Commercial deep-sea divers have played a historical role in keeping our shipping lines open, as these divers clean the ports and their infrastructures. I discovered this deep-sea world, which I had known nothing about, while working at a local university and running away for a quiet break. I headed for the commercial industrial seaport of Port Kembla, a black blue steel industrial landscape. I drove along the foreshore of the inner harbour. I felt at home, fresh sea air. ‘Hi what are you doing’? I spoke to some men inside a grey steel iron shed. We were standing near a wire fencing that prevented us falling into water pouring through these lower ground tunnels with grates, ‘Where is it going?’
Jim is a commercial deep-sea diver who is connected daily with the force of the water. Jim knows the harbour well, and believes that protecting fish species within the ecosystem is valuable work that contributes to the future of Australia. He invited me in: ‘Do you want a coffee?’ He is in his middle fifties, nuggetty, his eyes sparkle and he has the compact frame of a boxer. The deep divers are cleaners, “de-scalers” and sweepers between a steel plant, a coal terminal and a general port. Fortunately Jim agreed to be formally interviewed so that we can share his story.
What is it like down there?
Dark! We work unsighted – no view, no light, just darkness, it is like coal wash, pitch black.
This professional work is set against a dark, deep world that is a secret to most of us who don’t have diving skills. The repairs and cleaning have been successful, as the harbour has continued to operate under the pressures from international ship movements. Jim says that he has been working in the harbour as a diver for over forty years and in that time the water quality had improved. Jim described the port:
It used to be filthy dirty, it was the only harbour that ships could come in filthy dirty, and go out clean! Marine growth died, because of acids and materials in the water. The local stories of the past tell of heavy pollution in the water. Now it’s crystal clear in the inner harbour. The port authority, the local councils and administrative oversight bodies have consistently invested in the harbour.
The port needs to be a safe workplace and the divers are working in a specific type of geographic landscape, which needs to be maintained. The divers use string to guide them as they replace posts that have worn from the constant impact of the water. The men on the surface handle the movement of the replacement post as it makes its way to the diver below, who then positions the new post into place. The divers feel for pylons that need replacing, and once identified, the used pylon has to go up to the surface. The damaged pylon is identified by feel. Some jetties being worked a long are 50 or 60 metres long. While the pylons being replaced could be from two metres to seventeen metres as they trace down into the depths of the ocean floor.
Port maintenance is a crucial key to the success of the port. The inner and outer harbour areas are traffic points for import and export ships, both containerised and non-containerised. The Port Kembla Corporation controls the business, promoting and facilitating trade. There are dangers present that need to be identified before a risk turns into a crisis. The discharge berths in Port Kembla are nearly a kilometre long. Iron ore from Port Hedland and Whyalla is discharged into the steelworks. The port is a loading terminal for coal and its by-products.
Coal mining is an historical work site around the port and coal mining links these two work sites. The dark tunnels of the coal industry are another dark, dangerous space where work safety and communication are important. These divers gain their respect in the community, they are identified by occupation: working under the surface a dangerous occupation has a different status within the local area. It varies, depending on the politics of employment. The miners’ work is in the darkness: they use equipment under pressure: hammering, digging and blasting to produce coal. Interactions are conducted in a similarly difficult environment: even though it is dark they must be able to talk to each other. The torchlights on workers’ heads, or any other type of additional lighting, are all very similar to those used in the production of coal, as is the commercial cleaners’ gear. There is no room for error or saying ‘sorry’ as the work is too demandingly dangerous. These strange empty spaces are where divers and miners are self-reliant under the team’s interdependence.
The diver in this ocean of empty space feels the unknown edge of the pipe or object by being directed by sounds. The older method of ‘verbal and nonverbal gestures’ involved up to fifty hand signals in a type of Morse code: one – stop, two – up, three – down, replaced by a microphone, in the mouthpiece, and one or two earpieces. The flexibility of the rubber mask fits tightly over the diver’s head; there is a microphone in the mouthpiece and an earpiece next to the diver’s ears. At the same time the diver can’t get afford to feel lost; they have to trust experience, keeping hard-wired to the surface communications box where the job supervisor directs the divers to the ocean debris. The messages go up the line on copper wires and then start the work, strap a two or a four-core wire onto the rubbish – perhaps an old ship part, an old truck, or other greasy objects.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has a policy ‘Garbage Stow It Don’t Throw It’. Ships are prohibited from discharging oily mixtures: cargo residues, cleaning agents additives and animal carcasses. But discharge occurs and someone has to clean up the mess. Environmental problems cannot just be washed away. Maritime activities such as shipping, fishing, oil and gas drilling, tourism and navigational dredging create local and national environmental problems. People speak about solutions but responsibility, accountability and regulations for our commerce depend on healthy marine ecosystems. Our harbours are at risk from major oil spills, excessive discharges of chemicals, toxic substances, pesticides, and garbage from land and ships, as well as invasive non-indigenous species carried in the ballast water of tankers.
Jim is emphasising the vastness of the Australian seabed with iridescent voids, fear and feelings of the cold. Obedience can be life saving and the Australian Defence Force has a role in underwater development of robots and commercial divers who can contribute to these research developments. Remote technical sensors sometimes fall short; this is when the divers’ touch and experience is needed. The noise begins: the dive supervisor’s instructions, in the divers’ ears, machinery operating and the divers’ loud thinking in their silent world. The divers have to obey the senior diver who is controlling the dive. Perhaps the darkness helps everyone focus, like a space walk close to walking down a vast landscape.
A diver might not know they are in trouble, so experience is always valuable, otherwise they are in danger of losing their life. If administrations try to cut costs and employ less qualified divers then the risks to the diver increase, and can result in an inexperienced diver loosing their life. It is a rare understanding under the water, that death becomes a reality when a highly dramatic, traumatic and fast water event occurs. For example if a diver had no weight available to him, it meant that they couldn’t keep their body immobile. If the core valve, the cork which blocks the outage of a fast deep-water flow moves, then the water compression can literally suck the diver into a void, destroying his body.
Searching for things that have fallen to the bottom of the port, which might be partly buried, is difficult so the diver will dig a hole down to it with an airlift, which is like a big underwater vacuum cleaner. Then either a crane lifts the object or a lift bag is inflated below the object to do this. Commercial divers clean the port by lifting trucks, cars, and heavy objects. If it’s a steel pipe then a nylon sling is placed around it, so a crane can then lift it. Rogue objects, which have been dropped into the depths, can prove a danger to people working above the surface. The object can contribute to blockages or be a danger to other craft. Jim explains and then clarifies:
Divers wear around ‘30 pounds’ of lead. We have a little tank on our back we call a bailout bottle, because you do have the air supply on the surface coming down by air hose to the diver. You have petrol or diesel air compressors or you can have banks of air on the surface. The air hoses are no longer rubber, they’re properly made divers’ air hoses now through a demand valve, but he also has a bailout bottle on his back so that if he runs out of air from the surface the diver can turn his bailout bottle on and come to the surface. The use of air, the availability of air is crucial in this work place. Without it the networks within the port cannot be maintained but the work place is not safe for anyone above or below the ocean.
A commercial diver has to be able to do everything underwater that can be done on land. Anything you’ve got to do to concrete; cut, for example, concrete boat ramps or structures underwater. You might have to drill, to put the anchors in, to do a sewerage outfall where you’ve got to rock, bolt pipes to the seabed or you may have to be drilling and blasting or drilling a big hole and then reaming it out, from a two-inch hole to a six-inch hole. All this with air tools, and in some positions, along with hydraulic tools – hydraulic tools are very good.
Jim’s answers flow with the rhythm of water, evoking a world many of us cannot know firsthand.
We used mainly air tools for working, but the maintenance on them and the upkeep was difficult; the bearings get wet and they would seize up. We use chain saws, rock drills, but still when we rock drill we prefer to use air rock drills rather than pneumatic (compressed air operated), otherwise we can get a lot of the bubbles, even though, with the pneumatic you still have to have an air compressor.
If you’re in a muddy area, where you are drilling, all the loose material will be sucked away. This is the same as chainsaws. You can use a hydraulic chainsaw or you can use an air chainsaw. We used to use air chainsaws which were great but the maintenance and repairs were constant, but hydraulic chainsaws were much more reliable. Doing our own maintenance we can trust our tools but then on some pneumatic tools we had to send them away.
Jim presents an eloquent set of laws for survival:
You’ve got marine animals for instance, blue-ringed octopus. When you’re working on the bottom there’s blue-ringed octopuses everywhere. I’ve personally come out with a blue-ringed octopus on me. But because of what you are wearing you’re fully protected. There are many physiology problems related to diving. You’ve got barotrauma of ascent, barotrauma of descent; you’ve got decompression sickness. Three main laws with commercial diving govern you: Boyle’s Law, Dolphin’s Law and Henry’s Law.
My understanding of the foundational laws of physics, when the human body is required to function in water, is that a divers’ body does not tolerate excessive pressure. Henry’s Law is a rule that “the amount of gas that enters a liquid depends directly on the amount of pressure applied. ….The deeper you go the more gas that enters your body tissues from the tank on your back” (Pope 2006 p. 173). Dolphin’s Law explains that dolphins, like most diving mammals, have a diving reflex in which the pulse rate slows with submersion, permitting a more efficient oxygen use (Pope 2006 Pg.173). Divers are not like dolphins in that they cannot remain submerged for as long as two hours. Lacking knowledge of the deep, I often have to ask Jim to clarify the dangerous aspects of the work:
If I feel all right going down then I’ll feel all right going up. If you’ve got a problem with your ears going down you can have what is called a ‘face squeeze’ where your mask goes into your face and ruptures the blood vessels in your eyes, or you can do the reverse on the way up. You go to come up, then you could burst an eardrum or if you hold your breath, you can rupture the alveoli in your lungs.
You just think, “equalise on the way down.” That means making sure you’ve got pressure going up into your ears. The problem can be that you are limited by your air supply on the way back up, so if you get to a stage where you’re completely out of air, you’ve still got to come up. The dive supervisor might only allow the diver to stay on the bottom for twenty minutes. If the diver’s injured, if he’s got any problems on the way up, the dive supervisor tells him what to do and the diver is governed completely by the dive supervisor because he’s monitoring the whole process. You need to come up as directed or you might have to go into decompression chamber.
Does that dive supervisor have any electronic instruments that are helping him feed that information?
The dive supervisor and the physics tables govern how long you can stay on the bottom. The table is a reference document; you carry it with you and provide the calculations I require to estimate the safety of the dive so that I don’t get the bends as I come back up.
We refer still to the commercial diving worktables that the Canadian Navy use and it is very safe method. The American table has something like a four per cent error factor because they’re made for navy personnel, and they can put a diver straight into a decompression chamber.
Jim explains the dangers of the water pressure. His descriptions are based on the experience of compression on his body. He knows the inside of a decompression chamber. He likes being able to watch television while his body recovers.
You’re only bent when you come back to the surface; you’re not bent under the water. You know you’re unwell, you’ve got pains in the joints, you could have a rash, and you can even get the symptoms six to eight hours after diving. The decompression chambers are not great: you can have television in it, video camera systems in it, you can have communications in it, but it’s still just a round steel chamber with a couple of windows in it. Best to be avoided.
I heard you were sent down to retrieve a body?
Yes, a kid gets washed into the water and then the father goes to rescue him and he gets drowned too, and you’ve got to go and recover the father and the son. Back then you never had counselling. I think they were fishing, the child got washed in, and then the father jumped in to save him. The next day the seas were rough and they called us in to see if we could go and find them. We found the son first then we found the father. The boy was lying on the bottom with his head bashing against the rocks, face up, and the father was in under a ledge with his legs sticking out. We have a place in this community to do difficult work and we do that work voluntarily.
A couple of months ago, there was a car in Kiama Harbour. The water police had searched and couldn’t find it. A member of the family asked if we could have a look. The boy (the victim) had been speaking on a mobile phone so they believed that the vehicle was in the harbour. I’m the boss, but my son was the supervisor. He said, ‘if you find the car you are not to look inside it – you are to report straightaway’. I went in. Within five to 10 minutes I found the car. I could see someone behind the steering wheel even though the windscreen was smashed. I reported to my son the number plate then returned to the surface. I knew the family, very difficult, sad, dangerous, and we were helping others. The police may have eventually found the body but we work with the police, and the defence forces when needed. The family received relief when their son was found.
Australia has an asset; we are surrounded by water, an island. My niece sends me a message telling me, “I am getting off this island, going to Tasmania”! I smile. I have a greater understanding of this vast ocean that is under our island. The benefits to the Australian industry from maintaining clean ports have a cost. This cost involves significant risks and danger to divers working in the deep. The divers must have experience and then develop their skills as new technology develops. The deep, this essential and challenging world, is part of our world and the commercial diving work always performed in the dark is for our benefit.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AustralianDiverAccreditationScheme
- Pope, D. (2nd Ed) 2006 Body Trauma, Behler Publications, California
- Port Kembla Port Corporation http://www.portkembla.com.au/resources
