Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  Barth soon returned to view under the habitat, this time lugging Cannon, who appeared to be convulsing. Barth tried to lift Cannon into the skirt beneath the hatch to get him a breath. Impossible. So he grabbed the Mark IX’s buddy breather and tried to force it into Cannon’s mouth. He jabbed it once, twice, a third time. The escaping gas created a hail of bubbles but Cannon’s jaw was shut tight. Barth grabbed Cannon by the collar and began to swim for the PTC, disappearing from the camera’s view. As Barth pulled Cannon along the sea floor, stirring up more clouds, their umbilicals caught on something. Barth struggled to free them, got another few feet closer to the PTC, and was jerked to a halt again. Now Barth was winded, as he’d been on the first dive, getting no good satisfaction from the rig, and sensed a ringing in his ears. He thought he might pass out. He triggered the Mark IX’s bypass, using a lever at waist level to inject more fresh gas into the rig. Something still didn’t feel right. At that point there was little choice but to leave Cannon and swim for the PTC, which was still a few paces away and about twenty feet overhead. Barth wrangled some more with his own umbilical before swimming up, up, up. The capsule seemed as if it were a mile away.

  Inside the PTC, Captain Mazzone’s voice came over the intercom with an order to get another diver into the water. Blackburn and Reaves couldn’t be sure what was going on, but Blackie quickly strapped on a Mark IX. He was about to jump into the water when Barth popped through the looking glass, out of breath, but managed to squeak out the words that Berry was in trouble. Blackie squeezed past Barth to get through the trunk and down onto the winch cage. It took him a minute to get clear of all the umbilicals and he hurriedly swam off the cage and around the side of the PTC to unspool his own umbilical.

  In the pools of light cast from the habitat, Blackburn could see Cannon’s mouthpiece floating over his head, emitting a stream of bubbles. Cannon was on his back, his shoulders resting on the lab’s hefty main umbilical as if he were napping on a chaise longue. As Blackburn swam down he kept triggering the bypass to overcome the nagging sensation that he wasn’t getting enough gas from his rig. Blackburn was six-foot-two, perhaps the biggest and fittest of all the aquanauts, with a steely resolve born of the dangerous and delicate work of disarming underwater mines and bombs.

  Blackie first tried to force Cannon’s mouthpiece into his mouth, but like Barth had no luck. Swimming for the PTC, dragging more than two hundred pounds of Berry Cannon and gear, wasn’t going to work. Blackburn began to feel short of breath, but managed to wrap one arm around Cannon and with his free arm grabbed hold of his own umbilical, as if he were a rock climber clutching a rope. As he kicked hard to propel himself and Cannon, he also pulled himself up the umbilical, which formed a steep hypotenuse to the PTC from where Cannon had been lying atop Sealab’s umbilical on the sea floor. Blackburn, his mind racing, wondered if the line was strong enough to support his weight and Cannon’s. If the umbilical snapped, he and his unconscious buddy would sink back to the ocean floor, doomed.

  For everyone watching and waiting topside, scant information trickled in from the PTC, in Chipmunk garble. Barth had apparently returned, and they knew Blackburn was in the water. For those empty minutes, mission control could only wait and pray. The silence ended when Blackburn broke through the liquid looking glass. He was breathing hard, with a fury he had never before experienced. He held Cannon upright in the trunk and wrestled him out of his Mark IX, then hung the rig on a protruding valve, shed his own gear, and hung it up next to Cannon’s. Blackie slid past Cannon and climbed up into the PTC. Together, he, Barth, and Reaves were able to hoist Cannon into the capsule.

  The open hatch created a hole three feet wide in the floor, leaving only a narrow peripheral ledge to stand on—with one diver unconscious and limp as a rag doll. Blackburn held Cannon out of the way while Reaves and Barth shut and sealed the PTC hatch. Reaves had never seen a dead diver but Cannon sure looked like one—motionless, expressionless, eyes like glass. Reaves put his face next to Cannon’s and sensed no trace of breath, nor was there a discernible pulse. They put an emergency mask over Cannon’s nose and mouth that fed Cannon a fresh flow of their helium-rich gas.

  The mask didn’t seem to help, so Blackburn started in with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Cannon’s face was still warm. The mouth-to-mouth was getting a good exchange of gas into Cannon’s lungs—a hopeful sign. In the awkward circular space, Reaves got down on his knees to give Cannon external heart massage while Blackburn kept up the mouth-to-mouth and Barth ran the PTC. Questions from topside were spilling over the intercom—What is your internal pressure gauge reading? What is your oxygen reading? Walt Mazzone donned a headset and was in constant communication, and at the same time was getting the decompression chamber ready to receive them. Mazzone and the others finally heard that the PTC hatch was shut and sealed—“Take us up! Take us up!”—and Tomsky ordered the capsule raised. Within a few minutes a Chipmunk voice could be heard saying, “Faster, faster,” but it might be an hour or more before the PTC was safely mated to the chamber hatch. And then what? Their decompression from six hundred feet would take the better part of a week.

  Everyone in the PTC, except for Cannon, was shaking from the cold. They noticed a froth coming from Cannon’s nose and mouth. Amid the cold confusion, they sensed that their friend had slipped away. They were all tired and shaky and not in the best condition to make medical assessments, but about fifteen minutes after the PTC left the bottom, Captain Bond and the others heard a grim, helium-spiked pronouncement: “Berry Cannon is dead.”

  14

  AN INVESTIGATION

  An effort to revive Berry Cannon continued, even after Barth and the others reported over the intercom that they believed their friend was dead. Topside commanders ordered them to keep up their attempted resuscitation, and they did so until the end of their hour-long ride back, when their PTC was mated with the decompression chamber. At that point they finally stopped working on Cannon so they could open the hatch in the floor. They lowered Cannon’s body through the hatch and passed it down into the chamber, where they laid it to rest on one of the bunks. Barth took a moment to close his friend’s eyes.

  During the PTC’s nail-biting ascent there had been a discussion topside about putting George Bond or one of the other doctors on the Elk River under pressure inside the decompression chamber’s outer lock so the doctor could rendezvous with the aquanauts inside the chamber’s main quarters. But Cannon was presumably going to be dead on arrival. More than an hour had passed since the convulsion. Bond didn’t think a doctor’s presence would serve much purpose. Commander Tomsky, who had the final word, agreed that they should not complicate an already complicated situation by locking in a doctor.

  Barth, Blackburn, and Reaves, and five other Team 1 aquanauts in the second chamber would have to spend the next six days undergoing decompression. But the three weary aquanauts zipped Cannon into a body bag and carried it through the bulkhead hatch and into the adjoining outer lock. They then returned to the main chamber, closed and sealed the hatch. Since Cannon was already dead, he was brought rapidly back to sea level pressure. His body released myriad gas bubbles, causing significant puffing and bloating.

  When the PTC had surfaced through the Elk River moon pool, three of the Mark IX rigs were found dangling around the winch cage, the stoop below the PTC. In the rush to lift Cannon into the capsule, the three rigs were left outside—the two Blackburn had hung up in the trunk, just below the PTC hatch, and the one Barth had doffed and tossed down the hatch to get it out of the way. Only one rig was still dry and inside the capsule—the rig that Reaves never got to use.

  An autopsy report revealed that carbon dioxide poisoning triggered Cannon’s death and the rigs became key pieces of evidence in the Navy’s board of investigation, led by a panel of three officers, plus a legal counsel. No sooner had the aquanauts emerged from their week-long decompression than the board held its first hearing at the Deep Submergence Systems Project Technical Office at Ball
ast Point, the Navy Submarine Support Facility on San Diego Bay.

  Pursuant to long-standing military tradition, board hearings were a fact-finding mission. They were a formal, courtroom-meets-boardroom hybrid, with military lawyers representing the “parties of interest,” but with the parties themselves free to take part in the discussion and ask questions of each other and the many witnesses who were called to testify under oath. Jack Tomsky, the on-scene commander, Captain Walter Mazzone, the diving operations officer, and Paul A. Wells, a senior chief mineman and experienced diver who was in charge of the Mark IX diving equipment, were named as parties of interest. This entitled them to be present throughout the proceeding, introduce evidence, examine and object to any evidence submitted, testify, and ask questions.

  On the board’s second day, Captain Bond asked that he, too, be designated a party. Bond felt that as principal investigator he ought to be able to participate in the proceedings, even if he risked being found at fault. The three-member board agreed, but Bond was the only one of the four parties of interest who chose not to be represented by legal counsel. They were not sitting as defendants, per se, but they all knew that the board could recommend disciplinary action or even trial by court-martial.

  The board held sessions for fifteen days, through the middle of March, often meeting late into the evening. More than eighty documentary exhibits were submitted, from the hefty U.S. Navy Diving Manual to the scrap of paper on which Richard Blackburn had scrawled his concerns about the Mark IX rigs. Barth, Blackburn, and Reaves were among the nearly fifty people who were called to testify. Most were witnesses to some part of the action on board the Elk River; others, like Dr. Robert Workman, provided expert testimony.

  The central testimony was that of the three divers who were with Cannon in the PTC. One by one, they recalled the details of their ordeal: the crippling cold, the fatigue, nearly passing out with the Mark IX, the stuck hatch. The failure of the jury-rigged hot water for the wet suits. Cannon’s convulsion. The attempted resuscitation. The grim uncertainty as to whether their friend was dead or alive.

  Barth voiced measured frustration about such things as the Mark IX and the continual snagging of his umbilical. Describing the second dive, and his struggle to save Berry Cannon, Barth said: “It is quite trying to know when a man is in your hands and he is not breathing, he is in difficulty, and he is dying, we will say, and you can’t do much good because you are continually getting fouled on something on the bottom.” But in further testimony Barth defended the operation, and bristled at the unflattering picture he believed that reporters had been painting of Sealab III since the accident. News of the tragedy had made all three television network newscasts and stories were splashed onto front pages across the land, often accompanied by pictures of Cannon’s chiseled face. The board hearings were open to reporters and in the following days the papers continued to cover the mysterious death of this heretofore unknown aquanaut. Barth, who was never a great fan of the press, didn’t like all the reports, as was apparent from his testimony. “I’m not happy with what I read in the newspapers because it makes us out to be a bunch of stumblebums, actually, that didn’t know what we were doing, and this is not the case.

  “We had a bunch of people who worked damn hard for a number of years, to get this program on the road, and we were fighting the problems that everybody has in the building of the piece of equipment as big as Sealab and the deck decompression chambers and trying to get the thing on the road with some of the problems we had. We had the PTC flooding out; we had this happen to us and that happen to us, and it makes it look like nobody tried too hard to do a good job and I think everybody out there in the Sealab program broke their backs to get it going and tried darn hard to get it done. I am sorry that some things were said by the press, because to me they don’t seem to be the truth. Period.”

  Barth’s reaction was a lot like Bond’s after his Sealab II interview with The New York Times. Relatively little had been written about Sealab’s pioneering successes over the years, or the related breakthroughs in saturation diving, but Cannon’s death was widely reported. When Apollo 1 caught fire on its launch pad two years before, killing three astronauts, everyone at least recognized that, tragic fire notwithstanding, the space program had been on a triumphant roll. Even as Barth and the others testified about Sealab III, Apollo 9 was launched.

  Unlike Barth’s, Richard Blackburn’s testimony was laced with sharp criticism, which generated headlines of the kind that Barth found irksome, such as one in the Los Angeles Times: “Fatal Dive Should Never Have Been Made, Sealab Probe Told.” Blackburn’s opening statement enumerated a number of technical problems that may have contributed to the troubles with their Mark IX rigs—arcane regulator pressure settings and also the possible increase in breathing resistance from the stiffener added to the inhalation hose, as he had noted after the first dive. He testified that the Mark IX had not been properly evaluated, and their training with the rig was so limited that most divers didn’t know much more than how to put it on and where to find the bypass. The divers had all trained in less than sixty feet of water, and most didn’t go any deeper than thirty feet. It was as if they had trained for the Tektite project instead of Sealab.

  “Training looked good on paper but that is all,” Blackburn said. He and others had sensed this, and occasionally someone spoke up. But this was the United States Navy, and “no can do” is not a popular refrain. Besides, the Navy aquanauts and the civilians, too, Cannon included, had been eager to get to the bottom. In the aftermath, though, many were having second thoughts similar to those of Blackburn, who declared: “I believe that the second dive should never have been made, but it was consistent with the type of treatment we have been having all along. All the divers in Sealab have been worked too hard for too long, and then not given any consideration or compensation for their hard work. We were all pushed to the point where mistakes were inevitable. It is a horrible thing for a man to have to die to slow this outfit down enough for a realistic look at what the divers have to contend with.”

  It was an unvarnished, gutsy statement for an enlisted man to make before senior officers. Few others would be as direct, and many were not called to testify at all. More than a week later, Scott Carpenter offered his opinion that the program was underfunded. Money would have bought not only time but men, and they needed both. He also told the board that people were pushed harder in the Sealab program than he had been pushed anywhere else.

  Tomsky and his legal counsel were quick to respond to these and other criticisms. Tomsky maintained, for example, that the program received all the funding he had asked for, and that people were pushed only within reason. Mazzone often just listened to such testimony but occasionally piped up, as when Tomsky indicated that Barth and Blackburn were the ones originally slated to make the first dive and open the habitat as part of the unbuttoning process.

  “May I clear a point?” Mazzone asked. “Barth and Cannon have always been working together as a team for the unbuttoning. This was the original team for the unbuttoning and they were so trained.”

  On the eleventh day, Bond volunteered to testify. After he presented an abridged history of Sealab, he found himself pelted with questions about why he had advised against locking in a doctor to meet the divers inside the pressurized deck chamber after the first or second dives. Dr. Bond defended his decision—the final call was ultimately Tomsky’s to make—but his testimony was not without a touch of emotion. The tragedy had hit him hard. Bond considered Berry Cannon a great friend. But more than an hour had passed between the time Cannon collapsed and his body was lowered into the decompression chamber. He had been limp and unresponsive the entire time, but some suggested that there was a slim possibility that he was still alive when he reached the chamber. Without a doctor there to personally examine him, how were Bond or any of the doctors certain that Cannon had been dead before his body was locked out? The morbid implication was that Bond may have recommended the explosive,
fatal decompression of a living human being.

  The board’s investigation was deliberately and narrowly focused on the circumstances of Berry Cannon’s death. Any testimony that seemed to wander into broader issues was usually cut short. Lieutenant Commander David Martin Harrell, an engineer on the Deep Submergence Systems Project staff who was among the designated aquanauts, drew immediate objections when his testimony turned to the habitat leaks. Only cursory attention was paid to anything deemed the least bit peripheral to Cannon’s death, most notably the problem with opening the hatch, but many crew members believed that at least some of the major snafus should be looked into as part of the investigation. It could be argued, after all, that if corners had not been cut, if money and men had been more plentiful, if the habitat had not been leaking like a sieve, if the hatch had opened promptly and properly, Berry Cannon might still be alive and the program on track.

  On the fourth and fifth days, Barth was called on to narrate the silent black-and-white film that showed him trying to open the hatch on the first and second dives, and then struggling to help Berry Cannon. To relive those moments might have rattled some, but Barth spoke dispassionately, not because he didn’t care about having lost a friend. It was just his pragmatic way. Risks had to be taken. Since Genesis, Barth had taken them himself. Unfortunately, there is always the prospect of death with these types of endeavors, which Berry Cannon knew as well as anyone. The footage of Barth and Cannon from the closed-circuit television camera became for Sealab III what the Zapruder film had been to President Kennedy’s assassination: a grainy visual record scrutinized for answers.