GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS speak from Davey Jones' Locker.
On Wednesday 21 March Coast Guard diver Steven Duque would have turned 23. He died last summer in the frozen Arctic on a routine training dive from the CGC Healy (WHEC). The Coast Guard has issued its Final Report of the facts and circumstances leading up to his death along with that of Coast Guard female officer, Lieutenant Jessica Hill. The Report might have been final enough for the Coast Guard but not for rational and intelligent Americans who expect more from the nation's primary Arctic research and operations service. The Number 23 is ominous. Numbers 23, verse 32 says "Be sure, your sin will find you out".
NUMBER 23.
Senator Maria Cantwell, the ChairPerson of the Senate Coast Guard subcommittee is conducting hearings into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two Coast Guard divers who plunged about 200 feet deep into the frozen Locker of Davey Jones and King Neptune. Their support teams drank beer and spiked lemonade while playing football on the ice, according to a Coast Guard final report. When it was discovered that something foul was adrift, it was too late. Davey Jones had claimed his own.
In a memorandum dated Jan. 12, 2007, Adm. Thad W. Allen said an investigation into the accident "revealed failures in oversight at every level aboard Healy, as well as numerous departures from standard Coast Guard policy."
But Senator Cantwell said the incident suggested broader problems with the way the Coast Guard trained its dive units and their commanding officers.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the Coast Guard's port-security responsibilities increased and the diver program expanded from six units to 17. Despite the increase in active divers, the number of diving-program supervisors remained at four.
In addition, Cantwell said, Coast Guard policy states that a dive cannot take place unless there are at least four dive-team members present. The fourth diver on board the Healy had left the ship, leaving only three divers on board.
This case highlights another problem that male officers will always have working with female officers. It is hard to stop treating the women as their daughters, or mothers, or wives, or girlfriends, or muses, or secret love interests. It is more difficult to give them an order than another man. Men are unable to hold the women to the same standard as they do the other men. When the men have a difference of opinion from the women, they are less forceful in asserting that opinion. Men relent more easily and let the women have their way. That appeared to be the case when Lieutenant Commander James Dalitch, the Operations Officer, told Lt Hill that her dive plan had been approved by Captain Douglas Russell, the Commanding Officer. He then asked Lt. Hill if all three divers, including the Supervising Diver, could be in the water at the same time under the regulations. Lt Hill replied in the affirmative and indicated that she would brief the Captain. The Ops Officer told her that he was not sure that she was correct, but that he would take her word for it. He never did verify the accuracy of Lt Hill’s statement. Even though he suspected she was not correct, he acquiesced and let her have it her way. Most male officers would rather be liked than respected. They want to impress, or they acquiesce.
Lcdr Dalitch essentially told Lt Jessica Hill, "OK, if you say so". To every female officer in the Coast Guard, that should be a RED FLAG. Whenever they hear that, that should give them reason for a giant pause. They should suspect right away that something is not quite right. In some cases those may be the last words they ever hear. Those were really the last significant words that Lt Jessica Hill ever heard from her next senior officer. Shortly thereafter she was dead. That very superficially innocent statement (OK, if you say so.) is the last major failure in leadership that resulted in the death of a female officer and her dive companion.
Could this possibly be a tempest in a tea pot? No, I do not think so. This is a big deal. Lt. Jessica Hill died because her male superior officer acquiesced to her in a matter of grave importance. Minimal supervisory authority could have save two people's lives.
Why was she allowed to risk her life on a routine non-emergency situation? If there had been an emergency, then allowing her to risk her life could be excusable, but not here. While Jessica was risking her life, everyone else was having a picnic on the ice. It was beer and football for her superior officers and the crew while Jessica and Steve risked their lives with no support. They received no "supervisory support" before the dive, no "operational support" during the dive, and now, they are receiving no moral, professional, or financial support after their tragic deaths. Shame on you Coast Guard.
This should be a lesson to all female Coast Guard officers. You are expendable. The Coast Guard will not punish anyone whose negligence or poor performance of duty leads to your injury or death. You are politically correct trophies. You are on your own out there. You cannot even count on your own superior officers to correct you when they know you are wrong. If you are pretty, what you do not know, can hurt you. It could even kill you. It may have killed Lt. Jessica Hill.
Other problems were reported in the Coast Guard's report on the incident, including inadequate equipment, misread signals from the divers and the lack of a supervisor.
Senator Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said the number of errors suggested inadequate training of commanders of vessels with divers on board.
"It seemed to be very casual in the approval process along the way," Snowe said.
Senator Cantwell said that when her staff requested documentation of dive mishaps throughout the Coast Guard, her office received a three-page document with few specifics.
The Coast Guard has not yet requested money to make improvements or increase personnel for the diver program, Justice said. A formal report of recommended changes to the programs is to be released in June.
Well, Now It Is Official.The Coast Guard's findings and recommendations were etched in stone the last week of August 2007 in a 29-page report, known as the "final decision letter," from Vice Adm. Robert Papp Jr., the Coast Guard chief of staff. It says essentially the same things I said one year ago. I did not need an investigation and hundreds of man-hours of taking subjective statements from interested witnesses to see clearly what the facts were. I had lived it many times before along with Billy Thompson, the Dive Officer on CGC Glacier (WAGB-4). It was all too obvious what had happened and why. Now, the Coast Guard has put their official stamp of approval on it. They blamed the dead female officer for her own death. They let the dead bury the dead, while the walking dead were absolved of responsibility.
It echoes a scathing "commandant's action memo" released in Seattle in January after an administrative investigation, but includes recommendations for a Coast Guard study team determining the program's future.
The report details a chain of bad judgments that led to the deaths: safety regulations violated or non-existent, a casual atmosphere in which divers and crew members were poorly trained and lacked proper equipment, and lapses in judgment from the top echelons to the divers themselves.
The command cadre, the report said, did not properly prioritize the dive. "The dive was not operationally necessary in that it was being done for qualifications and efficiency. Getting a dive accomplished and conducting ice liberty took priority over safety," the report said.
Jessica Hill, as diving officer, was criticized for "overconfident" and "impulsive" decisions, and providing her command cadre with erroneous information about diving standards.
Jessica's family, after receiving the report last week, released a statement:
"The family's primary concern is that the tragedy of Aug. 17, 2006, never be repeated. The family appreciates any and all steps taken by the Coast Guard to assure the safety and well-being of others who may follow in Jessica's responsibilities and duties."
Just last month, a memorial to the two divers was dedicated at Coast Guard headquarters near Pier 36 in Seattle.
Lt. Collin Bronson, a spokesman for Coast Guard District 13 and a diver himself, said the memory of the two divers is being honored by making the program better.
"From a program and service standpoint, it has changed the way we do business, and the Coast Guard as a whole will change the way it will run its diving program," Bronson said,
Coast Guard diving students already have been receiving advanced training tailored to the Coast Guard mission beyond the foundational training they receive from the Navy, he said.
The CGC Healy is part of the nation's three-ship polar icebreaking fleet, based in Seattle. Without a diving unit, nevertheless it will be busier than ever now that the Russians have declared ownership of a major part of the Arctic by planting a Russian flag on the sea bed. Finland and other nations are following suit. The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels has already opened up a slim summer window for ships.
The Russian flag was planted by Dr Anatoly Mikhailovich Sagalevitch, a member of my Los Angeles Adventurers Club. Member Number 1021 (See Comment #3 Below for Details)Anatoly will be the featured speaker at the LA Club Headquarters on September 27th 2007. Anatoly Sagalevich was the first human to visit the floor of the ocean at 14,000' at the North Pole. He will tell us what it was like. This will be a major event. As most of you know, Anatoly has led the Russian deep sea exploration program for over 25 years. He led the expeditions to the ocean floor to be the first human eyes to see Titanic, the Bismarck, and the discovery of the "black smoker" vents that proved the proposal of plate tectonics. He has made hundreds of dives to the ocean floor all over the world and has taken the Mir-1 and Mir-2 to depths reaching 20,000'. Anatoly has published a Russian book that details the evolution of deep sea submersibles and his involvement in it. The greatly anticipated English version will be coming out in 2008.
He and fellow club member Ralph White (Member Number 942)located the wreck of the Titanic. Ralph is a dive photographer for National Geographic magazine. If there are indeed oil and other valuable natural resources below the Arctic, and Global Warming allows year-round operations in the Arctic, the United States will not be fully equipped to equally participated in the rush to grab sovereign rights to those resources.
For want of senior male officer leadership, a female diver was lost, and a national dive program was disabled, America's ability to compete for the natural resources in the Arctic was dealt a death blow, and the citizens of America will not get an equal chance to claim any of the oil or gas beneath the Arctic. Russia and her former KGB leader have hinted at resuming a Cold War stance, and she has her hand on the pipeline spigot that controls all of the natural gas that flows to Western Europe.
So, clearly, what happens to female Coast Guard officers affects the future of America and the destiny of every American. Does the Coast Guard Academy really want to disproportionately populate the cadet corps and the officer corps with women that the male officers cannot correct or command?Who will plant America's flag on the Arctic seabed? Are we going to just let the Russians and other nations carve up the Arctic in a mad dash for natural resources reminiscent of the San Francisco Gold Rush? Or will we sit back, wait for other nations to claim it, extract it refine it and then offer to sell it to us like another Opec? Who will supply the gas for America's gas-gozzling SUVs?
Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the United States are among countries in a race to secure rights to the Arctic that heated up last month when Russia sent two small submarines to plant its national flag under the North Pole. A U.S. study has suggested as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas could be hidden in the area.
The Coast Guard final report says, however, that the way the program is set up and budgeted, despite increased demands to operate in some of the world's most isolated and hazardous places, put an "excessive burden" upon the crews.
Jessica Hill and Steve Duque died during a cold-water familiarization dive Aug. 17, 2006, that she had been eager to carry out. Jessica was the only trained dive officer. Planning to leave the service in February 2007, she was intent on advancing the program, pushing for the dive despite lacking trained divers and decent equipment, according to the report. Not one of her male superior officer exercised proper leadership. There were three levels of males officers above Jessica. Not one of them stepped up to the plate and exercised command supervisory authority. They essential were acquiescent in her negligent and reckless behavior. What they essentially said was "If you say so." They let her go to her death, and she took an innocent victum with her. Is that proper leadership? Is such dereliction of duty deserving of no more punishment than a slap on the wrist? They let Jessica go and sleep with the fishes, but they gave her a monument.
Labels: Arctic Diver Dies.
posted by ichbinalj at 12:46 PM
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Coast Guardsman Killed By Propeller.
Published on 3/27/2007 in Home »Nation, World »National Briefs.
Seattle — A Coast Guardsman from Rhode Island who fell off a 25-foot fast response boat in Puget Sound near Vashon Island died of injuries suffered when the boat's propeller hit his head, the King County medical examiner's office said Monday. The Coast Guard identified the victim as Petty Officer 3rd Class Ronald Gill, 26, based in Anchorage, Alaska. Gill, a reservist on active duty who had served in the Coast Guard since October 2003, was a native of Cranston, R.I. He is survived by his wife, his parents and a brother
Judgment criticized in diving death of Jessica Hill and male companion as Coast Guard issues final report. Jessica Hill, 31, and Petty Officer 2nd Class Stephen Duque, 22, her co-diver on a training dive cobbled together during the ship's festive "ice liberty" 500 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, before being pulled from the water, dead.
The findings and recommendations were etched in stone August 2007 in a 29-page report, known as the "final decision letter," from Vice Adm. Robert Papp Jr., the Coast Guard chief of staff.
It echoes a scathing "commandant's action memo" released in Seattle in January after an administrative investigation, but includes recommendations for a Coast Guard study team determining the program's future.
The report details a chain of bad judgments that led to the deaths: safety regulations violated or non-existent, a casual atmosphere in which divers and crew members were poorly trained and lacked proper equipment, and lapses in judgment from the top echelons to the divers themselves.
The command cadre, the report said, did not properly prioritize the dive. "The dive was not operationally necessary in that it was being done for qualifications and efficiency. Getting a dive accomplished and conducting ice liberty took priority over safety," the report said.
Dr. Anatoly Mikhailovich Sagalevitch, #1021, Adventurers Club of Los Angeles, is an Oceanographer and Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. As Head of the Laboratory of Manned Submersibles, he directs all of the deep dive submersibles of the P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. He has participated in over 30 World Wide Expeditions and has more than 2000 hours in various research submersibles. He has piloted five dives to the Wreck of the RMS TITANIC, and he was one of thew six men to set The Deep Diving Submersible Rendezvous World's Record at 17,768 feet in 1989. He has written six books and 200 Scientific Articles. (For more Information see www.adventurersclub.org)
Anatoly will be the featured speaker at the LA Club Headquarters on September 27th 2007. Anatoly Sagalevich was the
first human to visit the floor of the ocean at 14,000' at the North
Pole. He will tell us what it was like. This will be a major
event. As most of you know,
Anatoly has led the Russian deep sea exploration program for over 25 years. He led the expeditions to the ocean floor to be the first human eyes to see Titanic, the Bismarck, and the discovery of the "black smoker" vents that proved the proposal of plate tectonics. He has made hundreds of dives to the ocean floor all over the world and has taken the Mir-1 and Mir-2 to depths reaching 20,000'. Anatoly has published a Russian book that details the evolution of deep sea
submersibles and his involvement in it. The greatly anticipated
English version will be coming out in 2008.
Rising temperatures and rapidly melting Arctic sea ice have raised prospects for new shipping routes, easier mineral exploration, and new wilderness holiday spots, triggering a new tug-of-war for Arctic sovereignty between Canada, Russia, Denmark, Norway and the U.S.
"It's a mixed story. It's not straight calamity and it's not all benefit," says Larry Smith, professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, who has spent the last year travelling through Greenland, Scandinavia and Canada, exploring the potential fallout from dwindling ice cover, warming water and migrating species.
"Climate change impacts are definitely magnified here, and you see them more clearly," said Smith, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel and research a book on the new North and the implications of Arctic warming on the rest of the world. "You have this huge seasonal snow and ice cover. It's important to a whole host of things - energy, balance, biology, the duration and intensity of that seasonal ice cover."
In the months ahead, scientists will collect air and water samples, chunks of mud and even drops of blood in an effort to unravel the distant past, understand the present, and glimpse the future. Studying the Arctic, they hope, will help us all get a better handle on how much of what has been happening is the result of human behaviour - with emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants leading the charge - and how much may be the result of natural processes like the ones that submerged those rivers and valleys thousands of years ago.
Captain Douglas Wisniewski, the man who court-martialed Webster Smith, the first cadet ever court-martial at the Coast Guard Academy, has published an article in Popular Mechanics magizine on 28 December 2007. It reads:
On a brisk, sunny afternoon last August, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy came to a crunching halt in 4-ft.-thick pack ice, 490 miles north of Barrow, Alaska. The polar icebreaker had just completed the western leg of its summer mission to study the Earth's crust for the National Science Foundation. Since the ship had been at sea for more than 40 days, the commanding officer, Capt. Douglas Russell, offered the crew a little rest and relaxation: He let most of the 84 sailors and 35 scientists on board disembark for several hours of ice liberty. A few crew members armed with rifles kept watch for polar bears; others played football, drank beer or just milled around.
Lt. Jessica Hill, 31, of St. Augustine, Fla., and Boatswain's Mate Second Class Steven Duque, 22, of Miami, decided to make an impromptu training dive near the bow of the 420-ft. ship. Both were Navy trained, and considered seasoned divers. However, this would be their first cold-water descent using scuba gear. As the ship's diving officer, Hill was charged with supervising the dive plan and all personnel involved. This included a third diver, who briefly floated in the 29 F water before climbing out, shivering inside a leaky suit.
Unlike a porous wet suit, a dry suit acts as a barrier between the body and the water, helping the diver withstand freezing-cold temperatures. Air inside the suit affects the diver's buoyancy. It compresses as pressure increases with depth, reducing buoyancy, and expands as the pressure decreases again near the surface. In order to avoid ascending too quickly, divers often carry extra weight. Hill and Duque each loaded up with an additional 62 pounds.
At 5:45 pm, Hill asked three of her shipmates to serve as diver tenders for the operation. She briefed them on safety protocols and informed them that the maximum depth of each of the two 20-minute dives would be 20 ft.
Three minutes into the training session, Duque's safety line began to play out quickly. "I had the impression he was swimming away from me sideways under the ice," Duque's linesman later told investigators. Within seconds, Hill's line began to do the same. The third diver returned to the scene 20 minutes later and noticed that too much line had been spent. He ordered the dive support team to "haul 'em up." Though other bystanders joined the effort, it took three more minutes to bring Duque and Hill to the surface. EMTs worked for more than an hour to revive them, but it was too late.
Capt. Douglas Wisniewski, who oversees Coast Guard diving operations, spent months analyzing what happened that day. Mistakes had been made at every level of command. The Coast Guard hadn't checked the scuba equipment in the Healy's dive locker in five years, nor had it posted a more experienced dive master on board to oversee operations and properly train the dive personnel. (Hill had only 24 dives in her career.) Capt. Russell should never have authorized a dive during a party and without a standby diver. He also should have checked Hill's dive plan with the Coast Guard Diving Manual, as procedure required. Finally, Hill's dive plan did not include adequate safety procedures, or sufficient training for the support team.
Wisniewski was unable to determine conclusively why the divers carried such an unusually heavy load (more than twice the recommended amount), and why they failed to drop that weight when they began to descend uncontrollably. Against Coast Guard rules, some of the lead weight had been stashed in zippered compartments, which would have made it difficult to release. The divers also likely succumbed to nitrogen narcosis, a sense of drunkenness resulting from the body's increased absorption of nitrogen, under pressure.
The real culprit, however, was inexperience. "Hill and Duque simply didn't have enough dives under their belt," Wisniewski says. As a result, the Coast Guard is expanding its diver training program: creating new predive checklists, increasing the frequency of dive inspections and examining how to rotate its most experienced divers throughout the fleet. New policies for equipment maintenance and command oversight are also under review.
Wisniewski believes the most important lesson to be gleaned from this tragedy is to follow the rules: "Those procedures were written in somebody's blood." And sadly, so are the new ones.
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