protect submerged heritage sites (another was Parks Canada). Gary raised the issue with the Navy. How could he take care of a cultural icon he couldn’t see? No one knew what was down there beyond a broken ship and the remains of many men (no women were lost on Arizona). The vacuum created by ignorance quickly filled with myth. Navy admirals repeated to Gary what they had heard over the years: Arizona is very dangerous to dive, killed many divers, it’s impossible to see down there and there are a thousand honoured war dead inside…how can we just start diving it? Gary’s response was, “Given all that, how
can we not?” He won the Navy’s confidence over time and by 1983 we began our work. Most underwater archaeologists
work on sites about the size of a tennis court, two at most. But Gary needed a detailed rendering of a ship that was two football fields long and 100 feet (30m) across…in water of 5-7 foot (1.5-2m) visibility. A trip around the hull involved quarter mile (400m) swim. In 1983, there was little technology available that might help. Sonar was crude; there were no personal computers, no internet, nor enough satellites in the sky to make primitive GPS useful. We’d basically be relying on our savvy in
This port side profile illustrates the location of the Memorial over USS Arizona and a sense of scale with a diver hovering above the #1 gun turret
All of Arizona’s gun turrets
were believed
removed in the salvage effort
after the attack. These 14” guns of the #1 turret, were discovered
to be still in place during the 1983 initial mapping
survey discussed in the article
dealing with underwater problems. I was touched by the faith Gary and the Navy put in us and a bit scared by it. Two things would help: we’d gained valuable experience in large- ship mapping at Isle Royale National Park, and there would come a timely advance in video technology. Our team had used the old
surface-supplied videotaping systems since the mid-1970s. Designed for offshore oil companies, they were good mainly for showing a non-diving engineer a black and white image of a ruptured pipe. The diver, wearing a full-face mask, dragged cables, one of which went to a surface TV monitor. ‘Topside’ could see what the diver was filming but the diver couldn’t––instead, needed directions like, “Pan left, tilt up 45 degrees.” It was a very clumsy tool for archaeology. But, as if answering our prayers, in 1983
www.divermag.com
43
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68