Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  The utter shock of that moment turned Mary Lou’s heart inside out. At the funeral, Mary Lou found herself thinking that the person in the casket didn’t even look like Berry. Maybe it wasn’t! She half-believed, wanted to believe, that her husband’s death was a necessary hoax, part of an elaborate Navy scheme to keep his true mission a secret. For the better part of a year she privately clung to this notion and the fragile hope that he would one day return.

  Several aquanauts attended the small service at Humphrey Mortuary, but Cannon’s buddies from Team 1 were still locked in a chamber, undergoing decompression on the Elk River. A Navy chaplain read these words: “There is a mystery in death; there is a mystery in the sea. Both are in some degree incomprehensible and unfathomable. Some must probe the mystery of the sea even at the price of probing the mystery of death…”

  The next day Cannon’s body, accompanied by his family and a couple of aquanaut friends, was flown to central Florida for burial at Wacahoota Baptist Cemetery, not far from Cannon’s rural hometown of Williston, where Berry had been raised by his grandmother, while his mother worked odd jobs. The family never had much money, but Berry had always been a good student. He graduated near the top of his high school class and was captain of the football team. Now, as the first American aquanaut to give his life for the quest to live in the sea, Cannon was brought home. A simple gray headstone marked his gravesite.

  A few days later, after Barth and the rest of Team 1 were released from their week-long decompression, the whole gang gathered at Barth’s place near Pacific Beach. Shock and disappointment still hung in the air like a gloomy coastal fog, though many of the aquanauts were still hopeful they’d get their chance to break depth barriers and play their parts in a historic outpost on the continental shelf. Their dampened spirits were lifted when Dick Cooper, a young civilian aquanaut with a doctorate in biological oceanography, showed up with dozens of lobsters, specially flown in from Maine. They were supposed to have been Cooper’s subjects in the planned attempt to start a colony of the crustaceans in deep, cold Pacific waters similar to their Atlantic environs. With Sealab III on hold, Cooper figured the homeless creatures might as well be the main course at what felt like a last supper. Some of the really big ones—caught deep in the Atlantic, in submarine canyons beyond the usual reach of fishermen—weighed as much as thirty pounds. A handful of the guys took those whoppers to Barth’s garage, injected them with formaldehyde, and lacquered and mounted them, as if creating consolation prizes for the big adventure that got away.

  After the accident, Tomsky and the Elk River crew had no more than a day in which to improvise a way to raise Sealab III. Through a combination of jury-rigging and quick thinking, the kind that had often saved the earlier Sealabs, they lifted the leaking lab to the surface before the ocean swallowed it up. Sealab III was then brought back to Long Beach and towed to San Francisco for repairs. While Navy planners mulled Sealab’s future, two Americans walked on the moon and were returned safely to the earth, just as President Kennedy had pledged. Mankind seemed better equipped to reach the distant moon than the outskirts of the continental shelf.

  The Navy continued to express a desire to revive Sealab III but many of the aquanauts and other personnel were already moving on to other assignments. Soon after the board of investigation concluded, a discouraged George Bond flew off to the Virgin Islands to have a look at Project Tektite as it reached its successful conclusion. In the fall the Navy said funding cuts would force the postponement of Sealab III until the following year. By the end of 1970, the Navy quietly announced that Sealab III was in mothballs and the Man-in-the-Sea program had been canceled.

  Bob Barth and most of the others had long since figured out that the Sealab program died with Berry Cannon, but Barth was dismayed by the program’s unceremonious demise. They had all worked hard to prepare for Sealab III. The living depth of six hundred feet would have been a giant leap down for mankind. Seasoned divers like Blackburn and scientists like Dick Cooper were on the brink of a historic mission only to be turned away with scant explanation. It didn’t seem right. Death was always a possibility in their line of work, Barth believed, and should not have been allowed to defeat them. But what most Sealab personnel didn’t know was that Sealab III was not an end but a beginning, and Mary Lou Cannon’s grief-infused thoughts about hoaxes and secret missions were not as far-fetched as they might have seemed.

  15

  THE OIL PATCH

  By the mid-1960s, saturation diving, and even the futuristic notion of living in the sea, was no longer the sole province of scientific dreamers, inventors, or undersea explorers. The business of drilling oil and gas from the world’s continental shelves was growing into an industry, and saturation know-how arrived just in time for the offshore industry to take its hunt for hydrocarbons into deeper waters. It was as if George Bond’s old exploration and exploitation mantra had been adopted by an industry with the money and the motivation to push saturation diving to whatever ocean depths the market, and the human body, would bear.

  By the summer of 1973, a diver like Alan “Doc” Helvey could be found working more than four hundred feet down, almost fifteen atmospheres away, at the bottom of the frigid and notoriously tempestuous North Sea. Helvey was an easygoing ex-Navy diver and medic—the nickname “Doc” had stuck with him after he left the Navy to join the growing legion of commercial divers. Helvey was attracted to commercial diving by the kind of strike-it-rich talk he had heard about working in the oil patch. There was indeed a gold-rush quality to what was happening offshore, and not just for the titans of industry. A commercial diver, especially a saturation diver, could earn in a day what a similarly skilled plumber or mechanic or factory worker would earn in a week, maybe even more, depending on the depth and duration of the dive.

  Working at a depth of 440 feet would have been unthinkable only a few years before. Less than a decade had passed since Ed Link had sent Jon Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit to a similar depth for two tenuous days, and in much less hostile Bahamian waters. Helvey was not only surviving but wrangling with pipes and related fixtures on the kind of outsized underwater plumbing job familiar to commercial divers like him. Helvey and his diving partner were in an oil field called the Forties, a sprawling patch of seabed covering an area larger than the island of Manhattan that lies a hundred miles northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland. Oil was discovered in the Forties in 1970, a first for the United Kingdom sector of the North Sea. The very first North Sea oil strike had come a year before, in a field to the southeast called Ekofisk, in the Norwegian sector. These and other North Sea discoveries yielded big-money contracts for a variety of offshore businesses, including those that supplied working divers, like Helvey’s employer, Taylor Diving & Salvage. Taylor Diving had been started in the late 1950s in New Orleans by a couple of retired Navy divers. From its humble origins on the Gulf Coast, Taylor had grown into one of the largest and most influential diving enterprises in the world. The Gulf of Mexico remained a hotbed for offshore drilling, but after the North Sea discoveries, the deep frontier between Britain and Norway attracted businesses and divers, including Americans like Helvey.

  Taylor Diving had become a major player in the construction field, which required some of the longest, deepest dives to do jobs like laying pipeline at sea. Maintenance and repair of the pipelines were also essential to offshore operations. Pipelines connected multiple wellheads on the sea floor with their mother platforms—industrial islets that often looked like car engines perched above the waterline on stilts. Pipelines ran between these islets and to production facilities on distant shores. Parts of the Gulf of Mexico had become so crisscrossed with pipelines that sandbags were dropped on the bottom and divers wrestled them into place as protective cushions between older pipelines and the new ones crossing over them. By the early 1970s, an estimated fifteen thousand miles of marine pipeline had been laid worldwide, enough to wrap more than halfway around the globe. Many more miles were on the way.

 
Much of what commercial divers were called on to do in the offshore industry might best be described as otherworldly construction work. The surveying, digging, hauling, dredging, cutting, welding, plumbing, inspecting, repairing—all of the kinds of jobs found at a typical construction site—had to be done with the challenges and constraints of working in dark, deep, and shifting water. Divers coaxed heavy parts into place with chain lassos. They handled bolts the size of baseball bats and tightened them with bazooka-sized hydraulic wrenches. They monitored dredging machines that were as noisy as locomotives and slid like giant sleds along the ocean floor, spewing water and stirring up silt, and they inspected pipes and other structures for cracks or leaks. Saturation diving proved especially useful for jobs that had to be done deeper than about 150 feet and were known to take hours rather than minutes to complete.

  The specialized pipe assembly job that Doc Helvey was doing in the North Sea was his first experience as a saturation diver. He liked the unique demands of the work, and he liked the high pay. As the project neared its end, with several days of decompression approaching, he had good reason to hope that this job would not be his last. But Helvey’s friend and diving partner, Paul Havlena, who was also in his late twenties, was looking forward to getting out of the diving business as soon as this job was done. Commercial diving tended to be a younger man’s profession—virtually all of the roughly three hundred divers working for Taylor at the time were under the age of thirty-five. Havlena might have been expected to stick around but he had other plans. He had been accepted to college, had paid his debts, and by signing on for this one last saturation dive, he would have enough in the bank to buy a new Corvette. Pretty soon all he’d have to do was study and chase girls. That’s what he had gleefully been telling Doc Helvey, anyway.

  Helvey and Havlena were getting ready to start on their next round of sea floor tasks when a ruthless North Sea storm ripped through the area. The pipe-laying barge from which they were making their dives didn’t have time to drop its pipe and make a run for the shore and safety, so when this unexpected storm hit, a line of heavy pipe was still attached at the barge’s stern. The pipe stretched some fifty yards behind the barge, cradled in a U-shaped pontoon like a hot dog in a bun. Once the pipe reached the end of the pontoon, it gradually angled down to the sea floor, like gargantuan fishing line. But as the barge got badly roiled, sections of the freshly laid pipeline buckled. The resulting damage required a repair job at a depth of 320 feet, and it showcased the oil patch diver’s brand of useful work.

  While some tasks required Swiss-watch precision, often in a hostile environment, others relied more on nerve and brute strength. Sometimes, as much as anything, a job required a human hand, along with a pair of knowledgeable eyes and the good sense needed to assess a situation and confer with supervisors at the surface. Initially Helvey and Havlena had to walk the bottom to locate the buckles in the pipeline. Then, with his feet braced firmly in the muck, one of them aimed a water jet at the spot to be repaired, using the force of the jet to dig a ditch under the pipeline so that a ring of the pipe’s outer surface had clearance all the way around. This particular pipeline, with a fairly typical width of three feet, and most other such pipe was coated with a protective shell of tar and concrete several inches thick with steel mesh, like thick chicken wire, embedded within it. With sledgehammers and axes, Helvey and Havlena took turns hacking away at the shell until they had cleared a ring of bare, uncoated steel around the pipe. Taking repeated whacks at the pipe through the water, while wearing restrictive hot-water suits and helmets, was exhausting work and could go on for hours.

  Once the coating was removed, they could start cutting out the damaged section. An electric torch was lowered from the surface and switched on and off by surface tenders—“make it hot,” a diver like Helvey would say, in his Chipmunk voice, when he was ready to start “burning” the pipe. When he pulled the torch’s trigger, a stream of pure oxygen shot through a steel rod in a blast of heat of up to twelve thousand degrees Fahrenheit, turning metal to mush, even underwater. A diver who was a skilled burner might cut his way around a sizable pipe in under a half-hour, although the job could take longer. All the while, the diver-as-burner was juggling a combination of heat, oxygen, and hydrogen that could explode if he wasn’t careful because of the ambient high pressure of his underwater surroundings—yet another reason this deep work wasn’t for everyone.

  When the cutting was finished, Helvey and Havlena removed the buckled sections by hooking them up to lifting lines lowered from the barge, coordinating the procedures with topside. A two-diver saturation team typically split an eight-hour shift. While one worked in the water, the other kept an eye on things from inside a transfer capsule, a pressurized pod much like the PTC that had transported the aquanauts to and from Sealab III. This familiar kind of capsule was called a bell, short for diving bell, as various incarnations of diver elevators had been called for years. Somewhere mid-shift the divers usually traded places, and the partner who had waited in the bell picked up where the man in the water had left off.

  Paul Havlena was wrapping up a shift outside the bell that day, his lean frame encased in the latest hot-water-infused wet suit. (Pumping hot water into a suit had proved more effective than heating it with electricity.) Havlena wore a dive helmet, though not the iconic, bulbous hardhat, but one that looked like the space helmets seen in movies—bucket-shaped fiberglass with a square glass pane set into the front. It was a new model, with two-way communications built in, a feature that had only recently been perfected. Trailing Havlena was a duct-taped braid of umbilical hoses; one fed hot water to his suit and two others pumped breathing gas to and from his helmet as part of a gas-recycling system.

  A saturation diver was usually pretty tired out toward the end of a shift like this, ready to climb back into the bell and ride it like an elevator to a decompression chamber at the surface. Everything seemed to be fine as Doc Helvey waited inside the bell for Havlena—until a helium-spiked cry for help over the intercom shattered the calm. Then came silence. Alarmed, Helvey started pulling in his buddy’s umbilical, hand over hand, through the sloshing open hatch in the floor of the bell. The bell was hanging thirty feet or so above the seabed, and Helvey strained against the combined weight of his buddy, his buddy’s gear, and all that hot water in his suit.

  Another diver essentially parachuted in to help by making an unusually rapid descent from the surface, the kind that can pop eardrums or worse. He followed a connecting line down to the bell, like a firefighter sliding down a pole thirty stories tall. He found Havlena stuck around the clump, a weight that hung below the bell, and freed his tangled umbilical. Once that was done he and Helvey were able to pull Havlena into the bell. As their pod was being winched up to the surface, they gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and heart massage, a distressingly similar scenario to Berry Cannon’s last dive, four years earlier. Cannon’s buddies had held out hope, however fleeting, that their unconscious friend might pull through, but Doc Helvey knew right away that his buddy was already gone.

  Taylor Diving researchers later determined that Havlena’s breathing gear, a new gas-conserving design that pushed and pulled gas through dual umbilicals, had malfunctioned. The pressure imbalance in the dive helmet had caused Havlena’s lungs to collapse, and that’s what killed him. But even after rigorous lab tests, the source of the problem remained a mystery, much like the mystery of Cannon’s empty canister.

  In the hours after the accident, all Doc Helvey knew for sure was that his friend was dead. As was done with Berry Cannon, Havlena’s body was locked out of the main decompression chamber, which sat on board the pipe-laying barge at the surface. Helvey remained inside the chamber, where he would spend several days decompressing, wondering whether he should ever dive again. Paul Havlena’s death, while tragic, would be one of just two reported in the North Sea that year. Some later years would see more fatalities, but statistics suggested that for all the elements working against them,
commercial divers were no more likely to die on the job than coal miners or construction workers.

  The offshore industry joined in the efforts to crack existing depth barriers in anticipation of sending divers down to even deeper subsea fields, a thousand feet below the surface and perhaps deeper still. If anyone had asked Doc Helvey that day whether he thought he might eventually dive to work at a thousand feet, he would have shaken his head in disbelief, and not just because of the inexplicable accident that had just killed his friend. A thousand feet was almost a fifth of a mile beneath the surface, and some thirty atmospheres away. Hannes Keller’s ill-fated dive years before had underscored the awesome nature of the thousand-foot barrier. It was perhaps possible to break it—in the open sea and not just in a laboratory—but a working diver had to be able to remain there safely for hours, not just a few troubled minutes.

  The undersea workforce had already come a long way since old-style hardhat divers took on the first jobs in the nascent offshore industry, which was born in shallow waters not so long after the first oil well was tapped on land in 1859, in Pennsylvania. As the nineteenth century came to a close, piers were being built to reach underwater oil fields just beyond the shorelines of Southern California. A similar evolution soon began in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling initially took place in the swamps, bayous, and shallow coastal bays along the Louisiana coast. Divers were not in great demand until after World War II, when more sophisticated, stand-alone platforms began to appear, both off the California coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. Depths were modest in those early years, and most dives could be handled the old-fashioned way, with hardhat gear and nothing more exotic to breathe than compressed air. Out of necessity, some divers might push the conventional depth limits to three hundred feet or more, mainly by summoning well-honed powers of concentration to fend off the inevitable nitrogen-induced narcotic haze just long enough to finish a specific task.