were preparing to close on. He knew his mom, who worked in a law office, would have the answer. But Olga sensed an unusual heaviness in his voice. So she asked him how the job was going, expecting he would perk up and deliver one of his standard upbeat responses. He didn’t, telling her, “I’m working in this godawful hole.”
For all the drama leading up to Wednesday, there was a certain calm to the morning once the guys got into the tunnel. Hoss rode 400 feet down the shaft, sharing the basket with Riggs and DJ and his Virgin Mary-adorned hard hat. At the base, they found Billy going over pre-mission checklists with Tim Nordeen of Norwesco. Hoss always liked working with Tim, a 39-year-old Texas native with an easygoing gentleness to him behind his husky, bearded exterior.
Just after 8 a.m., Hoss hopped into the passenger’s seat of the forward-facing Humvee, which Billy was driving. Tim sat in the driver’s seat of the Humvee being towed, with Riggs riding shotgun and DJ in the back. Then they began the roughly two-hour drive through standing water out toward the end of the tunnel.
Just before the point where the ambient oxygen ran out and they would have to don their face masks, Riggs took a few swigs from his Mountain Dew. When the Humvees could go no farther, around the 9-mile mark, Hoss hopped out, and he and Riggs began loading the boat with gear. They would head out on foot as part of that day’s expedition crew, with Hoss serving as foreman. Billy was supposed to be their third man. But his back was hurting him from the plug-pulling operation the day before, so he opted to stay in the Humvee and asked DJ to go in his place.
DJ balked, calling him a wuss. Maybe so, Billy said, “But I’m your boss.” They both laughed.
“All right, I’ll go,” DJ said. “But when I bring those plugs back, you’re loading them in the Humvee.”
As the foreman, Hoss would have a direct communications wire connecting him to Tim in the Humvee. Before the three-man team left, Tim told Hoss to call with frequent updates, so he could relay them up to Harald.
Topside, there wasn’t much for Harald and Tap to do in between those updates. As the morning wore on, Tap did an on-air phone interview with a Boston TV station — commenting not about the tunnel but rather the big story of the day. A few nights earlier, JFK Jr.’s plane had crashed off Martha’s Vineyard, and that morning divers were recovering his body.
Meanwhile, in the pitch blackness of down under, Hoss set up the boat with the breathing manifold around diffuser No. 4, just before the final stretch of the tunnel choked down to the 5-foot diameter. DJ and Riggs had lumbered and crawled out to the very end, to diffusers No. 1 and No. 2, to grab the plugs that had been yanked the day before and drag them back a few hundred feet to load them in the boat. Then they went to work removing the plug from diffuser No. 3. Riggs had the toughest job. He had to pump out any water in the 30-inch-wide pipe connecting the diffuser riser to the tunnel, then shimmy into the pipe, use a special wrench to remove the steel clips holding the plug in place, and then carefully slide both the plug components and his 5-foot-8 body out of the pipe without disturbing his breathing equipment. After he was done, DJ had to go into the pipe with a video camera to document the plug removal, and then they had to load the plug onto the boat. With the plug out of diffuser No. 3, Riggs moved on to No. 4.
Just after 1 p.m., Hoss began untangling the various hoses that had started to spool around his feet. He looked up to see DJ sit down on the tunnel floor, in a strange kind of involuntary slow motion.
“Are you OK, DJ?” Hoss yelled, muffled through his face mask.
Before he could finish his sentence, Riggs went down next, falling on one knee in front of DJ.
Hoss suddenly felt lightheaded himself, in a warm and fuzzy way, as though he had just tossed back a few cocktails. He had enough presence of mind to know that warm and fuzzy was not what you want to be when you’re 9½ miles away from land, hundreds of feet below the sea. “I need to call Tim,” he shouted.
Hoss reached Tim on his communications wire and pressed him for what the oxygen level was on the breathing system — anything under 19 percent meant trouble. He said he’d check. A few seconds later, he called back. “It’s 9.8!” Tim said, frantically. “We’re going on HP air.”
Then the line went dead.
Hoss lunged toward the manifold in the boat and flicked the lever. That switched off the mixed gas flowing into their face masks from the Humvee and replaced it with air from a canister of emergency HP they’d brought with them on the boat. He looked over to see both DJ and Riggs coming to, seeming a bit disoriented, as though startled to wake up from an unexpected flash of sleep behind the wheel of a car.
Hoss was still disoriented himself. When he couldn’t get Tim on the phone, he didn’t panic. He figured he and Billy had stepped outside the Humvee to check on the liquid gas tanks. Or maybe the water that he spotted on the microphone attached to his communications wire had somehow fried the system, making it impossible for Tim to reach him.
Still, Hoss was taking no chances. He decided the expedition crew should pack up and head back to the Humvee. Then, as they were winding up all their hoses, Riggs’s face mask started to free flow, leaving him unable to slow the rush of air hissing into his system. This was bad for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which it was a surefire way to burn through their emergency air in no time. Riggs decided to kink up his hose, opening it just enough to breathe, and then closing it after every breath.
The divers then began the 1,200-foot walk back down the dark narrow tunnel to the Humvees, dragging the boat with them. Hoss was sure that he would find Billy and Tim standing beside the vehicles, shining their miner’s lamps, and giving him, Riggs, and DJ a hard time for having screwed up the communications system.
As they made their approach, Riggs whistled as loud as he could. No response. Then the Humvees came into view. Suddenly, DJ yelled out, “Man down!” and sprinted ahead. Billy was lying outside the passenger door of one of the Humvees. DJ checked for a pulse, but there wasn’t one.
Inside the same Humvee, Tim was seated, his neck turned toward the breathing-system controls behind him, his head slumped over. Hoss didn’t know what had struck down Billy and Tim, but he knew what they were doing when they died: trying to switch the main system over to the backup air and save the lives of their fellow divers 1,200 feet away.
With the emergency air supply on the boat dwindling fast, Hoss was counting on using the four canisters of backup HP air strapped to the roof of the Humvee. But because the valves were open, Hoss couldn’t be sure which system — HP or mixed gas — was responsible for the bad air that had flowed to their face masks. The backup air couldn’t be trusted, therefore it couldn’t be used.
DJ was trying to revive Billy by doing chest compressions and “purging” his face mask with blasts of air. Distraught that it wasn’t working, DJ looked up at Riggs, who was still forced to kink and unkink his hose for every breath. He saw Riggs looking at the bodies and then down the long black tunnel to the shaft. DJ thought to himself: Riggs wants to leave now. He wants to run!
That’s when it dawned on him: They were so far from civilization that they might as well have been on the moon. Bad air had killed two of the divers, and the rest of them could very well be next. And nobody was coming in to rescue them.
As comfortable as he’d gotten with Hoss and Riggs, they were still basically strangers to him. The only guy on the team he really knew was now lying lifeless in his arms. Is this what Ron Kozlowski was talking about, when he warned him about how men can turn on each other in life-or-death situations? DJ had no boogie board, no .45.
He thought to himself: Are these guys going to stick with me? If they didn’t, he knew they had no hope of making it out alive.
August 30, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: boston harbor, divers, Donald Hosford, dress shoes, foot shaft, logan airport, oxygen, peninsula, Ron Kozlowski, sewer tunnel | Comments Off
Tonight the Big Blue Tech team and various customers depart for 5 days of cave and cavern diving in Khao Sok National Park
During this time there will be no news as the national park has no internet in it’s untouched natural beauty.
We’ll be back in the office on the 29th of August with a trip report and pictures.
For more information or to join our next event click – [ Khao Sok National Park Trip - September ]
August 24, 2009 | Categories: Big Blue Tech - Thailand | Tags: cave diving, cavern diving, khao sok national park | 1 Comment »
On a quiet spring morning, when the Arab villagers were at Friday prayers, Herve Jaubert dragged his rubber dinghy down an empty beach, started the engine, and chugged away to freedom.
As befits a former French naval officer and spy, he had made immaculate preparations for his escape from the United Arab Emirates.
The night before, he claims he had donned wetsuit and scuba diving gear, which had smuggled to him from France in pieces. He dressed himself in women’s clothes, and covered himself with a black abaya, the all-enveloping burka-like robe worn to preserve modesty in the Gulf.
Not a small man, he shuffled awkwardly out of the hotel where he was staying under an assumed name, made his way to the seafront and slipped in.
From there, he swam underwater to the nearby coastguard station, on a remote outpost of the emirate of Fujairah, where he cut the fuel lines on a police patrol boat. He knew it was the only one in the area, and the coast would now be clear.
On his dinghy the next day, it took six hours to reach his destination: a sailing boat, crewed by a fellow former French spy, that was waiting just outside UAE territorial waters.
He clambered aboard, turned the prow towards India, and for the first time since he alleges the Dubai secret police had threatened to insert needles up his nose a year before, felt the fear in his stomach dissipate. He was free.
This, at least, is the remarkable escape story that Mr Jaubert has begun to tell from the safety of his new home in Florida. It will form the centrepiece of a book he is publishing this autumn.
To the Emirati authorities, on the other hand, he is a liar and convicted fraudster.
The publication of his book, Escape from Dubai, is set to be another of the battlegrounds on which the emirate is trying to restore its reputation as a place to do business in the face of the financial crisis.
Although many other foreign businessmen have fallen foul of the Dubai authorities since the first cracks began to appear in its property-led investment boom, none was involved in anything quite as eccentric as the construction of miniature luxury submarines.
That was Mr Jaubert’s business, and his involvement with Dubai began when a man called Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem visited the company he had set up in Florida to serve a speciality tourist market three years after leaving the French secret service, DGSE, in 1993.
Mr bin Sulayem suggested Mr Jaubert might move his work to the Gulf. In the balmy waters off Dubai, filling as it was with luxurious hotels and offshore villa developments in the shape of palm trees or the countries of the world, mini-submarines would be yet another attraction.
It was too good an opportunity to miss. Even when Mr Jaubert arrived, along with his Lamborghini, and found he would not be running his own firm, he was not overly alarmed. He was put in charge of a newly formed subsidiary of the company Mr bin Sulayem chaired, Dubai World, which was also responsible for the emirate’s signature palm-shaped developments.
For a while, life was good. Everything was laid on to the highest quality, he says. The factory built by Dubai World was excellent, finished to the highest standards.
“You could have built an F16 fighter jet there,” Mr Jaubert said.
He lived with his American wife and two children in a villa with private swimming pool.
At weekends, he would speed up the desert highways in his Lamborghini, or take to the sand dunes in one of his two Hummers.
After a couple of years, the boats started coming off the production lines.
Four mini-submarines, a submersible yacht, and, finally, his pride and joy, a larger vessel he called the Nautilus, after the submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which could carry nine people.
It is from here that accounts begin to differ.
According to a case brought against Mr Jaubert after he fled the country, and which led to his being convicted in his absence and given a jail term of five years this summer, at least two of his submarines did not work.
Auditors investigating the company accounts found gaps, the court was told.
Equipment that Mr Jaubert had ordered from his own company in Florida failed to arrive, or parts were faulty.
All told, he is alleged to have short-changed Dubai World by 14 million dirhams – just over £2 million.
Mr Jaubert claims Dubai World had run into cash flow difficulties, and had come across a central problem with its submarine business plan.
Running them â ” particularly the insurance costs â ” was expensive, and it was not clear who the customers were likely to be. He claims Dubai World wanted to pull out of the venture but first wanted someone to blame.
From 2007, Mr Jaubert underwent lengthy questioning at the hands of both the authorities – the state security or secret police, he says – and Dubai World’s auditors.
It was the police, he said, who threatened to “insert needles into your nose again and again”.
Mr Jaubert has a recording that he said he made on his mobile phone.
“Do you know how painful it is to have needles put inside your nose repeatedly and then twisted around?” the interrogator said. “Do you think you can resist this kind of pain?”
Mr Jaubert made a promise to the auditors to pay back the 14 million dirham, a fact which was to form a central plank of the prosecution case against him. He said he did so only to win himself time.
He was forced to hand in his passport to prevent him leaving the country. After doing so, he made the decision to send his family back to America.
Once they had safely left, Mr Jaubert reverted to his training as a spy to go “underground”, living under assumed identities in a series of Dubai hotels until he was able to escape.
Dubai World is dismissive of Mr Jaubert’s allegations, saying that he is now a convicted fraudster whose stories should not be taken seriously.
A spokesman said: “As with any large enterprise anywhere, from time to time financial wrongdoing is uncovered.
“We take the necessary legal steps when that happens and hand the matter to the police.
“After due and proper legal process, the court found Herve Jaubert guilty of embezzlement and he has been sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to repay 14â million dirham. This is entirely appropriate.” But the organisation is also fighting for its own reputation. Of all Dubai’s numerous government-linked companies, Dubai World is the most closely associated with its rise to glitzy pre-eminence in recent years, and the most closely associated with the debts that have followed.
The property subsidiary that built the Palm islands and the World has to repay a $3.5 billion (£2.1 billion) bond by December, and has not yet said how it is going to do so.
With work on many of its high-profile developments, including the World, slowed or stopped, it is not clear where, other than a government bail-out, the money is going to come from.
A company statement on the Nasdaq Dubai stock exchange website gives Dubai World’s total debts as $59 billion (£35.7 billion).
But it also says that the company’s assets are greater than its liabilities.
As for Mr Jaubert, he is now back in Florida. Although some may see his own greed and ambition as the authors of his misfortune, he denies that he put common sense aside in order to live the good life.
“I am a down-to-earth entrepreneur, and I didn’t do the Dubai glitz and glamour,” he said. “I had my Lamborghini, but I didn’t use it to show off like other people in Dubai. It is 15 years old anyway.”
He says that, of course, knowing he will now never go back. Eight days after leaving the beach in May last year, his small boat finally dropped anchor in Mumbai, more than 1,000 miles to the south-east.
“For a year in Dubai, when I had the authorities after me, when I was going to the police and prosecutors, I lived with fear,” he said.
“I may be a sky diver, a former navy officer, but I had fear in my stomach every day.
“You don’t know how relieved I felt when I reached international waters.”
August 24, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: black abaya, french naval officer, french spy, rebreather, rubber dinghy, scuba diving gear, united arab emirates | 1 Comment »
A few days ago some members of the Big Blue Tech team revisited the little wreck in Japanese Gardens dive site that was sunk on purpose a few months ago.
Christos visited this wreck recently with Yvonne Fries and Sonia Cork to get some pictures and practice taking still shots on a wreck.
The wreck has become very popular on koh tao. It opens up the ability for more people to experience wreck diving in Koh Tao, an experience that was previously reserved for only experienced divers.
Below are some pictures from his dives.
August 23, 2009 | Categories: Big Blue Tech - Thailand | Tags: japanese gardens, shipwreck diving, wreck diving, wreck thailand | 2 Comments »
By Michael S. Glenn
Diving is an incredible adventure full of wonderful sights and experiences for everyone who ventures to explore that part of our world. However, for some dedicated professionals the water isn’t that pristine body that encompasses beauty and exploration but rather a harsh working environment pitted with potential hazards seldom addressed by the recreational community. In fact, the water itself has become a formidable opponent to safe diving operations for several groups of divers.
Public safety and commercial dive units have had to address the potential risks associated with operating in specific bodies of water; due to a plethora of contaminants. Contaminants can come in the form of organic and inorganic compounds, viral and bacterial strains, chemical and radiological pollution and manmade waste. Ironically, the same compounds you would expect to find in a common household commode are the same compounds surrounding you every time you enter the water: feces, urine, bacteria, viruses and chemical pollutants.
Contamination and pollution have existed since the dawn of mankind. By-products of civilization have often been washed or thrown into the water or through rain fall found their way into the watershed. California divers have a term for the first rainfall of the season, known as the first flush. The first flush refers to the high level of contaminants being washed into the waters. During this time the level of pollution is so high that it can create a health risk to the divers. During this time diving operations are generally suspended until the level of contaminants dilutes to safer concentrations. In other parts of the world, divers are exposed to agricultural waste and run-off, chemical manufacturing deposits and even amoebas and small bacterium.
Contamination also takes several other forms, more common to today’s society. Trash, illegal dumping and carelessness create several complications for public safety divers. Animal carcasses, trash and refuse are often dumped into the water to avoid proper disposal or clean-up. The recovery of human remains is of utmost importance, as this is a primary role of most public safety units. Necrotic tissues, voided bowels, gastric juices, etc.., all expose the diver to potential blood-borne pathogens. Ironically, any environments where animal carcasses have been deposited pose the same risks.
Several public safety dive teams have instituted a water testing and collection aspect to their dive operations. Units are collecting water samples and maintaining them for testing procedures, should divers become ill or suffer any acute onset of illness. Other units have employed a working relationship with their local department of water quality to have them test the water prior to any dive operation. Any attempt to collect and test the water quality is commendable. However, in some cases even the collection phase can destroy the ability to test for certain contaminants, like fecal coliforms. Another complication is that water quality can change from day to day. Dive teams are encouraged to perform periodic testing on all of the bodies of water in their area and maintain a written log for review and recordkeeping purposes. Finally, and most frustrating, divers generally do not actually dive when performing operations. Divers generally travel through the water column to the bottom where they spend a lot of time in or on the sediment. Heavy metals and items with higher specific gravities settle in this environment and therefore the levels of concentrations can vary greatly. General water collection from the surface does not allow for water quality testing throughout the water column or sediment concentrations. Dive teams can effectively enter into a working agreement with soil management departments in their state to inspect and evaluate sediment samples collected during diving operations.
Public safety divers cannot extensively test for all of the contaminants potentially present in the dive environment. However, they can mitigate potential exposure concerns by employing effective personal protective equipment measures.
Contaminants can enter the body through several avenues: inhalation, ingestion, absorption and injection modes. Inhalation is the largest and easiest manner for the introduction of a contaminant into the divers’ body and can easily be mitigated by the use of a full face mask. It is recommended to use a positive pressure full face mask for diving where gaseous concentrations may be high at or immediately above the waterline. The use of standard second stage regulators is forbidden for any contaminated water operations as they do not provide any protection against inhalation complications. Full face masks can also mitigate ingestion issues, as water cannot enter the divers’ mouth and nose while wearing such a unit properly. Absorption can be managed effectively by utilizing a dry suit instead of a wetsuit. Dry suits keep the water from contacting the skin. As your skin has millions of pores, orifices and openings; removing water contact is the number one priority. Not all dry suits are equal. Cloth based and neoprene suits can by their design trap small concentrations of contaminants in the fabric, which may never release from the suit, even after decontamination. Divers operating in these environments tend to prefer vulcanized rubber, polyurethane an even the newer NITEC material, designed by Trelleborg/Viking. In addition, dry hoods, glove systems and attached boots are all mandatory additional items for dry suits being used in these campaigns. Finally and often overlooked are injection complications. Divers are continually exposed to rough edges, sharp materials, exposed metals, fish hooks and other complications when diving. Adding gloves, knee and shin guards, work type soles on boots and even over suits can aid in avoiding potentially dangerous punctures to your dive system while operating in polluted waters.
As important to mitigating exposure by proper personal protective equipment, teams need to research and employ decontamination procedures for all dive operations. Decontamination can be easily performed by topside personnel by employing common available anti bacterial, anti-viral cleaning solutions, cleaning solutions that break down oil and grease solutions and fresh water. It is important that the diver be scrubbed form head to toe while still encapsulated and then allowed to undress one piece of equipment at a time. The equipment can be cleaned then laid out to dry, inspected in the field and then removed to a clean location for finite cleaning. Finite cleaning entails the disassembly of all equipment to its nuts and bolts and then performing cleaning to each item. Disassembly and reassembly should only be done by properly trained technicians.
Tenders and surface support should also employ personal protective equipment to avoid exposure to run-off from the diver. Tenders should wear protective suits, respiratory protection, eyewear, gloves and boots during all decontamination procedures. These items need to be cleaned and inspected exactly like the divers’ equipment and gear.
At this time there has been no known record management system maintained on public safety divers regarding exposure and overall health. No one knows what the long term effect of operating in these environments is on the health of any diver. However, there have been several incidents recorded by public safety divers, commercial and military divers which suggest there is a health risk present. Therefore it is recommended that dive units maintain a written log of any dive/post dive medical issues or complications for all divers and tenders…to obtain this important data. Dive units can generate a running record on all divers by simply sending out an e-mail to the divers asking if they have had any complications after a dive or every week / bi-weekly. If the diver has any complications a written follow-up should be obtained and the record maintained in the divers personnel file. Please note that medical questions and information are HIPA sensitive, in the USA, and as a result are protected and private.
Diving in potentially contaminated water is hazardous and challenging. However, with the employment of proper equipment, training and planning these operations can be performed safely, proficiently and professionally. Every dive operation encountered by public safety divers should be considered a dive in polluted waters and as such the safety of the unit should be the paramount concern. Dive units can effectively manage and mitigate risks, obtain running records and maintain health monitoring information by employing simple measures. The intent is to make sure the divers are safe and at the end of their career get to go home because they want to, not because they have to.
Michael S. Glenn is the Instructor / Coordinator, Crime Scene Technologies at North Carolina Justice Academy in Salemburg, NC
August 22, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: commercial dive, erdi courses thailand, hazmat divers, public safety diver, working environment | 1 Comment »
The TDI Advanced Nitrox course is designed to train the divers in the benefits, hazards and proper procedures for utilizing Enriched air nitrox through to one hundred (100%) percent oxygen for dives not requiring decompression To a depth of forty (40) msw, one hundred thirty (130) fsw.
The popularity of this course can further be illustrated with the recent shift in PADI’s technical diving arm DSAT to adopt the TDI style of courses which is to be released September 1st.
The course in itself gives the student many great new abilities as a diver. Of those include certification to 40m, above 40% nitrox use and the ability to dive in technical diving gear.
Yesterday Big Blue Tech completed such a course for Andy Holdaway , Panos Iosifoglo and Jean-Louis Rocheron. This course was also assited by Christos Kardana who was documenting the event with his under water camera.
The students excelled at the new gear and learning that extra buoyancy skills was introduced to help improve their confidence in the gear, these skills are typically found in the TDI Intro to Tech or GUE Foundations courses. This is essential for Panos and Andy who are continuing on to their TDI Cavern Course in a few days and later to more progressive technical diving course, they will use their new certification diving with twin tanks in the fresh water caves of Khao Sok National Park. Jean-Louis benefited from the extra skills and time to practice because he returns to work in France and might not have much time to dive again until next holiday.
Below are some pictures of the course.
August 21, 2009 | Categories: Big Blue Tech - Thailand | Tags: advanced, air nitrox, buoyancy, cavern, decompression, dives, diving course, diving gear, dsat, Enriched, foundations, fresh water, GUE, khao sok national park, oxygen, padi, tdi, tech, twin tanks, water camera, water caves | 2 Comments »
So, you’re on a mission in limited visibility water and can barely see your gauges to check your air status. Your team has been in the water for over four hours looking for what you have just found. As you collect data for the report you will soon be writing, you feel that ever annoying yet recognizable tug somewhere on your SCUBA system. It does not take long for you to realize that you have become entangled with multiple strands of both mono filament fishing line and what appears to be lines that your one team has introduced to the scene.
Being the superbly trained diver that you are, you calmly look at your gauge. “No problem, plenty of air”, you think to yourself. You stop and think in order to resolve your own problem as you have been trained. You reach for your cutting instrument, your handy dandy dive knife with its serrated edge and line cutter, cool! With the precision of Daniel Boone himself, you begin to hack your way out of your predicament.
As you begin the task of cutting your way out, you say to yourself, “Self, this is not as easy as it is supposed to be.” Your breathing begins to increase as your workload rises and anxiety sets in. You have already sent line signals to your team above that there is a problem and help is on the way.
As they arrive they see glimpses of what appears to be a Tasmanian devil spinning and slashing at the enemy with blade in hand. Realizing that it would not be good to approach from the front, you are finally calmed when your buddy touches you on the shoulder and gives you the OK sign. You relax as you feel what seemed like endless miles of line letting loose. What had taken you so much energy and time to attempt with a knife, your buddy had accomplished in seconds with his $8.00 pair of EMT shears.
Right about now you have drawn the line in the sand and jumped on one side of it or the other. “What an idiot”, you proclaim! “A knife works just fine in the hands of a competent diver.” I agree. However, let me point out some things that may change your mind.
We have all heard the term “Muscle Memory” before, yes? I discovered how prevalent this is quite by accident in recent training with my team. While training for what we call stress inoculation, we built what amounts to be a cage constructed of PVC that is 10 feet long and four feet wide and tall. With safety divers on both sides and in shallow water so the diver can stand up, the training diver enters the cage that is filled with crossed lines of various sizes to ensure beyond any doubt, that you will get tangled.
The drill allows you to practice the skills of using your cutting tools in a controlled and safe environment. It teaches you patience, to recognize where your problem is, to remain calm and not to frantically spin around. Divers are allowed to enter the cage the first time and are encouraged to solve their problems without even using a tool. After they are comfortable, they re-enter the cage with mask blacked out to simulate what most of us really dive in.
I was fascinated by what I saw. From the most experienced divers, to the new boot on the team, cutting the lines with a knife presented some interesting challenges. I could not for the life of me figure out why divers with thousands of dives and certifications galore were having similar problems as the folks with less than a hundred dives. Then it hit me.
How often throughout our lives have we used dive knives to cut things with vs. the thousands of things we have cut with scissors? Muscle Memory! Since we were kids, we have cut everything from strings and ropes to aluminum, pennies and your brother’s favorite pajamas. Sorry mom! It should not surprise each of us to hear that it is easier to do.
Prove it for yourself. Grab a small rope and try it with your team members, but don’t tell them what you are doing. Observe. What you will see is that everybody uses the knife in a different way; some with more success than others. With the scissors, everybody will cut the rope and look at you as if to ask, “What’s the big deal?”
I have watched as divers have almost cut themselves, their buddies, their air hoses, their own safety lines, and anything else they can grab as they pass through the entanglement cage. Where it takes most experienced divers 2-3 minutes to clear themselves with a knife, the same diver can do it in half of that with scissors and with much less thrashing about and near misses. Don’t take my word for it, try it yourself. You don’t even need to be in the water.
Now for those of you who are asking yourself who is this pacifist and how dare he suggest we give up our knives. Slow your role cowboy, I never suggested you give up your knives. Heaven forbid you give up that custom 10” titanium Spartan short sword you bought on sale at the local swap meet. No, you may still need that for prying yourself out of some other predicament you get yourself into. I am certain that is what most divers use knives for anyway!
I am merely suggesting that scissors, EMT shears, have proven to be much more efficient at cutting lines than knives. I suggest that all Public Safety Divers carry both and practice with both. If you already do, then kudos to you! By doing so, you become a stronger asset to yourself and your team mates. I have implemented this with my basic students in the private sector as well. It just makes good sense!
Tim Morin is an ERDI instructor and a member of the Riverside County Sheriffs department.
August 21, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: competent diver, dive knife, erdi, gauge, line cutter, line signals, predicament, public safety diver, scuba system, tdi | Comments Off
The day finally comes that you find yourself on the deck of a dive boat; out to experience the depths of the sea, the haunting beauty of a lost warship or the mysterious network of underwater caves, you’ll feel a particular sense of pride at the overcome challenges of being a lady diver.
No one knows that you’ve taken ‘The Pill’ for three extra days so as to avoid any unpleasant cycles of nature while sharing a marine toilet with thirty five men. Not a single person has yet to notice the added weights stuffed in your under-suit bra because despite the otherwise perfect distribution you’re familiar with on twin 15 liter steels, feeling a little bloated means rearing up like a seahorse in an overhead environment.
You are confident, self assured and ready for the dive of a lifetime. ….Right up until someone switches out of your group. Sure, you might hear a mumble about it being bad luck, attracting sharks, or a question of capabilities, but recognize this behavior for what it is: Nothing more than growing pains of an industry that is improving every day, every dive.
We have undoubtedly experienced marked progress for women in the recreational field. Entire lines of equipment are now devoted to your slender, more curved physique. It’s possible to choose from a range of pastel colors for fins, masks and even second stage regulator covers. The world it seems, has taken notice of the lady diver and cashed in on what is still a relatively niche market.
There are gender friendly live-aboards that offer cabin arrangements for all preferences, orientations and comfort levels. Companies have gradually become aware and started offering a choice of instructors based not just on linguistic abilities, but customer comfort level as well. This is important when taking a dive holiday abroad where the attitudes towards women may vary.
Perhaps the single most important achievement in repetitive dive medicine for the female world is the availability of Diflucan; (Floconazole) a one-time treatment orally administered that halts Candida in its tracks. A less than romantic side to discovering the depths of the blue is that the female anatomy wasn’t meant to wear a wetsuit for hours at a time. By speaking with your doctor and placing a single innocent tablet in your first aid box, you can enjoy your much anticipated vacation, assured that a yeast infection won’t be creating misery when you ought to be having the time of your life.
By never taking no for an answer, women have forged ahead and forced manufactures to sit up, take notice and find solutions to our diving differences. The advancements that have been made in recreational diving, however, still have a long way to go in technical diving.
Once past the 40 meter/120 foot line though, it’s all a boy’s world. This is evident not just in the gear options and color choice, but in the mindset and physiological differences between the sexes. Harnesses aren’t meant for the 32 in. / 81.3 cm. chest size if it’s accompanied by a 24 in. /64 cm. waist.
Extra training and practice must go into learning how to clip and unclip a cummerbund, crotch strap, weight belt, deco bottles, reels and basically anything that sits below your chest while visually impaired or outright blocked by your breasts. Add the bulk of counter-lungs over them for rebreather diving, and vision limitations are second only to the possible feelings of suffocation that accompany literally being unable to look down. While this doesn’t apply to everyone, the variation in female shape makes it much more likely that your technical kit will not be ready to wear without a lot of customization and adjustment.
Quality harness modification is essential to having a safe dive, and if you’ll be spending hours upon hours in it during deco, comfort is a necessity. Finding an industrial grade sewing machines such as those used by leather works can save you a lot of frustration and insure a strong seam. For a fee, many small businesses are willing to do alterations to even the thickets webbing. Don’t expect to get it right the first time. Test all modifications in a pool before attempting any overhead or decompression dives. You might discover that a little bit of pinching in one place is just mildly irritating for a few minutes, but after hours, it can become a disabling pain. Before you set out, make sure all your equipment is suited for your form. It might cost a bit of extra money and time, but investing in your gear is investing in your safety.
From here, things only become more embarrassing of a struggle. Without the luxury of P-valves in the female dry suit, cold water diving is decidedly in the male’s favor. It isn’t possible to find a bit of privacy on a rib or even a beach dive. Biological functions become an epic event requiring at least another pair of helping hands to get you re-zipped. Even in the sphere of medical technology, women are still trailing. As bottom times increase, the trend has turned towards catheter use. For what is no more difficult than slipping on a condom for men, it involves hair removal, leakage protection and adhesive for women. If this doesn’t have you cringing, consider the alternative: A less involved but much more debatable method is an indwelling, or internal catheters. When forced to choose between gluing odd plastics to your most sensitive area (and the need to subsequently remove them later) or having a tube shoved literally into your bladder, the question of your dedication, determination and passion for the ocean is no longer question. Ever again.
After all the struggles you’ve faced just to get here, don’t let something so small knock you down. Underwater, in 100 lbs. /220 kg. of dive gear, no one will be able to see gender. Pull your weight, don’t show off and pretty soon you won’t be singled out for being a lady diver; you’ll be respected as a technical lady diver
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August 20, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: customer comfort, dive boat, dive holiday, female deep divers, female divers, female technical divers, haunting beauty, lady tech, linguistic abilities, live aboards, marine toilet, niche market, overhead environment, repetitive dive, stage regulator, taking a dive, technical diving, technical diving women, underwater caves, women divers | 3 Comments »
A recreational diver who explored the seabed off Shag Harbour, N.S., where a UFO is alleged to have crashed in 1967, says what he saw last month can’t be explained.
David Cvet and a diving buddy came across a couple of dish-shaped depressions, each about six metres in diameter. The ocean bottom anomalies were found 11 fathoms, or about 20 metres, below the surface, in the spot where witnesses say an alien craft swooshed low over the Shelburne County coast.
“In the depression itself, it was as if somebody had come by the day before and swept it clean,” said Cvet on Friday during the Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society’s second annual festival and symposium.
He said the depression was lined with pebbles about four to six centimetres in size. The surrounding seabed had large rocks and pebbles and vegetation.
On Oct. 4, 1967, several witnesses described seeing something crash into the sea off Shag Harbour. In fact, people as far away as Yarmouth, N.S., reported seeing something streak across the night sky.
There were no reports of aircraft in trouble that evening, even though a patch of yellow foam about seven centimetres thick was seen on the water off Shag Harbour not long afterwards. The incident has been listed as a UFO crash.
Cvet, who’s from Toronto but summers in Smith’s Cove, N.S., said he’s known about the Shag Harbour UFO incident for many years.
“I think (it) has enough compelling evidence to warrant further investigation,” he said.
On July 20, Cvet used a copy of a 1988 report from a bottom sonar sweep of the area that found four dish-shaped anomalies.
He and a friend worked out the co-ordinates and planned their dive.
“We left from Lower Woods Harbour and came down to this location and dropped a buoy overboard,” he said, tracing the boat’s 25-minute trip on a map with his finger.
The divers entered the water just before 2 p.m., about 10 minutes before low tide. It was a pleasant 24 degrees on the surface and about 16 degrees at the bottom.
“The water was pretty much like pea soup,” Cvet recalled.
Nevertheless, they soon came upon the first of two depressions.
August 19, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: alien craft, anomalies, ocean bottom, recreational diver, seabed, shag harbour, shelburne county, ufo crash, ufo incident | 3 Comments »
A group of archeologists from Yogyakarta have discovered ancient Chinese ceramic artifacts estimated to date from between the 13th and 16th century AD in the waters around Genting Island, off the coast of the Central Java town of Jepara.
Head of the team, Priyatno Hadi Sulistyarto, said Friday the findings indicated that the Java Sea was a busy international trade route.
“From the features of the artifacts, which depict animal and flower motifs, albeit not so detailed, we assume the commodities were manufactured as mass products. They have characteristics commonly found in the Ming Dynasty,” Priyatno said.
The 16 member team includes three underwater archeologists. A dive master from the Association of Indonesian Diving Sports was hired to lead the underwater search.
The artifacts were located 200 meters from the coast, at a depth of between two and 2.5 meters.
Local resident Suminto, 28, said people on the island were aware of the artifacts for a long time but did not think they were historical items.
Priyatno said his team was originally searching for a shipwreck around Genting Island and the remaining parts of Karimunjawa Islands
August 18, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: Archeologists, ceramic artifacts, chinese artifacts, dive master, java sea, ming dynasty, shipwreck, underwater search | 1 Comment »
Sylvia Earle, called “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times, “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress and “Hero for the Planet” by Time, is an oceanographer, explorer, author and lecturer with a deep commitment to research through personal exploration.
Earle’s work has been at the frontier of deep ocean exploration for four decades. Earle has led more than 50 expeditions worldwide involving more than 6,000 hours underwater. As captain of the first all-female team to live underwater, she and her fellow scientists received a ticker-tape parade and White House reception upon their return to the surface. In 1979, Sylvia Earle walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any other woman before or since. In the 1980s she started the companies Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technologies with engineer Graham Hawkes to design and build undersea vehicles that allow scientists to work at previously inaccessible depths. In the early 1990s, Dr. Earle served as Chief Scientist of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. At present she is explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.
Sylvia Earle is a dedicated advocate for the world’s oceans and the creatures that live in them. Her voice speaks with wonder and amazement at the glory of the oceans and with urgency to awaken the public from its ignorance about the role the oceans plays in all of our lives and the importance of maintaining their health.
“We’ve got to somehow stabilize our connection to nature so that in 50 years from now, 500 years, 5,000 years from now there will still be a wild system and respect for what it takes to sustain us.”
Sylvia Earle
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August 17, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: chief scientist, deep ocean engineering, deepness, expeditions, library of congress, living legend, national geographic society, national oceanographic and atmospheric administration, ocean exploration, ocean technologies, oceans, sea floor, sylvia earle, undersea vehicles | 2 Comments »
On the evening of June 25th, 2009, the Ecuadorian Environmental Police, acting on information provided by Sea Shepherd Galapagos, raided a fisherman’s house on Santa Cruz Island. The Environmental Police were supported by the Galapagos National Park Service and the K9 Police Unit.
Thanks to the excellent work of the dogs and their guides, the police quickly found 52 large shark fins inside the house. The dried and fresh fins weighed about 30 pounds. They were cut from Black Tip sharks and Galapagos sharks. Additionally, the police confiscated a substantial amount of illegal fishing gear (hooks, nets, and long lines) used in the illegal shark fishing industry.
Although Ecuadorian law permits sharks to be caught as by-catch near the Ecuadorian mainland, fishing for sharks is absolutely prohibited inside the Galapagos Marine Reserve.
The shark fins have an estimated street value of $10,000.
The suspect is under detention. Sea Shepherd will continue to assist in the case to secure a conviction and proper sentence.
August 16, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: bust, environmental police, fisherman, fishing gear, galapagos national park, galapagos sharks, santa cruz island, sea shepherd, shark fins, shark fishing | 1 Comment »
From Mares via Press release
Dear Customer,
Please be informed that we have discovered a quality issue on the O-ring assembled on the Nemo Air
Quick Connector.
Under certain circumstances the O-ring can fail and consequently Nemo Air may start leaking through the
Quick Connector. As a result, there is a continuous, albeit slow, loss of breathing gas.
This situation could potentially lead to an accident, hence Mares has decided to issue a product recall. The solution already exists in the form of an O-ring of different material and hardness which can be retrofitted onto the Quick Connector of your current Nemo Air.
Please note that the event of an uncontrolled loss of breathing gas from the high pressure hose is regulated
by the EN250 Norm, which requires a 0.3mm opening in the high pressure fitting. As a result, the loss of breathing gas is very slow and a diver should always be able to complete a dive safely,
NONETHELESS FOR YOUR PERSONAL SAFETY AND TO AVOID POSSIBLE DANGEROUS ACCIDENTS:
STOP DIVING WITH A QUICK CONNECTOR SUBJECT TO THIS RECALL UNTIL THE EXISTING O-RING IS REMOVED AND SUBSTITUTED WITH THE NEW ONE.
• Affected products and codes are:
1. Finished goods
414158 – DIVE COMPUTER NEMO AIR
414159 – DIVE COMPUTER NEMO AIR W/COMPASS NO
2. Spare parts
44200771 – HP HOSE W/QUICK CONNECTOR NEMO AIR
44200770 – QUICK CONNECTOR ASSY. FEMALE NEMO AIR
PLEASE CONTACT THE NEAREST AUTHORIZED MARES SERVICE CENTER TO SCHEDULE THE REPLACEMENT OF THE O-RING IN YOUR QUICK CONNECTOR.
NEMO AIR QUICK CONNECTOR O-RING MUST BE REMOVED AND SUBSTITUTED WITH THE NEW ONE.
More information will be published on: www.mares.com
August 15, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: breathing gas, dive computer, high pressure hose, mares diving gear, personal safety, press release, recalls, scuba gear recall, spare parts | Comments Off
As authorities search for the body of a St. Petersburg woman who disappeared while lobster fishing in the Florida Keys, her family is left with many questions.
Before disappearing Saturday while diving near Big Pine Key, Louann Greene, 33, was using a hookah rig, an underwater breathing device that requires no certification and is commonly used by tourists or first-time divers.
“I’ve lived here for 20 years, and I’ve never heard of these hookah things,” said CeCe Ingle, Greene’s sister-in-law. “If people are putting their lives on the line, there need to be some kinds of precautions in place. Who regulates them, if anybody?”
No one regulates hookah rigs, which essentially do the same job as scuba diving tanks. Most diving experts agree that hookahs are no more dangerous than scuba gear, and that there is nothing illegal or wrong about hookah rigs.
Like most open-sea ventures, they say, it boils down to a simple rule: Proceed at your own risk.
“There are no state and federal laws governing diving,” said Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokeswoman Gabriella Ferraro. “I mean, you would think it’s good common sense that you would need some training before doing something like that.”
The commission does enforce some diver safety, such as requiring dive flags to be displayed and policing boater speeds in diving areas. And some self-regulation occurs in the diving world.
Many dive equipment shops, for example, will not fill a scuba tank or rent gear without seeing a diving certification card, obtained from a recognized training organization. For liability reasons, Bill Jackson’s, a sporting goods store in Pinellas Park, won’t sell its scuba gear or hookah rigs without seeing certification.
Most diving charter boats refuse to take out people who aren’t certified, said Capt. Mike Miller, who runs a dive charter boat out of Seminole Marina. Some do crash “resort courses,” involving a few hours of classroom and water instruction for noncertified divers.
Lobster season, especially the popular two-day miniseason that takes place a week before regular season, is known for accidents, Miller said.
Five people died in various diving mishaps last year. Four died in 2006. Miller couldn’t recall a season in recent years without a death.
But generally, Miller said, “diving is safer than bowling.”
“It’s safer than tennis and golf,” he said. “It’s when people go outside the boundaries of training that injuries happen.”
The hookah rig, while common for those who skip training, isn’t necessarily the enemy, experts say.
Experienced and certified divers sometimes favor the device, which provides compressed air taken from the atmosphere. Advocates find it ideal for depths of 90 feet or less. They say it is less cumbersome to breathe through a tube connected to a compressor than it is to carry a heavy tank on one’s back.
Hookahs have been blamed in lobster diving fatalities in the past. Last year, 32-year-old Carlos Urruchaga of Miami died using one during the two-day lobster season, and 66-year-old Joan Radford of Coconut Grove died during the 2006 miniseason after using the hookah system.
It’s still unclear exactly what happened in Greene’s case. When her husband tried to pull her in by her air hose, it quickly became clear that it was no longer attached to his wife. The last time her family saw her, she was crying for air, and then she sank.
August 14, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: breathing device, dive charter boat, dive equipment, dive flags, diver safety, diving certification, diving tanks, diving world, florida fish and wildlife conservation commission, scuba tank, underwater breathing, water instruction | Comments Off
A man who had gone diving in the harbor area of Haa Alifu atoll Thakandhoo was nearly crushed under a 21 tonne concrete L-Block slab but survived the incident without any serious injuries.
The incident occurred around 10:00am on Sunday and the man who narrowly survived being crushed by the 15ft tall concrete block was 29-year-old Abdul Dawood of Veesan / Haa Alifu atoll Maarandhoo.
Dawood explained that he had been diving near the harbor to survey the area where the L-blocks would be dropped by crane during the sheet piling work being done on the harbor project. The crane operator would wait for me surface and give the OK sign before he would lift the L-Block with the crane, he said.
He said that when the concrete block fell on top of him, he had temporarily lost all feeling from below the wait and had trouble breathing. He said that he had however survived being crushed without any apparent physical injuries.
“I would dive under and level the sand in the target area before surfacing and giving the OK sign to the crane operator,” he explained. “But that time, the crane operator had already lifted up the concrete block and was keeping it hovering above the surface of the water while I was underwater leveling the sand. The wire snapped as I was directly under the concrete block and the block dropped on top of me. The base of the block hit my air tank. That was probably what saved me from any serious injury.”
He said that the weight of the concrete block had forced him down into the bottom of the lagoon and had been trapped under 12ft of water for a few seconds before the block tilted to the side, giving him enough room to escape.
“When the block hit my oxygen tank, the regulator was pulled loose and all the air began leaking,” he said. “I thought I was done for; didn’t expect to get out alive.”
He said that the doctor had advised getting a few days rest before continuing.
August 13, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: air tank, commercial diving, concrete block, dawood, industrial diving, oxygen tank, surface of the water, technical diving, trouble breathing | Comments Off
Treacherous Hudson River waters forced divers to suspend their search Monday for two remaining bodies and the wreckage of a small plane that collided over the weekend with a sightseeing helicopter, killing nine people.
Divers believe they found parts of the private plane’s wreckage but had to pull out because of strong currents and zero visibility, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. Authorities hoped to resume the search later Monday afternoon.
During their brief time just south of where the plane went down, the divers “encountered what they believe were pieces of the plane,” Browne said.
Of the six bodies in the helicopter, divers recovered two on Sunday morning and two more that afternoon. Two were trapped in the wreckage and could be extricated only once it was hoisted on a pier in Hoboken, Browne said.
The seventh body — the teen plane passenger — was found floating Saturday near Pier 40 in Manhattan.
A Pennsylvania family and an Italian tourist group were killed in Saturday’s crash in the busy skies of Manhattan. The helicopter carried a pilot and the five Italian tourists, who have been identified through their fingerprints, said Italian Ambassador Giovanni Castellaneta.
Castellaneta said he had met with the medical examiner in New York, as well as relatives of the victims.
“Today the relatives were asking me, ‘How it can be that a holiday in New York can become such a tragedy?’” Castellaneta said in Italian. He promised to find out and said, “We intend to keep that promise.”
About a half-dozen relatives of the Italians were still in New York, including cousins and uncles, waiting to travel back with the bodies.
“They are destroyed by pain,” Castellaneta said.
Other members of the tourist group had gone on a helicopter ride just ahead of their friends and relatives but did not witness the accident, he said.
A pilot who radioed a desperate, last-minute warning said the plane that struck the helicopter “looked like a cruise missile hitting a target.”
Ben Lane warned fellow helicopter pilot Jeremy Clarke that the plane was bearing down on him.
Lane told the Daily News in Monday’s editions that another pilot heard him say, “Watch out! Watch out!” He said a wing and chopper blades fell before both aircraft plummeted.
An Army Corps of Engineers crane lifted the twisted wreckage of the helicopter from 30 feet of water near the New Jersey shore on Sunday. A sonar scanner found the Piper Lancer nearby and more plane parts were found farther away under about 50 feet of water.
Investigators used a crane to reposition the wreckage of the helicopter on a pier about a mile from the site where divers were searching the river on Monday. They placed tarps around the wreckage.
National Transportation Safety Board chief Debbie Hersman said on NBC’s “Today” show that investigators will eventually examine the aircrafts’ structural integrity and will try to determine how the initial impact occurred.
She declined to speculate about the cause of the crash. The investigation is expected to take months.
Witnesses said the small plane approached the helicopter, which had just taken off for a 12-minute tour, from behind and clipped it with a wing. Hersman said the helicopter was gaining altitude when the two hit. Both aircraft split and fell into the river, scattering debris and sending weekenders enjoying the beautiful day running for cover.
The plane took off from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey shortly before noon. Hersman said it was not required to have a flight plan and did not file one. The plane was flying at about 1,100 feet, she said. Below that altitude, planes in that part of the Hudson River corridor are to navigate visually. Above that, they need clearance from air traffic controllers.
One of the Italian victims was a husband celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary, a family friend said. His wife had stayed behind because she was afraid of flying, but their 16-year-old son was in the helicopter.
The five tourists were from the Bologna, Italy, area: Michele Norelli, 51; his son Filippo Norelli, 16; Fabio Gallazzi, 49; his wife, Tiziana Pedroni, 44; and their son Giacomo Gallazzi, 15.
The trip was a gift from Norelli’s sister, family friend Giovanni Leporati said. “The anniversary already happened but they took advantage of the August holidays and went,” Leporati told The Associated Press by phone.
The helicopter company, Liberty Helicopters, released the name of the pilot in the crash: Jeremy Clarke of Lanoka Harbor, N.J. The NTSB said the pilot, originally from New Zealand, was born in 1976 and came to work for Liberty last year. He had about 2,700 hours of flight time.
“He was a very responsible, very safe pilot,” said his former mother-in-law, Betty Mallory. “I wouldn’t have had any hesitation flying with him.”
The plane’s pilot was identified as 60-year-old Steven Altman of Ambler, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. The passengers were his 49-year-old brother, Daniel Altman of Dresher, Pa., and Daniel’s 16-year-old son, Douglas, officials said. The Altman brothers worked in real estate.
August 12, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: investigative divers, NYPD Divers, police divers, salvage divers, underwater recovery | 1 Comment »
We’ve recently designed and added another shirt to the collection of clothing we already sell and ship around the world.
This new shirt features the distinctive double tanks on the back with the classic logo on the chest. With all shirts now fully in stock we can have these sent to you in under a week and accept all major credit cards.
August 11, 2009 | Categories: Big Blue Tech - Thailand | Tags: diving clothing, double tanks, rebreather shirts, scuba diving shirts, technical diving clothing | 1 Comment »
A team of Australian navy divers is poised to head to Tonga to help authorities recover as many as 64 bodies possibly trapped inside a sunken ferry.
The Princess Ashika was heading from the capital Nuku’alofa to Ha’afeva, in the Nomuka Islands, when it sank just before 11pm local time on Wednesday.
Fifty-three people were rescued and two bodies have been recovered, but 64 people remain missing, presumed drowned.
The ferry has been located in 35m of water, about 86km northeast of Nuku’alofa. Navy divers from Australia and New Zealand have been asked to help recover those feared to have drowned.
Tongan Police Commander Chris Kelly said the help was needed because the local military and police lacked the capacity to reach the Princess Ashika.
“A major issue is that vessel is in 36m of water – that’s over 100 feet, and we don’t have the capability to get to that depth in the Tongan navy or police,” he is quoted on the Matangi Tonga website as saying on Friday.
A Royal Australian Navy clearance diving team of 16 will leave RAAF Richmond in Sydney for Tonga on a C-130 Hercules on Friday night.
The clearance diving team can operate to a depth of 50 metres, a Department of Defence spokesman said in a statement on Friday.
Defence Minister John Faulkner said: “As the depth of water appears to be relatively shallow where the ferry is located, it should be possible for the Royal Australian Navy clearance dive team to operate.
“The recovery of the bodies is an unpleasant but necessary job, but it will allow families the opportunity to farewell their loved ones.”
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who wrapped up the Pacific Islands Forum on Thursday, said he and his fellow leaders were distressed at hearing the news.
“This is a large human tragedy for what is, at the end of the day, a small community,” Mr Rudd said.
A team of 12 New Zealand navy divers and a three-member remote search team will also leave for Tonga on Friday evening aboard an RNZAF Hercules.
August 11, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: clearance diving, dive team, diving team, rnzaf, royal australian navy, zealand navy | Comments Off
Freediving is any of various aquatic activities that share the practice of breath-hold underwater diving. Examples include breathhold spear fishing, freedive photography, apnea competitions and, to a degree, snorkeling. The activity that garners the most public attention is competitive apnea, an extreme sport, in which competitors attempt to attain great depths, times or distances on a single breath without direct assistance of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (scuba).
Recent interest in this sport has caused dive schools to look at this side of diving as a great alternative to traditional underwater interaction. A recent article in the Times about Freediving in Koh Tao reviewed the sport, the island and the local leaders in free diving; Apnea Total. In the article Guyan Mitra says:
By the end of the two-day course, I was comfortable at 20 metres, a depth that had sounded inconceivable 48 hours earlier. Plus, I was able to dive Ko Tao’s newest underwater site. A boat had recently sunk — without casualty, thankfully — creating a modern wreck around which a kaleidoscope of tropical sea life was investigating.
Using my new-found skills, I was able to probe and glide in and around the wreck, just like my fellow fish. Not quite a merman, but getting there… definitely getting there.
That article in its entirety can be found here
Additional interest was generated from the inflight magazine for Bangkok Airways; “Fah Thai” where photo journalist and fellow technical diving enthusiast Ayesha Cantrell reports about the growing trend of breath hold diving growing on Koh Tao. In the report Ayeasha says:
Go scuba diving around Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand and you may encounter a mermaid. Propelled by her monofin to depths of 50 metres on a single breath of air, Monica Ganame is the nearest you’ll get to meeting one of these mythical creatures underwater.
The Argentinian-born professional free diver wears no air tank or other bulky scuba gear – instead, Monica can hold her breath for up to six minutes and explore the underwater world in its truly natural state. The absence of dive equipment not only allows Monica to interact much more closely with marine life, but also to feel a part of the ocean herself.
Ayesha is referring to Monica Ganame who is co-owner of Apnea Total on Koh Tao, that article can be found here
One of Apnea Totals protege’s is Jeroen Marteens who became a freediving instructor through their school. Jeroen is your typical freediving instructor; Tall, slim and appears to be someone who likes his yoga and perhaps a bit of incense. Jeroen join the Big Blue Family to start our Big Blue Freediving department and has been very busy ever since. With maximum 3 people per course.
Jeroen will be taking out members of the Big Blue Tech team for their freediving course later this month, although there were grumblings between wearing 6 cylinders or none at all it is a fringe and extreme side of scuba diving so technical diving and freediving have quite a lot of similarities.
You can find more details about these courses: Freediver Basic and Freediver Advanced
August 10, 2009 | Categories: Big Blue Tech - Thailand | Tags: aquatic activities, bangkok airways, breath of air, dive schools, free diver, gulf of thailand, inflight magazine, ko tao, koh tao, merman, monofin, mythical creatures, photo journalist, scuba gear, self contained underwater breathing apparatus, spear fishing, tropical sea life, underwater breathing apparatus | 2 Comments »
Our facilities manager and resident technical dive-master Christos Kardana recently conducted a technical refresher for a big blue tech client, covering key skills essential whilst technical diving. Conducted in a similar fashion to that of refresher common in the recreational diving industry, a variety of skills where demonstrated and completed.
The confidence to complete essential safety skills is paramount whilst diving in general, but even more so in the world of technical diving where you take on challenging dive environments and profiles. The sheer bulk and number of equipment necessary, combined with the effects of narcosis at depth and the ceilings imposed by decompression diving, emphasises the importance of executing these skills with efficiency and confidence. This is further exacerbated by the usual task loading of ‘mission diving’ common in the technical world of diving, whether it is search and recovery or simply adding a video camera and the pressure of capturing certain footage whilst at depth.
A standard technical refresher here at Big Blue Tech is conducted in a confined water environment – ocean or swimming pool- entailing equipment assembly, pre-dive and in water checks, followed by S-drills and key skills. Equipment assembly involves complete set-up of a technical twin set rig, as well as deco tank set-up and gas analysis, demonstrating correct use of an oxygen analyser and tank management and labelling. A short briefing is conducted covering the skill breakdown and dive signals followed by kit up and correct front stride entry into the water -right hand palm securing mask and primary regulator, with left forearm bracing left and right deco tanks. Buoyancy and bubble checks are completed followed by key technical dive skills:
S-drill: acting as receiver and donor for out of air drill, in a controlled manner while maintaining position in the water column.
Gas shutdown: completing full gas shutdown of all posts managing multiple failures, showing awareness in switching from primary to alternate air source and vice versa accordingly. Reaction to catastrophic gas loss and securing failure should be ideally achieved in less than 30 seconds.
Regulator recovery: retrieving long hose primary air source, with and without the use of alternate air source (necklace).
Staging cylinders: while maintaining buoyancy, deco cylinders are staged and received achieving competence both on the ‘fly’ and statically in the water column.
BCD removal: removing and re-donning BCD, demonstrating awareness in hose management and deco cylinder staging.
Tired diver tow: acting as donor and receiver of air source (long hose) towing a tired or unconscious diver at depth ensuring victim regulator is secure with one hand and controlling victims movement via securing manifold with other hand.
Simulated gas switch: switching to deco cylinder gas, noting depth, mix and teammate awareness while changing blend, both face-to-face and individually on the fly.
The above drills are an essential combination of skills required whilst tech diving whether in a team or solo. Through repetitive circuits during the refresher we aim to achieve correct execution whilst maintaining a high level of awareness for teammate and the environment. Additional drills can be added, depending on the divers comfort and experience such as breathing from deco cylinders staged at multiple locations at shallow depth, improving muscle memory and confidence in relation to quick gas switching.
A technical refresher in a confined environment can be of vital importance to an individual re-entering the world of technical diving, whether it be for a few fun dives or one considering further education. Furthermore, for one who will be diving and using equipment through a dive centre, it provides the perfect opportunity to test and become accustomed to a new set of kit and procedures -regardless of past experience or amount of time spent out of the water- before re-immersing yourself in the world of decompression and extended range diving.
Big Blue Tech is currently working on short skill circuit videos, which will be posted in the near future.
August 9, 2009 | Categories: Big Blue Tech - Thailand | Tags: buoyancy, decompression diving, narcosis, oxygen analyser, safety skills, tank management, technical dive, technical diving | 1 Comment »
Jana Strain has a deep love of all things aquatic. She started swimming at a young age and has always felt at home in the water. As a youth, Jana trained rigorously in many forms of dance. By her late teens she was performing at a professional level in dance, musical theatre and acting. She moved to Los Angeles after being requested to audition for several productions.
Jana’s journey into freediving began when she got her PADI Open Water scuba certification. Within a year, she had traveled all over the world to dive and got her instructor certification. She loved the deep and wanted to learn to dive without gear. So, in May 2008, she took her first course in freediving.
2008 was a huge year for Jana. She attended the 2008 AIDA Team World Competition where she discovered her natural ability in dynamic apnea. Soon after her return home to Santa Monica she smashed the North American Continental Women’s Dynamic Apnea Record swimming 171M (561ft) on a single breath. Finally Jana received top honors being voted the Best New International Freediver.
2009 has been an very exciting year to date. Jana has broken two Pan American freediving records, the first in Constant No Fins, and the other in Dynamic No Fins. She also won the title of ‘National Champion’ at the Canadian Indoor Finals in April. This year Jana will also have many opportunities to dive with big animals, an experience guaranteed to take her breath away.
http://www.janastrain.com/
August 9, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: apnea, elite, fins, freediver, instructor certification, national champion, padi open water, water scuba, world competition | Comments Off
Similan Islands have been listed as one of the top 10 diving destinations in the world. It’s limited season of November to March gives teh national diving park a chance to recover creates an abundance of marine life seldom seen anywhere else.
Last season we did quite well with only one speed boat, we did day trips to and from various islands in the similans. But there was one thing missing, a live-aboard. After months of shopping around we powers that be found the perfect vessel; The MV Pawara which is a luxury live-aboard based in Khao Lak.
The MV Pawara is 32m or 105ft in length, and built of steel making her one of the largest live-aboards plying the western Indian Ocean. She takes a total of 20 divers in 10 air conditioned cabins on regular departures, but some of her cabins are large enough to accommodate more than this on special request. She has two types of cabins deluxe and standard, and both types are air conditioned, have twin beds and en suite bathroom arrangements.
Probably the boat’s finest features are three: One, her huge interior saloon which seats everyone comfortably and is completely air-conditioned; two, she has a ‘breakfast nook’ and briefing room right next to the dive deck so you can duck in for a quick bite or a cup of tea without having to walk upstairs to another deck; three, her huge dive deck and dive platform making getting in and out of the water a breeze.
The saloon is generously appointed and has comfortable seats centered around the huge flat screen TV situated on a well organized bookshelf with a large library. The saloon is designed so that small groups can gather comfortably for private chats, yet still at the same time seat all passengers.
There are two types of cabins on the MV Pawara, standard and deluxe. Both of the cabins have twin beds only, there are no double beds on this vessel. For couples who require double bed sleeping arrangements, best look further.
There are two air conditioned deluxe cabins located on the main deck. They are well laid out and spacious, and have private en suite bathrooms. The twin beds are perpendicular to each other, and the cabin features a large vanity mirror on the closet. Each cabin has a large picture window looking forward. These cabins are the first to be sold on each cruise.
There are eight air conditioned standard cabins on the boat, four on the main deck and four on the lower deck. Each cabin is spacious and comfortable and has two twin beds. The prices are lower for these cabins. Have a little bit less comfortable cabin and paying less is not a problem with the Pawara as there is so much room on the boat. It’s easy to spread out and find a quiet place for reading or listening to music.
This vessel will also be fitted with on board nitrox blending, oxygen filling and trimix blending for full technical diving.
The similan islands is quite unexplored, the majority of the diving is done at the 30m mark with double that depth below you.
Bookings are starting now for the November to March period. Prices will be release shortly.
Those who complete the Advanced Nitrox to Extended Range course will get this liveaboard included!
oh, we also got another speed boat, so that’s 2 speed boats and 1 luxury live-aboard!
August 8, 2009 | Categories: Big Blue Tech - Thailand | Tags: breakfast nook, dive deck, flat screen tv, live aboards, similan islands, similans, similans liveaboard, similans luxury, similans nitrox, similans tech, similans trimix, speed boat, technical diving similans, western indian ocean | 3 Comments »
The Divers Alert Network Annual SCUBA Diving Report is one of the most anticipated and trusted publications in the dive industry. Each year, divers count on it as a resource to educate themselves; the knowledge they gain, hopefully, makes them safer divers.
Once again, the DAN Research team has compiled its findings from data gathered from incident reports and information shared through the Project Dive Exploration (PDE) initiative. The DAN Annual Diving Report – 2008 Edition examines contributing factors in SCUBA dive accident and fatality cases in an effort to understand those factors and improve dive safety.
The report is available at no charge to everyone interested in reading it; it can be downloaded from the DAN website at Divers Alert Network 2009 Report
The Divers Alert Network website is located at www.DiversAlertNetwork.org.
August 8, 2009 | Categories: General News | Tags: dive industry, dive safety, divers alert network, diversalertnetwork, fatality report, incident reports, initiative, network 2009 | Comments Off
