Sealab Page 11

  The Unit chambers at the Navy Yard were similar to the one at Bethesda—divided by a bulkhead into two sections, with a smaller outer lock that led through a hatch into an inner lock, the main living area. There was one difference. The inner lock had a second hatch, a back door of sorts, that opened into a short tunnel just wide enough to crawl through. The tunnel led into the “igloo,” a circular, domed adjacent section, about ten feet in diameter. A hole in the igloo’s floor allowed a diver to drop down into the “wet pot,” a vertical tank filled with about ten feet of water. There researchers could simulate a dive that was not just under a certain pressure but also underwater.

  Over the course of the next week Barth and his two fellow volunteers would spend time in and out of the wet pot, replicating the experience of living in a pressurized, sea-based habitat and working in the water outside. Bob Barth would be teamed with two other instructors from the escape training tank, Sanders “Tiger” Manning and Ray Lavoie. Both Manning and Lavoie were hospital corpsmen—Navy-trained medics—so they could do the required poking and prodding of Barth and themselves. Dr. Bond also sent in a canary. It seemed like a wise precaution. Canaries had been put into service with caisson workers, just as they had in coal mines. If there was something foul in the breathing gas and the bird keeled over, that would serve as a backup warning system. A friend of Barth’s likely spoke for others when he said: “They’re gonna hurt you with experiments like that.”

  There was a palpable air of skepticism about this week-long test dive. A hundred feet? For a week? Some Unit personnel couldn’t help but wonder why if this test was so important, a group from the New London submarine base had to run it. Others scoffed at the very notion of saturation diving. Whatever skepticism hung in the air may have been thicker, too, because the Unit had only recently played host to a Swiss wunderkind with similarly grand ideas about how to revolutionize deep diving—and everyone knew how his thousand-footer turned out. Now here was this erstwhile hillbilly doctor and his gospel of undersea living. Yet at least a few people around the Unit seemed receptive to the concept of saturation diving, and even the Jules Verne–sounding notion of living in the sea. The New London researchers also had the reassuring presence and slide-rule savvy of Dr. Workman, who had recently been assigned to the Unit after three years as Bond’s assistant officer-in-charge at the Medical Research Lab. If all went well this week, they could begin to bridge the depth and duration gap of the Cousteau and Link trials—not just by racking up a record number of days under pressure, although Genesis D would in fact be a historic first for saturation diving, Bond reckoned. With careful physiological monitoring they hoped to better understand both the limits and possibilities of saturation diving.

  Once locked into the EDU chamber, Barth found that daily life was much as it had been at Bethesda—a campout with crazed medics. He and the others eased into their routine of pokes and prods. The atmospheric control system had its limitations, so conditions in the chamber fluctuated between wintry and downright steamy, with stretches of relative comfort. Amenities for long-duration tests like this were lacking, as they were at Bethesda. There was a bunk for just one person inside. The other two had to squeeze their bedding in elsewhere. There were no showers, and toilets consisted of a portable, flimsy folding seat over a plastic bag. Now that they were living under pressure, they had to be careful not to tie up the potty bags too tightly when passing them out through the airlock. Otherwise, as Boyle’s law worked its magic, the gases trapped inside the bag would expand and, very likely, explode.

  The wet pot may not have been as thrilling or scenic as Villefranche Bay, and there would be no story in National Geographic, but they were accumulating valuable data on a diver’s ability to work underwater and under pressure, in this case prolonged pressure. So Barth or one of the others would crawl through the short connecting tunnel into the igloo, put on breathing gear, and drop through the open hatch in the floor into the wet pot. A number of physical tests were performed on something like a swimmer’s treadmill, a kind of counterweighted trapeze the diver could hang on to while swimming in place fully submerged, so that the doctors could track the effects of breathing harder and burning more oxygen.

  As the days and hours crept by, Bond and Mazzone took turns keeping watch outside the chamber. Locked on the inside, visible only through a couple of small portholes, Barth and the others continued with the poking, prodding, diving, waiting. They seemed to be holding up well, although Ray Lavoie’s blood pressure shot up about midway through the experiment. That sort of thing could happen under pressure, even on conventional dives. Different bodies respond differently to pressure, breathing gases, and the rest. The thousand-foot Atlantis dive provided a chilling case in point: Under similar circumstances, in a shared diving bell, Hannes Keller lived and Peter Small died. Dr. Bond was fairly convinced that Lavoie’s high blood pressure was nothing to worry about. He recommended that Lavoie take tranquilizers three times a day.

  As the hyperbaric campout approached its end, Bond gave his subjects a rundown of their forty-eight-hour decompression schedule. In the future they might be able to shorten the schedule, but for now they were still erring on the side of caution, taking it slow, as Dr. Bornmann had with Robert Sténuit. Considering the stakes, and the common knowledge that even a standard decompression is risky, everyone sounded remarkably relaxed. Someone joked that Bond ought to consult a Ouija board.

  At one hundred feet, a depth of about four atmospheres, the breathing gas contained only about 5 percent oxygen, but the pressure had the effect of creating a four-fold increase. That made the oxygen concentration roughly equivalent to the 21 percent level of the gas found in ordinary sea level air. One practical advantage of this phenomenon was that the presence of relatively little oxygen in the chamber’s atmosphere eliminated the threat of fire. A match would not have lit inside the chamber. Smoking, even if allowed, would have been impossible. But that would change as the helium was flushed out, the oxygen concentration raised, and the pressure reduced.

  The potential for fire was on Bond’s mind toward the end of the decompression as the chamber was to be filled with ordinary compressed air. Any appliances that might cause a fatal spark were turned off—the coffeemaker, electric fans that helped circulate the atmosphere, and a portable carbon dioxide scrubber, the cauldron-sized, electric-powered kind used for emergencies on submarines. It had hummed away during Genesis D to bolster the atmospheric control system and help prevent a poisonous CO2 buildup during the unusually long experiment. The refrigerator could be left on, they decided. Bond joined the night watch during the final hours of the six-day dive and seemed almost tipsy with delight as he indulged in some characteristic repartee with his desaturating divers.

  “Well, I hope you all feel good and brave. Pretty soon I’m going to start you up. I got your oxygen up to about 11.7 now,” Bond announced over the intercom. “You see this piece of paper? This tells the whole story.”

  “Oh, yeah. Uh huh,” a Chipmunk voice said with exaggerated uninterest. Bond went on rhapsodizing about the sheet of paper, clearly savoring his gag.

  “I found it over here in the wastebasket. I thought it was a shopping list at first but it turned out to be your decompression schedule! It’s all right, though. I can read it. Let me show you the curve.” With that he put the paper to the porthole for all inside to see. It was a graphic rendering of their route back, a plotting of times, depths, and gas mixtures—a landing plan, in effect, for a safe return from four atmospheres to one. Then Bond joked again: “Well, I don’t know which way that curve goes, but we’ll get on it and ride it.”

  A Chipmunk muttered: “I thought you were at thirty-five feet now, right?”

  “Ah, yeah. We’re somewhere around there,” Bond said.

  “Well, that’s nice,” said the Chipmunk.

  Early on the last morning of the experiment Bond wanted to hear what his subjects sounded like as helium was removed from their artificial atmosphere at around t
en feet.

  “Notice how your voices are changing. Talk a little bit now each of you,” Bond said. “Say a few words, each of you.” One after the other, each wise-ass Chipmunk responded: “A few words, each of you.”

  As the ultralight helium gas was replaced with air, Bond facetiously asked whether the canary felt any heavier.

  “Well, we’re going to have roast Tom Turkey tomorrow but other than that, no evidence,” said a Chipmunk.

  With less than ten feet and just a couple of hours to go, there was a sudden surge of anxiety when Barth and Manning detected smoke in the roof of the igloo. A motorized winch appeared to emit a gray puff. Electricity was shut down and Bond ordered the men to get out of there and secure the hatches to the igloo, sealing it off from the rest of the chamber as a precaution. The topside crew could then let off the pressure inside the igloo only, open an exterior hatch, and crawl inside to investigate the mysterious puff. A faintly acrid smell lingered in the domed section, they noticed. All the electrical systems were checked. None was found to be excessively hot, including the suspect winch. The smoke apparently came from the exposure of grease in the gearbox to the artificial atmosphere. In addition to physiology, there were lessons still to learn about optimal equipment design. The igloo remained sealed off as the three men rode out the rest of their decompression in the main chamber. The compressed air came whooshing in.

  Bond drawled into a tape recorder as the experiment concluded: “The subjects are being held now at six feet on compressed air. I expect to have them out in about twenty minutes.” It was three-thirty in the afternoon on April 30, 1963. “Their general condition appears to be quite satisfactory.” Bond confirmed this soon after the three scruffy aquanauts emerged from their chamber.

  To celebrate, Bond and Mazzone took the trio out for a seafood dinner at a nearby restaurant. They then climbed into their Navy truck to make the long drive back to New London. Mazzone dropped Bond off at his house in the wee hours of the morning, and Bond sat up until daybreak, sipping bourbon in the kitchen while telling his wife about the successful experiment. He would soon have another chapter of the Genesis story to tell.

  7

  DEEP LOSS, DEEPER THINKING

  The changing atmosphere in the Unit chamber made a timely metaphor for a changing atmosphere throughout the Navy Department. As Genesis D successfully ran its course, the United States was reeling from the devastating tragedy of USS Thresher. The nuclear-powered sub was a stealthy, state-of-the-art Cold War weapon capable of diving to thirteen hundred feet, deeper than any Navy sub before it. The submarine had been in service less than two years when, on April 10, 1963, it was making a test run about two hundred miles off the New England coast. Its communications inexplicably fizzled and the worst was soon confirmed: The Thresher had gone down at more than eight thousand feet, taking all 129 men on board with it, including seventeen civilian observers. The disaster sent shock waves through the Navy, jolting some crusty attitudes in the process.

  When the Thresher was first reported missing, a couple of weeks prior to Genesis D, Captain Bond received a call asking that he prepare his emergency divers for a possible rescue, but long before the sub reached the bottom, more than a mile down, the tremendous ocean pressure cracked its hull like an egg shell, causing an implosion that scattered the sub and everything on board like shrapnel across the ocean floor. The New London base was Thresher’s home port and the loss was a personal one for many sailors, including Bob Barth. He had just seen the Thresher crew members, alive and well, when they came through the escape training tank for a required review course. A handful of them had been close friends and shipmates—and Barth had almost gone down with them. He had requested and received orders to join the Thresher crew, but Bond had asked him to stick around for the upcoming hundred-foot Genesis trial at the Unit. Barth agreed and Bond arranged to have Barth’s training tank duty extended. If not for Genesis, Barth would have been on the sub’s final, fatal dive.

  The best hope of locating the remains of the Thresher lay in a clever if somewhat quaint deep-diving vessel, the bathyscaphe Trieste. Designed by the Swiss physicist and high-altitude balloonist Auguste Piccard, the Trieste worked a lot like a hot air balloon in reverse, drifting down toward the ocean floor and then rising back up to the surface. Its steel “balloon,” filled with jet fuel for buoyancy control, looked like a runt of a submarine. On the underbelly was a steel personnel sphere, attached in the center like a pea outside the pod. There was room enough for just two pilots, as the operators called themselves. The pod was built to withstand enormous pressure outside while maintaining a benign surface pressure inside, like the bathysphere the naturalist William Beebe had used in the 1930s to go a half-mile down. But the bathysphere was lowered by cable from a mother ship; Trieste could make its dives without tethers to the surface, and it could go much deeper.

  The Navy bought the Trieste for research purposes and the vessel made its mark on January 23, 1960, with a harrowing record drop to the deepest known point on the planet in the Mariana Trench, southwest of Guam. The Challenger Deep is almost seven miles down, deeper than Mount Everest is high and more than a thousand atmospheres away. The bathyscaphe pilots achieved the inner-space equivalent of a moon landing, except that they couldn’t leave their sealed sphere, plant a flag, or be seen on national television. They could only peer into the gloom through two tiny portholes and take pictures from mounted cameras. The Trieste wasn’t designed to hunt for downed submarines—its battery-powered propellers gave it a limited roving ability. But with North Atlantic depths of more than a mile, and with the Thresher remains scattered across at least two square miles of ocean floor, the bathyscaphe was the best tool the Navy had.

  Being ill-equipped for the Thresher search was one problem. Another was the impossibility of a rescue had the sub crash-landed on the seabed and remained intact but beyond the limited reach of divers and the standard rescue equipment. The Navy would have been helpless to save any trapped, suffocating survivors. To address these and other undersea concerns the Thresher tragedy had underscored, the Navy established the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group—just as Genesis D got under way at the Experimental Diving Unit. As the all-encompassing moniker implied, the group would reexamine many facets of the Navy’s deep-sea operations, not only submarine rescue—while crucial, it was rarely needed—but salvage capabilities and diving. About sixty specialists in oceanography, engineering, and submarines were called on to develop a five-year blueprint to nudge the nation’s undersea know-how into the space age.

  Ed Link was among the first asked to join the group. Link had just returned to the picturesque Monaco harbor from a two-week cruise on Sea Diver when he was summoned by Rear Admiral E. C. Stephan, head of the Navy’s Oceanographic Office, who was put in charge of the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group. Link flew to Washington the next day to meet with the admiral, and the two stayed up late at Stephan’s home discussing the matter. Link was initially reluctant to get involved because it would mean putting off the extraordinary four-hundred-foot attempt at undersea living that he had announced the previous fall at the Second World Congress of Underwater Activities. Stephan did his best to twist Link’s arm. Link’s far-flung connections were such that the admiral believed that if he could get Ed Link on board, he could get almost anyone else. The hope was to assemble a group not only of military experts, but leaders from the realms of science, academia, and industry. After talking it over that night with Stephan, Link agreed to participate. He believed that the review group had important work to do, and could see that by spending weeks meeting with top underwater experts he would undoubtedly learn a great deal, probably more than he could contribute.

  The review group was organized into a number of sections—operations, oceanography, research, engineering, and a variety of knowledgeable naval officials and scientists were ultimately appointed, but Captain George F. Bond, officer-in-charge, Medical Research Laboratory at the New London submarine base, crusad
er for saturation diving and undersea living, was not among them. Link headed the industry division. Bond might have been a logical choice to head the medical division, but the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, where Bond still had a prime detractor in the boss who rejected his “Proposal for Underwater Research,” tapped Charlie Aquadro for the job. Nonetheless, Admiral Stephan sought out Bond to do some work with the group, even if he wasn’t a designated section leader.

  By June, Link sailed Sea Diver to Washington and was given a berth at the Navy Yard. Sea Diver would remain docked there for the next six months. Link was provided with an office on the grounds and could frequently be seen around the Unit, a good place for the inquisitive inventor to soak up valuable information. On board Sea Diver that summer, with the assistance of a medical student, Link conducted some animal saturation experiments by locking mice into a shoebox-sized pressure chamber he built himself. More important, ultimately, was what Link and his team, including Robert Sténuit, who rejoined Sea Diver in Washington, could learn from the Unit and its medical chief, Dr. Robert Workman. In another show of Navy support for Link’s plans, Workman was running some day-long deep dives in one of the Unit test chambers, with two Unit divers as subjects. They hoped to verify a decompression schedule that might be the key to Link’s next crack at undersea living.