THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 27, 1996 TAG: 9607270182
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
LENGTH: 153 lines
For the past week, their world has been where their bodies are not biologically equipped to be: more than 100 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, in waters dark as dusk, moving gingerly around and above the metal and human remains of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.
They are the divers, several dozen, culled from the New York police and fire departments and, mostly, from the Navy. At the moment, the conclusion of their work is anxiously awaited by the millions of people above ground - people waiting to know why a Boeing 747 bound for Paris exploded over the Long Island coast, killing all 230 aboard, and waiting to hear that all bodies have been recovered.
James Cordara of the Nassau County Police Department tried Thursday to describe the diver's experience: ``We're talking of an 11- or 12-story building - that's the depth you've got to go down. You're floating into the darkness. You can't see anything. I just heard my own regulator, my own bubbles. All of a sudden, the bottom just comes out of the blackness, and then you start your search.''
``It's cold, dark and deep.''
The efforts of Cordara and other divers have met with some success, most notably the recovery late Wednesday, by two Navy divers from the Norfolk-based salvage ship Grasp, of the so-called black boxes. The cockpit-voice recorder and data recorder hold clues to the cause of the explosion.
But the work is exhausting and disquieting, given the mission to return the bodies of the dead to the surface. So far, 127 bodies have been recovered.
Navy Cmdr. Dale Lueck tries to give his divers an idea of what they are likely to encounter before their grim - and dangerous - search for the debris and death of a submerged airplane.
``Have you been to a funeral?'' he asks his young recruits. Most of them nod.
``Part One is you need to understand you're going to be faced with at least that much of a situation,'' he says. ``Part Two is you can expect that the undertaker has not been there.''
On Thursday, for the first time since the crash, the Navy released information about the divers' experiences, through a videotape in which Navy divers talked about their experiences.
One of the divers, Chief Petty Officer Kevin Oelhafen, hinted at some of the danger lurking below. ``Some of the pieces are pretty big,'' he said. ``They're sharp and they're all over the place.''
The Navy, which is coordinating the operation, had been holding 7 a.m. briefings for divers from local agencies at the Coast Guard station in Moriches Bay. But the role of those divers has been reduced, in part because the work they had been conducting has been more peripheral. Still, some of those divers, wearing scuba gear, have helped to plot and secure stray debris.
The most crucial underwater work has been conducted by divers aboard the Grasp, one of three Navy vessels stationed over a roughly 2-square-mile swath that various technical equipment - from sonar mapping to remote-controlled camera devices - has shown to be the most fertile area for exploration.
With it is the Norfolk-based dock landing ship Oak Hill, which arrived Wednesday to support the operation with helicopters and utility boats. A third vessel, the Navy-chartered Pirouette from Maryland, used side scanning sonar in the search. Another Norfolk ship, the Rude, is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel that has been on the scene since the day after the plane crash.
The Grasp, a combat-salvage ship, carries a metal platform that can be lowered by cable to the ocean floor, about 120 feet below, as well as other equipment to enable Navy divers to stay below water for as long as 90 minutes, a preciously long time at such depths.
Lueck, the Navy's supervisor of diving in Washington, described in general terms the task of these Navy divers. Virtually everything about their work is carefully orchestrated, he said, from the moment they slip beneath the surface to the moment they reappear. Miscues could compromise the investigation or prove fatal.
These divers do not wear scuba gear but specially designed suits that keep them warm and dry, he said. Their shoes weigh about 12 pounds, and their helmets about 30 - the root of the term ``hard-hat diving.''
Compressed air is pumped into that helmet through a hose that also allows the diver to communicate with supervisors on the vessel above.
The divers work in pairs - one is called ``green diver,'' the other ``red diver'' - with an alternate, ``yellow diver,'' who is stationed aboard the ship. They take their positions on the platform, and then are slowly immersed in waters cast in the haze of eternal dusk, where humans can see less than 15 feet.
The descent takes about two minutes, bringing the divers to a sandy underworld where the ghostly images of silvery plane metal are best seen with powerful flashlights. Lueck would not comment on the recovery of bodies. He did say, however, that small pieces of debris might be placed in a basket on the platform. The divers might also carefully tie thick nylon cord around larger pieces of debris, which can be reeled in after the divers have returned to the ship.
Hazards are everywhere, Lueck said. Divers risk becoming entangled in the suits' umbilical cords, or in the miles of airplane electrical wire swaying in underwater currents. Some of the wreckage is jagged.
Then there is the return to the surface, which is done with stops at various depths following a specific timetable. The purpose, Lueck said, is to allow the body to expel the nitrogen it has accumulated during the deep-level submersion. His analogy of doing the ascent incorrectly: ``You're like a soda bottle with the cap on it. Those bubbles gather up and they can cause you real problems.''
The Grasp, however, has a decompression chamber that allows the divers to rise a little faster to the surface. But once they reach the top, they are stripped to their shorts and rushed into the chamber to breathe pure oxygen that again follows a specific time chart. For an hour spent at a depth of 120 feet, a diver will spend 32 minutes in the decompression chamber, according to Thomas Galloway, an engineer in the Navy's office of supervisor diving and salvage.
The scenario described by Navy officials is exactly what took place around Wednesday night, when Oelhafen and Petty Officer Douglas Irish were lowered to the ocean floor. Once they stepped onto the sandy bottom, the light of the remote vehicle they had brought fell upon something orange - the ``black boxes'' that had proved so elusive during the search.
``Once we were underneath, we found an orange box right in front of us,'' Oelhafen said. ``Right on the front it said, `Flight Data Recorder.' We've seen pictures of what they looked like. We've been briefed on what to do.''
Galloway, the Navy engineer, explained that the recovery of the black boxes demonstrates why ``surface-supplied'' diving is much preferable to scuba diving in cases like the crash of Flight 800. ``To perform underwater work, you're not constrained to what you have on your back,'' he said. ``You have surface communication. You can coordinate the rigging and bringing up of pieces. You can let people know what's happening.''
Scuba diving is what has been provided by two dozen divers from several agencies, including the New York City police and fire departments and the police departments of Suffolk and Nassau counties. Their roles have been more specific. Nassau police divers, for example, were required to examine a single, 6-foot-long piece of debris.
Cordara, the Nassau police officer, said that because of the scuba equipment, he and other divers had only about 11 minutes to spend near the wreckage. ``It's not a lot of time,'' he said, to find the piece, tag it and attach a line to it so it could be found again.
``I was scared,'' he said. ``There's a lot of sharp metal down there.''
Indeed, the work has been dangerous. Robert Haring, 39, a diver for the New York City Fire Department ``wasn't getting a proper flow of air through his lungs at 100 feet below the surface,'' said Lt. Louis Raimondi, of the department's rescue unit.
The air shortage - which may have been caused by equipment malfunction - forced the firefighter to rise rapidly to the top without spending the proper amount of time decompressing. ``You can be alive and hurt above water,'' the lieutenant said, ``or be dead below water.''
Haring was briefly hospitalized and is still undergoing tests. He declined to speak about the incident on Thursday night. ``I'm hurting a little bit,'' he said. ``I'm still having residual effects, but I'm fine.''
And there has been emotional toll. Like others, Lt. Thomas Martorano of the Suffolk County Marine Bureau declined to describe in detail what the divers from his unit are seeing. But he did say that some of the unit's nine divers have met with counselors to talk about what they're experiencing. ``Our divers,'' he said, ``are seeing nothing that anyone in my command has seen before.''
One of those divers, Andy Gliganick, said, ``Nothing compares to this. I hope nothing in my life will compare with this.'' MEMO: Staff writer Jack Dorsey contributed to this report. ILLUSTRATION: U.S. NAVY photo, via Associated Press
Aboard the Norfolk-based salvage ship Grasp, private contractors
check a remote-controlled underwater recorder. It was two Navy
divers from the Grasp who, on Wednesday night, found Flight 800's
black boxes. by CNB