An interior view of the Division Marine Office from an open porthole reveals a writing desk and rotary phone just visible to the left of the desk
of. They all eventually adopt a cave diving swim style, knees bent, fins swiping in a gentle horizontal motion. Staying close to the silt, yet hardly stirring it, is important when you move inboard of the gunnels (sides). Your reference points disappear from view if silt rises. Towards the bow the deck angles
down but the gunnel doesn’t––and that’s puzzling to a diver’s brain. It’s like walking with your hand on a railing when suddenly, the floor drops away but the rail doesn’t. A million pounds (500,000kg) of explosives in the magazine puts the blast almost on the scale of nukes––a 1/2 kiloton. Hiroshima by comparison measured about 16 kilotons. The weather deck, where the gun turrets sat, collapsed through lower decks carrying the number one turret beyond view, even from an aerial perspective.
Te second revelation from the opening dives was that live ordnance lay under the visitor access ramp!
That’s why everyone thought the number one turret was salvaged. It’s there, but lower. It makes sense only to the eyes of a diver. I shot a half dozen slow video
pans of the muzzles and other dramatic features for Gary to give to local TV affiliates. For the next few days we reviewed our video coverage on the 6:00 news. The second revelation from the opening dives was that live ordnance lay under the visitor access ramp! We departed until Navy EOD divers declared the site safe. We photographed, videoed and
Daniel J. Lenihan – Author and
former Chief of
the U.S. National Park Service, Submerged Resources Center
generally figured out how to map the giant hulk during a week-long assessment in 1983. We came back to do it over an intensive five weeks of diving in 1984. The technology we selected was numbered clothespins, measuring tapes, slates, plastic protractors and about a mile (1.6km) of string––more specifically, 1/16th inch (16mm) braided nylon (i.e. cave diving line). The method was based on high school geometry. We created three views of the hull–– bird’s eye, port and starboard. Using cave diving reels we ran straight white lines amidst the low- visibility, blown up chaos of Arizona. From any two points on any lines, our divers measured to a new, unknown point identified in a rough sketch by our illustrators. We used trilateration to pull together the picture of a recognizable, if heavily damaged ship.
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