Medical Diver

Hey Doc, pack your bags, we’ve got a diving job. We are going to be leaving from the amphibious base at eleven hundred today!” “Sounds great Lieutenant King, what’s up?”

“Well, it seems the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Team has been doing some exercises outside the mouth of the harbor and found an uncharted wreck with some explosives on it yesterday. It is about two miles south of Point Loma in about one hundred feet of water. They feel it is important enough to document on film. They also say it has been there for about forty years, with quite a few bombs and other explosives on it! They called Harbor Clearance Unit because we have the underwater damage assessment television (UDATS) filming equipment.”

A new Harrier Combat Jet went down in New York’s Long Island Sound. These were a new version of aircraft and the first one to crash in the water and they wanted all the pieces since it didn’t land like “Sully” did on the Hudson (US Airway Flight 1549 Airbus A320 landed safely 7 September 2016). While on that recovery job we bent three divers while diving surface supplied air doing surface decompression on oxygen. The problem was the tidal currents in Long Island Sound races at over five knots at times and that is a problem when you have two divers in the water on a cabled stage with hundreds of feet of umbilical hose tilted by the current.

Long story short, the diver (Eran with a named changed due to medical history) was dragging the clump, trying to keep up with his buddy, Lt Pete Vanhooser. The lead clump was at least 50 pounds, and he used the air in his tanks long before Pete did. He also was not close enough to communicate to his buddy he needed air and the need to buddy breathe to the surface. Eran rushed to the surface. We are trained to blow and go in an emergency to the surface when there is a loss of air scuba diving. Well, Eran left Pete at 95 feet, and we saw him come to the surface. Halfway out of the water, he raised his arm and passed out with classic AGE. We raced to pull him in the boat, got him onboard, and quickly motored over to the side of the fantail of the USS Edenton ATS-ONE and into the recompression chamber located on the fan tail of our salvage tug.

In 11 minutes from the moment when Eran surfaced from the dive, we had pulled him from the water, stripped his gear off, and prepared him for treatment depth in the recompression chamber. It was a quick boat ride with a dying diver and a trained crew that had saved him. Eran was unconscious, with red froth spewing from his mouth (fulminate pulmonary edema or the chokes).

I remember working with the Canadian Navy Fleet divers in Quebec, and in Van Couver, British Columbia, Canada. Again, we showed them our systems and they showed us theirs. On tour, I noticed a huge rock on the quarterdeck of the Dive School entrance in Quebec. The DMT, a
physician assistant giving me the tour said the students swam it back from the other side of the harbor! It was the second one since a 232-pound rock wasn’t big enough for that class. This one was 252 pounds, or 115 kilos, and it was a mile across to the other side. They would swim over as a class, escorted with safety boats, find the boulder, and place it on the biggest guy or girls belly who would then hold the boulder as they would raft that person back. Amazing teamwork—and cold water. As Canadian divers say, “There is no such thing as cold, just varying degrees of warmth.”

After a while, they would break out “The Book.” This was a clever contraption that had the title “The Book” on one side and “Do Not Touch” on the other. Inside, most of the pages were hollowed out, though looking at it when closed you could not tell. The book was covered in shiny tin foil, and the back binder was non-conductive. Mounted inside was a circuit board from the old disposable cameras. If you can imagine, those old disposable cameras had a battery connected to the circuit board for the flash; after taking a picture, you would hear the capacitor recharging and the winding sound it made charging up for the next flash.

Soldered to the capacitor was a wired toggle switch so once the capacitor discharged, it could be toggled, and the battery would recharge the capacitor again. Oh, such fun when someone who had never seen “The Book” would be curious and pick it up or attempt to pick it up: they would get a serious shock.