There I Was... Differential Pressure; Thoughts of Amputation
| Differential Pressure; Thoughts of Amputation |
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| Contributed by Luke Lucariello | |||
| Monday, 18 January 2010 12:43 | |||
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The incident described in this article occured on the fifth of June 1992. And this is no shit!
Friday afternoon in the old instructors office at DIT was usually a place where the shit flew thick and fast until we were let go at 16:15. The Friday that this happened was my next to last at the school since I had gotten on the wrong side of the owner at the time, so as soon as enrollment was low, he laid me off; which was better than being fired.
Out of all the instructors there at the time, I was the only one still diving on a regular basis, but that week was a topside week and all my gear was at home drying out.
Around 15:30 the phone rang in the office and Mel Paxton took it. I heard my name mentioned but then the caller was transfered over to John Ritter.
Ten minutes later John was standing in the door to our office looking directly at me. Since I hadn't conducted any mischief that day I wondered what was up now. His next words galvanized every swinging richard in the office.
"There's a diver trapped under a NOAA ship at their Lake Union pier. We've got to go help. Where's your stuff Luke?"
"Home drying out."
"Well get your ass in gear and go get it, then go to NOAA on Lake Union."
I unassed that chair double time ran out and jumped in my Blazer. As I was doing that, Mike Massey, my good buddy and brother instructor came around the corner of classroom three, one of the trailers from his NDE lab.
"Where ya goin Rellis?"
"There's a guy trapped under a ship at NOAA and we're goin to the rescue."
Massey about hopped the chain link fence and jumped into my truck as I was pulling out. I was renting from Ritter and lived right around the corner. We were there in a minute and ran through the house collecting all my junk. I had no idea what Ritters plan was so I grabbed everything and out the door we went.
We drove back to the school just as John was leaving. He asked if we had everything, then Massey asked him if he had a B.C. or two. No. Mike launched himself and bolted to the SCUBA locker, returning with two stabilizer jackets. We followed Ritter in a wild chase through the city until we arrived at the NOAA pier.
The first thing I had to do was get the "Black Death" on. My custom 3/8th" skin in wetsuit. In those days I used cornstarch to get it on, on this day, with the temperature in the upper seventies, me standing in the sun sweating like I was in the Gulf, the powdered starch wasn't working. Finally Massey dumps the whole damn box down my back and I got in it. I pulled the jacket on and ran up the gangway onto the USS DeSteiguer.
Massey and I were the only DIT people there at the moment so we leaned against a hand rail and watched what looked like a circus in the water below us and Massey poured cups of ice water down through the neck seal of my suit.
A wooden raft, the type sailors use when they have to scrape or paint at the waterline was tied alongside the hull and a bald guy with glasses was yelling at a group of Scooby Doers hanging on the side of the raft.
A couple of officers in NOAA uniform and a civilian in street clothes came over and were introduced. I forgot all their names immediately, but they gave us a quick sit-rep and moved on. It was now about 16:30 and according to the NOAA people, the incident was initiated around 14 or 14:30. We still didn't know what was happening below. The scene on the raft was amusing so we stayed with that. I happened to look right a few minutes later and there was the nose of the deep dive barge coming into view. Bobby Burns at the helm.
Once the barge was secured to the DeSteiguer things began to slowly happen. Massey and me went aboard. The instructional staff was almost all present and accounted for and it looked like we were finally going to help.
Ritter went aboard to confab with the powers that be, so the rest of us drank the pops and munched snacks that John had provided. While we waited, the speculation about what happened ran wild. This was not my first experience with a diver being hurt by differential pressure. The first time I had been up inside a seachest in a 1000' VLCC when someone inside activated a 14" intake and killed my partner.
So being a little apprehensive about what was coming, I refrained from eating and drinking. About that time John came back aboard and gave me the green light to splash. Weight belt on, harness on, water depth was 28ffw under the ship. I put the neck dam of what was then the newest superlight, the 27, s/n 07 on and shackled into the hose. Jimmy Schnepf and Willy Wilson checked me out after I got the hat on and buttoned up, then Willy got up on my hose and I donned my Duckfeet. Standing at the edge of the barge we waited the final go.
I was looking at the surface of the lake when two hard taps on the shell told me it was time. I used a giant stride into the water and ducked under a hawser that a SPD Zodiac was tied to and promptly ran out of air. Massy was on the radio and the rack at the same time as I'm telling him I've got no gas. I was about to rip the fucking hat off when the air came back. I took a vent to clear the faceplate and swam to the side of the ship.
As I slid down the hull, I was surprised at the clarity of the water. Must have been twenty or twenty five feet of vis. When I hit bottom, I landed on what looked like a submerged concrete roadway, nice and clean, no silt to stir and cloud the visibility and then I looked up.
The trapped diver was hanging from the very bottom of the ship. His right arm had been sucked up inside to the shoulder. He was wearing a Viking drysuit and a SCUBA mask and fins. A group of what turned out to be Seattle Harbor Patrol divers swam in a
circle while one diver held a bare tank and regulator in the trapped guy's mouth.
Massey had me giving running commentary as this was happening. After a little while Jimmy Schnepf came on and told me to get in there and have a close look. I swam up, pushed the cops away and realized with some shock that somebody had cut this divers drysuit at the shoulder. The water in the lake was about 55 that day and this guy had been under since 14:00 with no thermal protection. As I'm relaying this back to topside a cop diver swam down with a hookah and hot water hose from our barge.
Once the change over happened Jimmy told me to wrap myself around and try to fall down with him. That was an exercise in futility. He was solid in that pipe. The police divers were swimming around aimlessly so I dropped back to the bottom where I could see everything. After a while, all the cops came down and formed a class in front of me. We communicated with sign for a while then somebody swam down in a huge hurry and dispersed the police divers, then got in my face and gave me a completely incoherent set of signals before I shrugged and he left.
Massey had replaced Jimmy on the horn and announced that a medic was going to swim down and do an evaluation. He'd be wearing a black drysuit. True to his Massey's word, the diver duly appeared swam around Gary Decker, (they finally told me the trapped guy's name) for a couple of circuits then he left, never to be seen again.
By this time it was getting late in the afternoon, I looked at my Seiko and saw that it was closing on 18:00, something had to happen soon. Most of the police divers had gone topside to change tanks and there were only two of them as I recall when Massey told me to get back up on Decker. So up I went and tried the fall down futile method. Then I was told to put the pneumo up inside. They gave it a full minute and nothing happened.
Suddenly Decker gave a lurch and came out about three or four inches. I couldn't believe it. He was coming loose when all of a sudden he came squirting out of that pipe like he was greased. Down we all went with me yelling to topside about what was happening. Massey told me to let the cops handle it from there, which is what they're trained for and in a second Decker and the PD were gone.
I found myself all alone and looking at what could have easily passed for a yard sale at a divers house. There were regulators off tanks, empty 80's the pair of EMT shears used to cut Decker's drysuit and pieces of the suit which I have hanging in my bar and assorted other miscellaneous junk. I began to collect it and when I couldn't hold anymore I had them pull me to the surface.
After all that trash got handed up I doffed my fins and climbed the ladder. Massey put a cold Coke in my hand and they were all slapping me on the back and shaking my right. There was still a job to do and I wanted to find out what brought this whole mess on.
I learned later that the guy in the black drysuit was an orthopedic surgeon who had come down to determine the feasibility of amputating Decker's arm and the goof who got in my face on bottom was the squad leader of the Harbor Patrol divers, I never did find out what he wanted.
It came down to this. Gary Decker and another diver who I never met were working for a local drydock in Seattle. Their mission that day was to dive down and blank the four inch intake that needed a valve replaced inside the hull. Their first mistake was that they did the job on SCUBA. To accomplish that task, they took an inflatable sphere to use as the DC plug. Gary was the one who placed the sphere and was holding it when the valve was pulled off inside the ship. Well, as you can imagine, the ball didn't work and was sucked up inside as was Gary Decker's right arm. In effect he was now the DC plug.
The crew was fabricating a soft patch that I would need to go place when it was ready so Massey and me went up into the ship to see what had been done to free Decker, it certainly wasn't anything we did other than maybe saving him from hypothermia with the hot water.
The real heros of that rescue were the ship's engineer and one of their welders. They took a flange, welded a long pipe nipple to that, capped the nipple and put threaded fittings on it. That assembly bolted down over Gary's arm and they tried ships air first, that was when he came down a couple of inches. Then they went to 250 psi firehose water and out he came.
When we returned to the barge, the patch was ready and me and one of the advanced students who had come along went and installed it. Our part of the operation ended as the sun was starting to set, which in Seattle that time of year is late. I got changed and had to answer some interview questions with a KOMO reporter while I dripped lake water and cornstarch out of my hair as I was changing. It didn't matter, Gary Decker was alive and under treatment, he got to keep his arm, but he quit diving.
Ritter was treating us to cocktails at Duffy's, our watering hole at the time and we watched ourselves on local television while the whole place gaped at us. Everyone was in a buoyant mood so Jimmy and me went out to burn one. We were sitting in my Blazer and with his lungs full of smoke he coughed, looked at me and told me that I had done a good job. Coming from him and with how the afternoon had gone, I felt that the bad mojo of my partners death in 1981 had finally lifted.
Luke Lucariello, Alpha Diving Industries
Arcata, CA
This article was previously published in slightly different form in UW Magazine fall 1994 issue.
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