Sealab

America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

Ben Hellwarth

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439180426
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Sealab is the underwater Right Stuff: the compelling story of how a US Navy program sought to develop the marine equivalent of the space station—and forever changed man's relationship to the sea. While NASA was trying to put a man on the moon, the US Navy launched a series of daring experiments to prove that divers could live and work from a sea-floor base. When the first underwater "habitat" called Sealab was tested in the early 1960s, conventional dives had strict depth limits and lasted for only minutes, not the hours and even days that the visionaries behind Sealab wanted to achieve—for purposes of exploration, scientific research, and to recover submarines and aircraft that had sunk along the continental shelf. The unlikely father of Sealab, George Bond, was a colorful former country doctor who joined the Navy later in life and became obsessed with these unanswered questions: How long can a diver stay underwater? How deep can a diver go? Sealab never received the attention it deserved, yet the program inspired explorers like Jacques Cousteau, broke age-old depth barriers, and revolutionized deep-sea diving by demonstrating that living on the seabed was not science fiction. Today divers on commercial oil rigs and Navy divers engaged in classified missions rely on methods pioneered during Sealab. Sealab is a true story of heroism and discovery: men unafraid to test the limits of physical endurance to conquer a hostile undersea frontier. It is also a story of frustration and a government unwilling to take the same risks underwater that it did in space.Ben Hellwarth, a veteran journalist, interviewed many surviving participants from the three Sealab experiments and conducted extensive documentary research to write the first comprehensive account of one of the most important and least known experiments in US history.

1

A DEEP ESCAPE

Three hundred feet down, deeper than most divers were equipped to go, the World War II–era submarine Archerfish prepared to release two passengers into a dim sea with little more than the breath they held in their lungs. A spate of foul weather and strong currents had complicated some trial runs, but now, early on the first day of October 1959, the sun came up with just a few wispy clouds on the horizon. In calm water, the sub set out from the U.S. Navy base at Key West, heading southwest into the Gulf of Mexico. The mission’s unusual aim was to prove that a trapped submariner could reach the distant surface on his own—and live to tell about it. No escape quite like this had ever been made, and not everyone was convinced it was a good idea to try. But one of the passengers, Commander George Bond, a Navy doctor, had argued for attempting to make the escape. As was typical of him, he had also argued that he should be the one to do it.

George Bond was forty-three, though his soft features and jowls made him look older. He was a couple of inches over six feet, barrel-chested and thickly built, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and owlish dark eyebrows. Bond had joined the Navy just a few years before but he already had a reputation for being a maverick with a fondness for showboating. He preferred not to be photographed without his pipe. Daring, gregarious, kindhearted, even his detractors found him difficult not to like. He often lapsed into the disarming Appalachian brogue of the clients he had served not so long ago as a country doctor. His resonant baritone, noticeably seasoned somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, had the soothing, unhurried intonation of a storyteller sent from heaven. It was a voice that had served him well as a lay preacher back home in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Dr. Bond had recently become head of the Medical Research Laboratory at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base at New London, Connecticut. Most American submariners got their specialized schooling at the base, which was named for New London but was actually in neighboring Groton, on the eastern bank of the Thames River. Scientists employed at the base’s medical lab concerned themselves with a variety of physiological puzzles such as those related to submarine escape. In the early years of the U.S. submarine service, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no procedure, and virtually no hope, for submariners trapped in downed subs, even in relatively shallow water. Safety features in the early boats were primitive at best, and gradual asphyxiation or drowning were often the survivors’ macabre options. But after three submarines sank in the 1920s, newer American subs were fitted with the equivalent of emergency exits, known as escape trunks. By the late 1930s a drum-shaped pod called the McCann Rescue Chamber was devised that could be lowered like an elevator from a surface ship and, with the aid of divers, locked on to the sub’s escape hatch. But if the chamber couldn’t reach a sunken submarine, the sailors inside needed something like an underwater version of a parachute to escape on their own.

Several methods evolved to enable a sailor to bail out of his doomed vessel and get himself to the surface. From the Archerfish Bond wanted to test one that had been borrowed a few years earlier from the British called “buoyant-assisted free ascent,” or just “buoyant ascent.” It was also known less formally as “blow and go.” Holding your breath underwater might feel like holding on to life, but not if you’re swimming to the surface after inhaling a lungful of highly compressed air. The final breath taken in the escape trunk just before leaving the Archerfish would expand from something like five quarts to nearly thirteen gallons en route to the surface, a phenomenon explained by Boyle’s law, named for the seventeenth-century Irish physicist Robert Boyle. Assuming temperature remains the same, as pressure increases, volume decreases; as pressure decreases, volume increases. So it is that a lungful of compressed air inhaled at any depth will expand tremendously as a person approaches the surface and the surrounding water pressure gradually drops. A submarine escapee, therefore, had to learn to exhale forcefully and consistently, like an exuberant tuba player, all the way to the surface—a strange sensation that took some getting used to.

The gravest danger during an escape to the surface is from an arterial gas embolism, or “getting embolized.” If not adequately exhaled, the expanding air will backfire into a pulmonary vein, sending emboli in the form of tiny bubbles to the brain. The consequences could include seizures, slurred speech, loss of vision, loss of muscle coordination, unconsciousness, even instant death. The human lungs aren’t wired to the autonomic nervous system, so even if perilously overinflated they won’t set off any synaptic sirens and zap the brain with pain signals the way other body parts do, like a finger on a hot stove. From three hundred feet down if you didn’t blow and go just right, you could kill yourself as surely as if you stayed on a stranded submarine.

Prior to Bond’s attempted escape from the Archerfish, about the deepest experience that he or anyone else had with the blow and go technique came from inside the escape training tank. At New London the tank towered above everything else on the wharf and was the main attraction on base tours. Esther Williams, “Hollywood’s Mermaid,” once came to have a look. For anyone going through submarine school, the tank held the promise and fear of a rite of passage. Eleven stories high, it resembled a silo that might have been transplanted from a farm in the surrounding Connecticut countryside. But it was taller than a silo and instead of a simple dome, it was topped with an octagonal cupola, which gave it the look of a misplaced airport control tower.

Built into the sides of the tank were several airlocks similar to actual submarine escape trunks. A sailor could pass from the airlock into the tank water as if making a real escape, and practice reaching the surface unharmed. The deepest entry point was near the bottom of the tank, at almost 120 feet. Most trainees made their required mock escapes from a lock at fifty feet, but the confluence of physics and physiology is such that a blow and go escape begun at that depth could be every bit as life-threatening as one from the bottom of the tank. During training sessions half a dozen instructors hovered in the tank water, trailing each trainee like pilot fish. A doctor was on duty, too, in case of an accident, and Dr. Bond became a proficient escape artist himself.

Sailors often asked whether it would be possible to blow and go from, say, 240 feet, the depth at which the USS Squalus sank during a test dive off the coast of New Hampshire in 1939. The best answer that Dr. Bond or anyone could give was that, yes, in theory, you should be able to safely blow and go in the open sea from a depth of at least three hundred feet or so—but no one had ever done it. Bond decided it was time to put theory to the test.

After receiving the approval of the rear admiral in command of the submarine force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, Bond planned to stage a series of progressively deeper open-sea escapes, culminating with one from more than three hundred feet. Bond needed a buddy to make the escape with him and chose Cyril Tuckfield, a chief engineman recently reassigned to a submarine out of Key West after working for several years as a training tank instructor at New London. “Tuck,” as the good-humored sailor was known, was thirty-eight and a World War II submarine veteran who was also trained as a diver. He had an infectious, face-crinkling grin and was unique among the enlisted men for his aversion to using foul language. Tuck’s father once heard him cuss during a sandlot baseball game, gave his boy hell for it, and young Tuck never swore again.

As a former training tank instructor, Tuck understood the peculiar dangers of this deep escape as well as anyone but was delighted to be asked to accompany his friend Dr. Bond. The fact that a medical officer like Bond would put himself on the line was one of the things that endeared him to enlisted men like Tuckfield. Indeed any number of sailors would have gladly volunteered to join Bond for the escape from the Archerfish.

Once the two men locked themselves into the escape trunk, with the sub at a depth of just over three hundred feet, they would have at least as much to worry about as someone parachuting from an airplane. Their procedures and timing would be critical. Pressure inside the trunk would approach 150 pounds per square inch, about ten times as great as inside the submarine, where the air is kept close to 14.7 pounds per square inch, the same atmospheric pressure as at sea level. The elevated pressure would enable them to make the transition from the submarine’s escape trunk into the sea. That pressure would also expose them to physiological dangers including one commonly known by deep sea divers as “the bends.” Ugsome aches and pains, paralysis, even death await the diver who ascends too quickly to the surface—but only after having spent enough time at depth for gases to seep into the blood and tissues. To avoid getting “bent,” as divers say, Bond and Tuck knew they would have strict time limits at each step of their escape. They would need about five minutes to prepare the trunk and flood it shoulder-high with seawater. Then they’d open an air line inside the trunk and within another minute, as air noisily whooshed in, the pressure inside the remaining air space would match the pressure outside. At that point, according to prior calculations, they would have a maximum of three minutes and fifteen seconds to reach the surface. Any longer than that and they would risk getting bent.

Throughout this process Bond and Tuck would also have to be alert to the symptoms of breathing nitrogen under pressure. Four-fifths of air is nitrogen, but when inhaled at high pressures the omnipresent gas could instantly put a diver into a giddy haze similar to drunkenness, and that could cause him to make fatal mistakes. Largely because their time at the full depth of 300 feet would be brief, Bond and Tuck were less likely to be dogged by the mental haze of nitrogen or the bends. Getting embolized posed the greatest danger in making this deep escape. Once they began their ascent, sufficient blowing, all the way to the surface, was the only thing that would keep them from getting embolized by tiny, backfiring bubbles from their lungs. In the training tank, to avoid potentially deadly cases of embolisms, instructors would routinely jab a trainee in the gut to make sure he was blowing forcefully enough, and if anyone’s ascent ever looked problematic, they would pull the ascending man into one of several air pockets built into the wall of the tank. In the open sea, of course, safety pockets did not exist.

On board the Archerfish that morning, neither man ate breakfast. Bond thought it would be wise to keep their stomachs empty, in case of an accident. They drank only black coffee. Bond puffed his ubiquitous pipe and Tuck smoked a cigarette as they mulled over the plan for their impending escape. It would have been like Bond, a consummate raconteur, to recall his memorable introduction to the hazards of making an escape. It had come five years earlier, at the Pearl Harbor submarine base, where Dr. Bond was first assigned soon after completing his Navy schooling for submarine duty and deep-sea diving. At Pearl Harbor Bond spent much of his time around the escape training tank, a replica of the tank at New London that was built a couple of years later and survived the infamous Japanese attack.

There were no guarantees with escape training, as Bond learned one Friday in the fall of 1954 when he met a fellow Navy doctor named Charles Aquadro. Charlie Aquadro, whose very name suggested a love of the life aquatic, was the medical officer with an Underwater Demolition Team, the progenitor of the Navy SEALs. Aquadro was an experienced diver, fourteen years younger than Bond, lean and athletic, raised and educated in Kentucky and Tennessee. He was polite but playful, with a disarmingly gentle demeanor and a ready smile—a boyish Southern gentleman. The two doctors hit it off immediately, at least in part because of their common Southern roots.

Aquadro’s UDT group was soon scheduled to make practice escapes from the bottom of the training tank at 120 feet. Bond watched the UDT drill as Charlie Aquadro took his turn, blowing a steady stream of bubbles, looking good all the way up. Aquadro reached the surface, climbed out of the water, stood up on the deck around the top of the tank, said a few words, seemed to be fine, and then collapsed, unconscious. Aquadro had somehow embolized himself. As Dr. Bond knew from his recent training, the surest remedy for quashing menacing bubbles, the cause of the embolism, is to put the ailing person back under pressure.

The group lugged Aquadro’s limp body into the pressure chamber that had been installed for just such emergencies. Bond stayed inside with Aquadro. Those outside sealed the hatch and flooded the chamber with a whoosh of compressed air to raise the pressure to that at 165 feet, a standard treatment protocol. Aquadro regained consciousness, but couldn’t see a thing. You could never be sure where a bubble blockage would occur or what effect it would have.

Aquadro’s sight gradually returned. As the hours passed, the pressure inside the chamber was eased back to surface level. They were closing in on the surface when Aquadro went into severe convulsions, then stopped breathing. Those working outside the chamber cranked up the pressure again, hoping to quash the bubbles that were clearly short-circuiting Aquadro’s brain. Temperature rises when a gas is compressed, so the air inside the little chamber was as hot as a desert summer. Bond sweated it out with Aquadro on the hyperbaric roller coaster for almost forty hours. By Sunday morning, the two men finally staggered out of the chamber, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Description
• Author Bio
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: A Deep Escape
• Chapter 2: Diving
• Chapter 3: Genesis
• Chapter 4: Friendly Rivals
• Chapter 5: Depth and Duration
• Chapter 6: Experimental Divers
• Chapter 7: Deep Loss, Deeper Thinking
• Chapter 8: Triangle Trials
• Chapter 9: “Breathe!”
• Chapter 10: The Tiltin’ Hilton
• Chapter 11: Lessons in Survival
• Chapter 12: The Third Team
• Chapter 13: The Damn Hatch
• Chapter 14: An Investigation
• Chapter 15: The Oil Patch
• Chapter 16: The Rivals Press On
• Chapter 17: The Projects
• Chapter 18: Answers and Questions
• Appendix: Sealab Aquanaut Rosters
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Insert