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system — so they don’t have to pull divers out of the
water to switch tanks.
“These guys are beautiful for us,” notes the
Stratton
’s
commanding officer Captain Nathan Moore. “If we’d
called in a commercial dive team we’d be at their mercy.”
The two unplanned patches probably would have cost
about $10,000. In August 2015 the RDLW sent eight
divers to Juneau, Alaska, to work on eight ships gathered
for the annual buoy tender roundup. (Along with law
enforcement and search and rescue, the Coast Guard also
maintains the nation’s navigational lights and buoys).
When I began writing my book
Rescue Warriors: The
U.S. Coast Guard, America’s Forgotten Heroes
, I was
surprised that these service personnel seemed more
comfortable on and above the water than below it.
They had a rescue swimmer program that grew out of a
helicopter rescue tragedy in 1983, but no dive program.
The service has had hardhat and scuba divers
since World War II, but until recently diving was
considered volunteer or collateral duty and comprised
shallow-water repair work from three Pacific buoy
tenders and hull inspections of polar icebreakers. After
9/11 the number of Coast Guard armed responders
skyrocketed. The Maritime Transportation Security
Act of 2002 created Maritime Safety and Security
Teams (MSSTs) in major ports, and these teams
included scuba divers doing underwater security
sweeps. Still, even as it expanded from four to 12 units,
diving remained a collateral duty, with most divers
selecting and maintaining their own gear. Then on
Aug. 17, 2006, a tragic safety failure occurred.
That day Lt. Jessica Hill and Boatswain’s Mate
Steven Duque died on a training dive below arctic
ice during an “ice liberty” on the Coast Guard cutter
Healy
about 500 miles north of Barrow, Alaska. They
were undertrained and overweighted, each carrying
60 pounds of weight in the pockets of their BCDs
— about twice the recommended amount. Their
low-pressure inflator hoses were not connected to
their BCDs. They rapidly dropped down nearly 220
feet, where they ran out of air and asphyxiated. Their
line handlers were nondiver volunteers who had no
idea what was going on. The internal Coast Guard
investigation that followed revealed a cascade of
safety breaches, including that their gear had not been
inspected in more than four years.
“The
Healy
incident flipped our entire leadership
on its ear,” says Ken Andersen, now chief of subsurface
capabilities for the Coast Guard. Recognizing that
diving had to be “elevated on par with other high-
risk, training-intensive operations such as aviation,”
the service decided to professionalize it, establishing
permanent dive lockers in California (RDLW) and
Virginia (Regional Dive Locker East) in 2008 and
a third more recently in Hawaii (Regional Dive
Locker Pacific). Training, gear and inspections were
standardized. The lockers will soon have 71 rated
members. The Coast Guard officially established a
diver rating, and the first class of certified Coast Guard
divers was recognized in April 2015.
Those already on duty spend more than 200 days a year
deployed on missions. To carry these out they’ve acquired
and trained on remotely operated VideoRay subs; metal
detectors; hand-held, mask-mounted and towed side-scan
sonar systems; and hydraulic tools, including underwater
chainsaws. They use surface-supplied systems, Kirby
Morgan helmets and scuba units. They hope to have their
own hyperbaric chamber within five years; for now they
deploy to sea with Navy medical crews and chambers or
else depend on shore-based facilities.
New recruits go through a one-week screening at
the enlisted training center in Cape May, N.J., where
they put in a lot of pool time. Next they get acquainted
with the lockers and are then sent to the Naval Diving
and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC) in Panama
City, Fla. There they undergo the Navy’s five-month
Second Class Diver Course (see “Year of the Military
Diver,”
Alert Diver
, Summer 2015). Some will later
return for the three-month First Class Diver Course,
which focuses on dive medicine and mission planning.
Toward the end of the Second Class course, instead of
Navy underwater explosives training, the Coast Guard
divers undergo specialized training in light salvage,
drysuit operations and polar diving.
The Coast Guard runs the armed services’ only ice-
diving school for two weeks each winter at a National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
facility in Seattle, Wash. After some emergency ascent
training in a tower tank, the trainees head 370 miles
north to Lac des Roches, British Columbia, where
they chop a hole in the lake ice and head below each
morning. They lay out wagon-wheel designs in the
snow around the hole in case a diver loses an umbilical
and needs surface markers to find his or her way back.
RESEARCH, EDUCATION & MEDICINE
ADVANCED DIVING
48
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WINTER 2016
DAVID HELVARG