Lucy's Diver
Contributor
DennisS:Surface supplied doesn't always work. A friend of mine is a dive supervisor, he's an old man in the business, with 30 years experience. He's disgusting, he grabs his gut and pinches maybe a 1/2 inch.
He was working a project and the umbilical started whipping off the deck, dragged everything attached with it to the side of the ship, then the umbilical snapped. He had to stop the backup divers from going in. It was in the gulf oil patch, someone opened a valve miles away, slurp.
He'd been living on a 26' boat out in California for over a year when I gave him a ride back to Houston, where he told god he'd never do commercial again. He's back in the saddle, doing what he does.
No one ever hears about these folks and what they do.
How does that prove surface supply "doesn't always work?" The surface supply was working all the way till when the line snapped. An untethered diver on scuba would have been "slurped" up as well, the only difference being no one would have known until the guy didn't surface a half hour later.
I just can't imagine that this was a job that should not have been performed on at least hard line coms and aga, if not hard hat and surface supply. Hard line coms and aga really is not that much more time to set up than straight scuba.