Diver No. 1- Ready!

Chapter 4: NEAR TRAGEDY

One of our practice dives involved breaking up a large concrete block on the bottom with a pneumatic hammer. This almost resulted in a tragic accident to the oldest member of my team, Lt. Watson, a World War I veteran. I was the Tender holding on to his lifeline. After he had been down for about 30 minutes I noticed that his bubbles were slowing down and finally ceased coming to the surface. I gave one pull on the line signalling "Are you OK". I got no response. Finally I yelled over to the phone man to contact my driver. He called and got a sort of mumbling as if he were drunk. Immediately, I was ordered to pull him up. and the rest of my team helped grab hold of the lifeline and started hauling. When we got him to the surface, we could see that he was completely limp within his diving suit. We pulled him up on the float and immediately opened his face plate. He was unconscious and looked grey. I thought "My God, he's had a heart attack and is dead!". However, after unscrewing his helmet his color came back and he quickly revived. After talking with him, we discovered what had happened. He was not having much success breaking up the concrete because he was bouncing up and down with the jackhammer. To put more weight on the hammer, he closed down his manual air valve half way and dumped some air out of his suit with the chin valve. However, the jackhammer accidentally hit the valve and closed it tight. Fortunately, there is a five minutes supply of air in the helmet which kept him alive until he was pulled up. He thanked me for saving his life and said he would buy me several rounds of drinks. I declined since it is the Tender's duty to watch out for his diver, and I was sure that he or one of my other teammates would do the same for me when I was on the bottom.