News: Another Diver Killed Off Long Island
(Long Island, N.Y.) East Hampton Town Police investigated the case of a sixty-four-year-old man who died after diving sixty nautical miles southeast of Montauk. The incident occurred on Thursday, and the man was a scuba diver from Reading, Pennsylvania. The man entered a state of cardiac arrest after ascending from the dive.
Like the twenty-seven-year-old diver from California, the Pennsylvania native had been set to explore a shipwreck. He had been surfacing from the USS Norness, which is a Norwegian oil tanker. The vessel sank on January 14th, 1942, and was the first ship to flounder off the east coast since the start of World War II.
The sixty-four-year-old had also been traveling along the same dive boat as the young diver. Both had boarded the John Jack Dive Boat, based out of Montauk. Both perished in high depth seas within the last five days.
The Pennsylvania native had been in waters roughly three-hundred feet below surface. Sources claimed that the crew from the dive boat helped to administer CPR in response to his distress. He had been with another diver, and embarked on the underwater journey around eleven that morning.
According to reports, the diver was submerged while exploring between fifteen and twenty minutes, and had stopped to decompress on his way to the surface. Sources claimed that the incident did not seem suspicious, and that a medical reason was likely the culprit behind his sudden death. Fellow passengers noticed his distress as he surfaced.
The Suffolk County Medical Examiner was set to perform an autopsy and his equipment had been tested by investigators. Reports stated that the California diver, who had been found dead four days earlier, was missing before other divers and ship personnel realized he had not returned to surface. Fifteen other divers had been killed while exploring the same shipwreck.
The shipwreck, called the Andrea Doria, was once a seven-hundred-foot Italian luxury vessel. It sank after a collision with the Stockholm, a Swedish passenger ship. At least fifty-one people were killed in the wreck, which occurred in 1956. It now rests on its right side along the edge of the continental shelf under roughly two-hundred-and-fifty feet of water.
Despite the casualties, 97% of the ship’s 1,660 passengers and crew survived. The small amount of deaths attracts experienced divers to the shipwreck because they don’t feel as if they are exploring a ghost ship amidst the Andrea Doria’s labyrinth of debris. They claim that, despite the fatalities of sixteen divers, there is less of a negative presence at the wreck site.
Decompression time after the dive takes as long as three hours, and the last death to occur was that of a thirty-eight-year-old man from Houston on August 1st, 2008. Experienced divers train for years to take on the Andrea Doria, for dives that last between two and three hours. A specialized blend of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium is necessary to counteract the water pressure’s effects on the body and brain.
In addition to icy waters and strong currents, the lack of sunlight makes visibility unpredictable. Divers can see between five and seventy feet. Reports stated that more than a third of the fatalities occurred when divers suffocated after tangling their air hoses/tanks in nets, pipes, cargo lines, and other debris in the area.
For all of the above reasons, fellow divers esteem the Andrea Doria as the “Mount Everest of dive sites” and “Holy Grail of shipwrecks.” It is more than two times the depth of the average recreational dive and attracts hundreds of divers each year.
