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Dive team gets feel of new suits
By ANNIE TAYLOR
Times staff
Members of the Cape Ann Regional Dive Team spent more than two hours yesterday morning searching for a toy infant in Babson Reservoir. The 40-degree water measured about 25 feet deep, and the baby was a plastic mannequin, used in search and rescue operations like this one.
The dive team practices every last Wednesday of the month. So suiting up in 130-pound, penguin-like outfits and diving under with harnessed oxygen tanks is nothing new for the 13- to 15-member team, led by Fire Captain Miles Schlichte.
But yesterday morning the diving firefighters from Essex, Rockport and Gloucester joined the Beverly Fire Department's dive team to test some new equipment, purchased with two $25,000 state grants secured by state Rep. Anthony Verga, state Sen. Bruce Tarr and state Rep. Michael Cahill from Beverly.
Both groups have decided to invest in new dry suits -- the special outfits the divers wear to keep dry and to stay afloat.
"We got this with the state grant," said Beverly firefighter Lt. Michael Acciavatti about the new dry suit he was wearing. "This is the way to go."
Different than a wet suit, which absorbs water and acts like a glove to insulate divers from colder waters, a dry suit keeps water out altogether. It also acts like a body-shaped inner tube that, when filled with varying amounts of air, keeps the diver afloat.
The divers also add anywhere from 10 to 30 pounds of weight to their suits to off-set the buoyancy of the outfit. If they are too light, they cannot dive underwater. Yet if they are too heavy, swimming to the surface may be overly cumbersome or tiring.
Acciavatti toyed with his weight belt two or three times before he settled on a particular poundage to fit his new suit, while Gloucester firefighter John Bell was more experienced with his equipment and could dive right in.
"Once (your suit) is working, you're working," Bell said. "Then the real difficulty is the search patterns. And it's cold, and there's absolutely no visibility."
Under water, divers may face each other in their fluorescent-orange dry suits and still not see each other. Flashlights also are of absolutely no use. Divers are better off closing their eyes and just feeling for objects, Schlichte said.
Since vision as well as sound are distorted underwater, touch is the one sense divers can really use. Otherwise, they must rely on commands they receive by radio or tugs on a line from men at the surface to direct them to what they are looking for.
The Gloucester and Beverly Fire Departments also plan to buy additional radio equipment with the $25,000 state grants they have received, Schlichte said. The units, attached to the divers' dry suits, send messages back to the surface via a transmitter, which translates the sound waves travelling through the water to sounds understood in air.
"You live on an island, cut by a river with tons of quarries -- it's only a matter of time before something happens," Schlichte said. "So you have to be ready."
Members of the dive team eventually go through three tiers of certification -- diver, advanced diver and rescue diver. Once they have reached rescue diver status, they are ready to participate in specialized dives, such as dives under ice, in deep water and dives from a boat.
"Too bad we didn't have colder weather today or we would have had
ice," Schlichte said. "It's important for us to practice."
