Toughest Job: Industrial Diving

[chris_girard]

I've been a diver now for 32 years. Not hardhat commercial diving, but SCUBA. I am not a pleasure diver, as I prefer the work aspect of diving, rather than swimming around doing nothing but looking at fish in warm tropical water. I usually do work such as setting mooring anchors and cribbing work for docks in the cold icy lakes of N.H., or hunting for lost lobster traps for the lobster men in the frigid North Atlantic.

When I was 18, I seriously thought about becoming a commercial diver, but met my future wife Heide, and didn't want to be away from home for months at a time. Still, I love watching these guys work and seeing the incredible salvage jobs that they perform.

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[chris_girard]

I only do this kind of work occasionally, as I'm plenty busy with tree work and other activities.

 

[FireFighterZero]

Thats pretty cool. I have always wondered what that would be like. Do you do any welding?

 

[MasterBlaster]

At one time I worked on boat trucks in the Gulf of Mexico. For a while we packed a diving crew. It was cool, they brought their own cook!

 

[chris_girard]

Thats pretty cool. I have always wondered what that would be like. Do you do any welding?

Yeah, I can weld, but not underwater welding. That's where the professional commercial training would be required and I never pursued that trade.

 

[chris_girard]

At one time I worked on boat trucks in the Gulf of Mexico. For a while we packed a diving crew. It was cool, they brought their own cook!

That's pretty cool Butch. Working as a dive tender is an extremely important job on a diving crew, as a diver's life can at times be in their hands. Kind of like the way that as climbers, we rely on our ground crew to assist in our safety.

 

[Limbrat]

Working divers are a tough lot. I worked with a crew installing submarine power cable to Dog Island and was very impressed how they could work all day and drink all night. Seriously though, walking on the bottom behind the underwater trencher all day with all the gear and hard hat takes a special breed of man. That guy was the only man who could ever say he walked the four miles to Dog Island (there is no bridge).

 

[woodworkingboy]

A guy that I used to sport dive with, went to Vietnam and was a diver in the military there, mostly clearing out sunken boats from waterways. He said the conditions were often close to zero visibility, sometimes also dealing with wicked currents, they had to do most everything by feel. After he came out of the service, he went on to commercial diving for an oil company, building and servicing offshore rigs. His job took him to far away places. His brother became a dive tender, among his duties being the person that monitors divers in a decompression chamber after their dives require it. Those divers can end up having to spend many hours in a chamber. It doesn't seem like fun.

 

[FireFighterZero]

I cant remember exactly what kind of diving it was but I watched a show about diving where the crew had to live in a chamber for the whole job, only coming out to dive and go home after the tour. They had to breathe a lot of helium at that depth and they said when they were fed, the meal had no taste, because of the gas they were breathing.

 

[chris_girard]

I cant remember exactly what kind of diving it was but I watched a show about diving where the crew had to live in a chamber for the whole job, only coming out to dive and go home after the tour. They had to breathe a lot of helium at that depth and they said when they were fed, the meal had no taste, because of the gas they were breathing.

That would be called Saturation Diving, and IMO, would be a very lonely way to work. No going home and living in the chamber all the time. Those quys are like astronauts, only we call them aquanauts.

 

[chris_girard]

The Last Dive.

Here's a story about a fatal saturation dive.

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This was back in the "cowboy days" of commercial North Sea diving, when it was not as safe as it is today.

 

[stig]

It is not even very safe today.
Not many fatalities, but they still suffer from a lot of long term damage.
Most are pretty ruined as they get old
( Kinda like us loggers, I guess)

 

[chris_girard]

Stig, you are so right, and I kind of feel like a kindred spirit to the commercial divers. We both have to answer to the powers above us, who haven't been out there in the field (or under the seas) doing the actual work...very sad.

 

[chris_girard]

These tragic deaths IMO, goes to show you why you don't want engineers making practical field decisions where they don't have the experience (and I am also a civil engineer with 26 years experience working with the NH DOT). I could not imagine overruling someone out in the field who has the practical construction experience.