Underwater logging

Interesting thread. I got into Arb work after working in commercial diving for about 8yrs, cool to see someone having a similar experience. Did you get into the diving work through recreational diving or was commercial diving something you'd done in the past Gary?
 
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  • #27
Started recreational diving in the 70's. Had kids in the 80's...diving went bye-bye. Started diving again approx. 2009 with county Dive Team....search, rescue, recovery. That led to comm. diving for a few years.

Still do the Dive Team....comm. diving is sporadic.
 
Is the Dive Team a volunteer service? Sounds interesting, that sort of thing is done by the Police service here. I knew an old police diver years ago, had some stories of some of the searches he'd done. Worst one I can remember was about going down a pipe, either sewer or a culvert-can't remember, that got tighter and tighter until he was inching in by wriggling his shoulders. Think it was looking for a gun.
 
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  • #29
Yes..volunteer. We are under the local EMA (Emergency Management Agency) director. He takes requests for our services from law enforcement, fire, etc., determines if we have the resources to help.

There are pictures here of some of what we have done...pretty good sampling of what we get into:

https://garylayton.smugmug.com/Dive-Team-Search-and-Recovery

and here's an inspection we did of a coffer dam setup in a river project...they hired us to sandbag it so they could pump concrete in to shore up the 150 year old bridge bents.

embed is not working....try this:

https://youtu.be/pnC627Pw81M
 
That's cool, makes me wish I'd taken more photos over the years. We used to do a lot of work on military vessels, they tend to frown on you taking pics around their stuff. Do you guys still dive a lot of construction on scuba? HSE cracked down on it here quite a few years ago. Nearly everything is done on surface supply these days. Good side is the extra safety, bad side is the amount of (heavy) kit we have to get to the sites.
 
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  • #32
That's the only major construction job I have done. I think we had four weekend events...most on Scuba where we inspected dam/bottom meeting points and placing sandbags.

We often needed the mobility of scuba...sometimes a crane would lower pallets of sandbags to the river bottom and we would go back and forth to the pallet to get the bags we needed to fill voids...surface supply would probably have been rough.

The last pictures shows the new concrete encapsulating/reinforcing the old concrete.
 

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  • #33
10-4 on heavy kit...sometimes a front end loader would take out stuff down to the transport boat. Sometimes we put it all in a big tub (maybe 5x10, sometimes bigger) and a crane would lower it off the bridge onto a barge. Humping the stuff was not an option...thank God! On Dive Team missions that's different...ingress and egress to search sites can be awful.

The 3rd coffer dam task had to be done surface supply...the work area was too narrow for the other two guys so skinny me got the task. It was really a blast...I have not done much SS diving but loved the "unencumbered" aspect of it. Scuba with BC vests and hoses everywhere, pony tank, extra regulator.....LOTS of stuff to keep track of.

Surface supply was almost like just swimming...still had a pony tank (slung cross chest) that made a great clanging noise everytime it banged into the steel plates and the supply hose but movement was lots simpler and easier than scuba. Some places were only about 24 inches wide, sometimes had to turn sideways to access the area to work in. I would evaluate how many bags I needed, back out of the work area use a wrench to signal that number by banging on the dam, watch the bags descend and then move back into the area to place the bags.

Comms would not work inside the steel plated coffer dam so we did the old school sound signaling. I learned I can deal with small tight places...also know I ain't real fond of it. :D

The other interesting task was to ID voids in a berm they were constructing out of boulders to make a whitewater area for in-town river rafting/kayaking. Water was probably 3-5 feet deep under a bridge that was at water level. As I transited under the bridge to the other side a protruding bolt snagged my dive gear. That's inconvenient. Then the current had increased under the bridge since my first transit (as the concrete guys above filled in voids in rocks around the bridge the current was increasing with each void fill. Anyway, about the time I was working to un-snag my gear the current started ripping the mask off my face. OK..you can breathe thru a regulator without a mask, have done it plenty. But snagged, mask ripping off and in a confined space...still plays with my head sometimes when I think thru it. I wasn't smiling a lot when I came up after I get it all sorted out.

We had some nice early morning views as the sun came up on the river.
 

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We managed to get our deployment of the surface supply gear pretty quick, managed to get the pack up at the end of the job even quicker. We mostly run all the gear out of a 7.5ton box body van. Once it's out then the van works as the supervisors office. If we can't drive close enough, and we use 100m umbilicals with the airline comms and power cable in it so we have a decentish range, then we have to strip everything out and then rebuild it closer to the job. It can be a bit of a ball ache tbh. Surface supply is definitely a more luxurious way of diving though, especially with hot water suits. More snagging hazards with it though, definitely.
 
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  • #37
Hot water suits!!! Good for you. That river job we did was winter and right at the edge of wet suit/dry suit temps. We used 7mm wet suits and handled the cold water better than I thought we would. An outfit downstream had hot water suits we heard, never saw them. Have not used one.

I suspect you have done more commercial diving than I have. My biggest gig was the river project...others were pond valve inspections, vehicle recoveries.
 
It was my full time job for quite awhile. Actually started doing tree work to give me another income stream during downtime from diving. Other the years it's changed from diving being the main job to tree work taking over. There was a fun period in the middle where I was getting loads of contract climbing work interspersed with some interesting diving work. Now I've not dived for nearly 2 years, been concentrating on building up a tree service business as we have had our first kid and I don't want to have to travel so much for work now. That being said I've just got my dive medical back, always good if I can squeeze in some local diving work here and there.
Dive Team sounds good fun, always liked doing recovery dives and searches. Sometimes find some good stuff other than what you are looking for. Some of the other stuff you end up doing can be pretty tedious...we used to joke that if you were doing some of the jobs on dry land you'd be lucky to get minimum wage for it.
 
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  • #40
Ha! Glad to oblige!!! It was a good gig...got to work with good people, good equipment. And nobody got hurt...always good.
 
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