Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  As the Comex series and other experiments continued, still more troubling signs emerged when human subjects were exposed to the pressures of four hundred pounds per square inch or more at depths of a thousand-plus feet: lethargy, fatigue, sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, even delusion and hallucination. Researchers were finding that the high pressure was somehow causing a hyperexcitability in the central nervous system. Neural transmitters seemed to be rapid-firing and synapses overloading, which could lead to convulsions—a nasty lingering threat that had been seen in animals exposed to very high pressure. As with nitrogen narcosis, symptoms varied from diver to diver—Delauze did not exhibit the same pronounced tremors as his American chamber mate.

  Scientists debated what to call this new physiological phenomenon—“helium tremors” wasn’t quite right—and a name finally stuck: High-Pressure Nervous Syndrome, or HPNS. HPNS was physiologically the opposite of nitrogen narcosis. It was like a shift into neural overdrive that produces wide-ranging effects, often inexplicable and counterintuitive. Narcosis, on the other hand, slowed all systems down, ultimately causing a person to pass out. While problematic in its own right, narcosis was at least fairly predictable—a martini-party drunkenness that could be alleviated either by substituting helium for nitrogen, or just by returning to a lesser depth. HPNS was largely unpredictable, like drinking some kind of LSD-laced triple espresso. And whether in the sea or in a test chamber, a badly stricken diver saturated at thirty atmospheres is a long way from a hospital, literally days of decompression away.

  The Comex deep-diving series Physalie, begun with Delauze and Brauer, ushered in an active period of latter-day Genesis experiments, at Comex and elsewhere, in search of a solution to HPNS. Volunteer test subjects and scientists at the top research centers in the United States, Britain, and France tried out various forms of alchemy, mainly different gas mixtures and pressurization rates, to get divers beyond thousand-foot depths without causing them to shake, vomit, convulse, or anything else. In hindsight, it might appear that HPNS was to blame for Berry Cannon’s demise, but at six hundred feet, Cannon would not yet have been exposed to sufficiently high pressure to bring on HPNS-induced convulsions.

  Slowing the rate of pressurization en route to great depths was one approach that seemed to help divers dodge HPNS, but that could also make deep dives less practical. Not only would a diver face a long decompression after a dive—about ten days from a thousand feet—but it might also take a few days before the dive to ease past the thousand-foot barrier. Even the successful tests, like the one to eleven hundred feet that Dr. Workman ran in 1970 at Taylor Diving’s new Hydrospace Research Center, showed that with HPNS there were no guarantees. But there was still hope. A couple of years later, in mid-1972, Comex researchers reached an astonishing new mark by pressurizing two men to 610 meters, a simulated depth of slightly more than two thousand feet. The divers were held at that depth, equal to more than a third of a mile, for an hour and twenty minutes—not terribly long, but a major breakthrough. This exposure of human beings to life at sixty atmospheres, under some nine hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, constituted the deepest experimental dive to date—and got the Comex divers featured in Rolex advertisements for wearing the ultra-pressure-proof watch called the Sea-Dweller.

  Within a year, the U.S. Navy borrowed Taylor Diving’s research chamber for a similarly deep test of its own—an indication that, despite Sea-lab’s demise, the Navy had not lost interest in deep saturation dives. The Navy’s need to borrow Taylor’s state-of-the-art chamber also underscored the leading role the private sector had taken in furthering deep-diving and saturation research. At Taylor, Navy researchers pressurized six divers to a depth of sixteen hundred feet. To simulate a real dive to such depth, the test subjects went in and out of the wet pot for seven days. An eighteen-day decompression followed—nearly three weeks confined to a chamber the size of a walk-in closet, breathing an ever-changing blend of gases. The divers came out all right, but they had suffered many of the troubling, unpredictable effects of HPNS, including a newly identified one: dyspnea, characterized by labored breathing and the frightening sensation of not getting enough oxygen with each breath, as happens in thin air at high altitudes. The perplexing fact was that blood samples from the test subjects showed normal arterial gases. There was no actual shortage of oxygen, just the sensation—and another mysterious neural effect of HPNS.

  A number of latter-day Genesis experiments like this one continued to focus on the persistent problem of HPNS and on cracking the thousand-foot barrier, but industry titans also wanted readily applicable methods and equipment. One major innovation took the concept of a sea floor habitat and cleverly adapted it to specific commercial needs. It was a hybrid habitat that had the portability of Link’s inflatable dwelling and the sturdy, roomier structure of Sealab. This new industrial habitat provided a dry, pressurized shelter, but it was intended as a workshop only. Saturation divers would still spend their off-hours in chambers at the surface, under pressure. They could then commute by bell to the sea floor, set up a habitat, and spend entire shifts working inside until the job was done. Engineers at Ocean Systems produced and tested the first one, in 1967, but Taylor Diving was right behind them and very soon came out with its own, as did some of the other larger companies, like Comex.

  There were some differences in design, but these hyperbaric workshops, called underwater welding habitats, were all built with a specific purpose in mind: the essential lining up, cutting, and especially the welding together of pipeline sections. None of these utilitarian welding habitats was as eye-catching as Jacques Cousteau’s Starfish House, and each was just one-quarter the size of Sealab. But they got the job done, and brought about a useful variation on the theme of Dominion over the Seas. The typical habitat looked like a steel shed, about twelve feet square, often with a slightly domed roof and arched slots like the doors of a doghouse on two facing sides. The slots fit over a pipeline lying on the sea floor, similar to the way the fenders of a car fit over the wheels. Divers on the bottom coordinated with the surface ship as the habitat was lowered so it would not damage the pipe—a potentially million-dollar mistake.

  Most habitats were designed with no permanent floor, so each one was like a box-shaped bucket turned upside down. The two divers who guided the hyperbaric hut into place had a few more preparatory steps to take before a breathable artificial atmosphere was shot in. The incoming gas forced out the seawater that had filled the habitat when it was put on the bottom. Bubbles burst forth through a grated floor, which the divers put into place, until all the water was expelled, leaving the habitat dry. An exposed section of pipe, or often the ends of two pipelines to be welded together, ran through the middle of its austere interior.

  Inside a habitat, divers who had trained as welders—or sometimes welders who had trained as divers—joined the sections of pipe. Underwater welding techniques had markedly improved since World War II, but conventional underwater welds, while fine for some jobs, could not meet the more stringent standards set for the far-flung arteries that carried the lifeblood of the offshore oil industry. That’s why pipelines were typically pieced together and welded, assembly-line style, on pipe-laying barges, like the one from which Doc Helvey made his first saturation dives. Several sections of pipe, each about forty feet long, could be lined up, welded together, and X-rayed to verify the quality of the welds. Once that was done, the newly fused pipeline was pushed off the barge’s stern into the hot dog bun of a pontoon. From there, divers helped ease the pipeline onto the seabed.

  But the logistics of offshore pipe laying still left numerous pipe ends that could be joined only after they were laid on the seabed, and that’s where the habitats came in—once Ocean Systems engineers figured out that welds of equally high quality as those made on a lay barge could also be made under pressure, as long as the welding was done somewhere dry. One common and crucial underwater pipe connection, for example, which became a big moneymaker for Taylo
r, was between a pipeline laid on the seabed and a vertical conduit that ran like a giant downspout from the top of an offshore platform. At the foot of the platform, this vertical pipe section turned at a right angle, its open end facing out to sea and in the direction of the end of the pipeline lying on the seabed. There were also times, usually to speed up the pipe-laying process, when more than one barge would lay long segments of a pipeline, and those segments would then have to be lined up and connected out at sea. Just as Doc Helvey acted as ringmaster to coordinate the hooking up and removal of damaged pipe sections, a diver on the bottom had to coordinate the lining up of pipes, giving instructions to crane operators at the surface to yank a tethered pipe end, weighing tons, one way or the other.

  This process of lining up two ends of pipe had to be executed with nearly improbable precision, given the heft of the pipe and often shifting seas that further complicated the task. There could be no slamming of pipe into pipe, and the job wasn’t done until the two circular ends faced each other almost perfectly. On a smaller scale it would be like trying to line up two ends of garden hose by attaching a string to the end of one hose, climbing to the roof of a tall building, then taking instructions from someone down below as to which way to pull the string. Ideally there would be no stiff breeze—the equivalent of a strong sea current—to make the alignment even harder to get right.

  Once two pipe ends were properly aligned, the diver wielded a bazooka-like hydraulic wrench and started bolting together the lined-up flanges, the collars around the end of a pipe with holes for bolts. The drawback to flanges was that they weren’t as long-lasting as welds, and had a greater risk of leaking. This put potentially weak links in an otherwise scrupulously welded pipeline. But then the underwater welding habitat was brought to market, and soon followed the discovery of oil in the North Sea. Taylor Diving found a major market for its habitats and became the dominant provider of hyperbaric welding, and Comex evolved into one of its top competitors.

  Because the precise lining up of pipe was critical to the subsequent welding process, Taylor and others came up with variations on another key piece of heavy equipment. This setup featured two pairs of mechanical vise grips sized to grab pipe up to about four feet in diameter. The grips hung like lobster claws from the rafters of a steel structure resembling the framework for a big three-car garage. Taylor called its seventy-foot-long version a Submersible Pipe Alignment Rig, or SPAR. With divers on the bottom, the SPAR could be lowered from a barge over two ends of pipe. A welding habitat fit into the center of the SPAR framework, and a diver operated the big clawlike grips on either side of the habitat the way a construction worker would operate heavy machinery. A second diver gave directions to the one at the controls and the two of them worked together to move the pipes around until they lined up inside the habitat. Then the divers could both get to work in the pressurized dry confines of their sea floor workshop.

  The first thousand-foot contract came in the early 1970s from Conoco for exploratory work in the North Sea. No one had ever worked at that depth, but Delauze and Comex had spent more time and money than most preparing to crack the thousand-foot barrier. Comex was clearly a leading candidate, and Delauze was dismayed when the contract went to Oceaneering International, an agile competitor formed a few years earlier by a union of upstart diver-entrepreneurs out of California and Canada.

  Fast-growing Oceaneering was a study in the offshore industry’s frontier spirit. Its California-based founders, a posse of former abalone divers, broke with Ocean Systems after deciding they didn’t care for its corporate attitude or the retired admiral that Ed Link put in charge, his friend E. C. Stephan, the former chief of the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group. When Oceaneering won the contract for the first thousand-foot dive, it had never before put divers to work at such depth. The company principals had to play catch-up just to get a saturation diving system built that would handle a thousand-foot job, but as it turned out the dives for Conoco never exceeded about seven hundred feet.

  Within a couple of years, in 1975, Henri Delauze and Comex were the first to work at a thousand feet after all. They were hired by BP Canada to recover a hefty stack of valves about thirty feet tall that looked something like a small rocket pieced together from fat fire hydrants—a blowout preventer. The assemblage was worth $10 million and had to be abandoned off the coast of Labrador before it could be properly placed on a sea floor wellhead to serve its fail-safe function of controlling pressure. Attempts to raise it had failed. Comex divers worked from out of their bell, which was lowered from its mother ship to the job site at a record working depth of 1,070 feet. The six divers, working in two teams, made several dives and spent four hours in water that was a few degrees below freezing. Warmed by their hot-water suits, the divers were able to work through the checklist of mechanical preparations they had practiced in the Comex test pool back in Marseille. They then went about hooking up the heavy fixture for its successful lift back to the surface. Comex even shot and produced an in-house film about the project. The footage would never have anything like the marquee value of a Cousteau show, but it was another testament to the achievements of Henri Delauze, France’s less celebrated diver.

  Within a couple of years divers were gearing up for another series of thousand-foot-plus dives that were also notable for durations far longer than those at Labrador. Shell Oil had an offshore structure of unprecedented size in the works that would require days of undersea labor in the Gulf of Mexico. The deepest offshore platform ever built, called Cognac, was about to be put together on the sea floor. The platform was named for a prospect Shell had acquired and it was to be built at a site about fifteen miles south of the Mississippi River Delta.

  Cognac’s main supporting structure, known as the “jacket,” was going to be set on the bottom of the submerged Mississippi Canyon, some thirty atmospheres away, at a depth of 1,025 feet. The original plans for Cognac called for much of the deep work to be done remotely, by mechanical devices, hydraulics, and electronics. Divers were to be more of a backup brigade for system failures. Instead, with the growing confidence born out of diving research and oil field experience, it was decided that divers should be put on the front lines. Taylor Diving & Salvage won the coveted contract for the Cognac diving operation, though its parent company, Brown & Root, lost the bid to build the jacket structure, a prestigious deal worth $275 million. That honor went to J. Ray McDermott & Co., a major competitor in marine construction, which had a diving subsidiary of its own, thereby creating an unusual alliance of not entirely friendly corporate rivals.

  The Cognac jacket, a densely latticed steel tower, was built on land, just west of New Orleans near Morgan City. The jacket would be too tall to handle and transport in one piece, so it was designed in three sections—base, middle, and top—to be stacked one at a time. Beginning with the base, each section of the prefabricated jacket was to be floated into the Gulf on football-field-sized barges from shore and then lowered to the designated site on the canyon floor. When fully assembled, the Cognac jacket would look like an industrial version of the Eiffel Tower, its matrix of steel beams perhaps less ornate but every bit as intricate. With the platform and derricks that would top the jacket above the waterline Cognac would reach a height of more than eleven hundred feet, taller than the Parisian landmark it evoked. At nearly sixty thousand tons, Cognac would weigh five times as much as the Eiffel Tower, a heft designed to support two drilling rigs and withstand both the everyday surges of a thousand feet of seawater and the occasional wrath of a Gulf hurricane.

  Two saturation diving systems, each with its bell and chamber, were installed aboard a McDermott barge, along with a supply of several hundred thousand cubic feet of breathing gases. It was the largest saturation spread ever assembled. Through a rigorous screening process worthy of NASA, Taylor selected twelve divers, half of whom might as well have been called the Cognac Six. They never thought of themselves in such elite terms, but like the Mercury Seven astronauts who rode the
first rockets into space, the Cognac Six divers would be the first of the twelve to ride a bell down to a thousand feet for a series of day-long shifts scheduled to go on for a month. Fittingly, this 1977 dive coincided with the twenty-year anniversary of George Bond’s rejected “Proposal for Underwater Research,” although it’s unlikely anyone knew to mark the date. The Cognac Six, along with the six others who would follow them, plus one tender for each group and two dozen members of a topside support crew, were chosen from a field of more than four hundred experienced divers and supervisory personnel. One of the Six was Doc Helvey.

  After the death of his buddy in the North Sea, Helvey had seriously considered quitting diving for good. With encouragement from fellow divers, including Ken Wallace, then Taylor’s vice president, he decided to stick with it. He enjoyed the otherworldly work, and over the next few years spent many more hours in saturation. Still, when the need for divers on the Cognac project was announced, Helvey did not rush to the front of the line. It occurred to him that this job might just be too risky, too deep, too dangerous, not worth it—although the money would be incredibly good. As a diver for Cognac, Helvey would gross almost a thousand dollars a day.

  Fat paychecks aside, diving to work at a thousand feet, for days at a time, was not merely a job. It was more like a mission, a deep-sea version of… the moon landing. Helvey didn’t want to miss out. Risky, yes, but risks of all kinds came with any underwater job. Doc Helvey knew that as well as anyone, and he was also the designated medic for his six-man Cognac team. If anyone started to exhibit any signs of HPNS, it was up to the topside controllers to try to alleviate the symptoms by adjusting the pressure and gas mixture, but there were other reasons to have medics on a diving team. Helvey once saved another diver’s badly crushed finger by deftly stitching it back together while saturated in a chamber at seven hundred feet. From that depth and pressure it would take the better part of a week to decompress and get to a hospital. How wonderfully fleeting a typical spaceflight was by comparison. As Cognac got under way, Doc Helvey couldn’t help but wonder who would tend to him if he had a medical emergency. But that unlikely scenario wasn’t going to change his mind about taking on the job and the mission.