July 27 -- He was 20 feet underwater with two empty air tanks and nothing left to breathe.
The diving boat captain had told Tony Maffatone there would be extra tanks of gas suspended from the boat at 70 feet. But when he reached the chilled, murky waters above shipwrecked Andrea Doria 100 miles off the coast of Long Island, N.Y., there were no tanks to be found. He scouted a while, but then, checking his air gauges, began swimming to the surface.
By the time he reached 20 feet, Maffatone was out of air. He grasped one of the emergency lines of gas dangling just below the boat, shoved a mouthpiece in his mouth and sucked in some pure oxygen.
”I was hanging there thinking, ‘this is not good,’ remembers Maffatone. It was a close call he never wants to face again.
Maffatone was one of the lucky ones.
In recent years shipwreck diving has led to an unsettling string of deaths. In the last two summer seasons five divers probing the decaying remains of a single shipwreck — the Andrea Doria — lost their lives. And since January 2000, the Divers Alert Network has recorded at least 27 diving deaths in the U.S. The network’s director, Peter Bennet, is not sure how many of those deaths occurred during shipwreck dives. But he admits that shipwreck diving, like underwater cave diving, carries its risks.
“If you’re in a wreck and you don’t know your way out, then you don’t ever come out,” he says.
Where Air Becomes Lethal
What makes shipwreck diving appealing is also what makes it so dangerous. Wrecks, for example, can sink to extreme depths. The Andrea Doria is known as the “Mt. Everest of diving” partly because it’s an intimidating 180 feet below the water’s surface. And that’s only to the top of the wreck.
At such depths, breathing gets very complicated.
Unlike on Everest, where oxygen levels are thin, the weight of water at more than 20 feet deep compresses the oxygen that divers breathe. That oxygen density, in turn, wreaks havoc on the human nervous system and can lead to unconsciousness and eventually death.
