Inspecting a Dam with Shoreline Dive Services

My time working with Rick has come to an end. So sad! Today we will be heading to Greenwich Connecticut to work on a Dam. Rick was called on this job to do an inspection of the Dam, and I got to help. To start, Rick threw dye tablets in the water to see if he could see any areas where water was seeping through, and out the other side. These tablets turned a fluorescent green color, so we could track the movement of the water easily. There didn’t seem to be any troubled areas from this initial test, so Rick got suited up to dive and inspect it underwater. He would be diving surface supply, which means the air he was breathing came from tanks on the surface and he was wearing a Superlight mask which allowed him to talk to us through a communication box we had on the surface. This communication was very useful as he was able to tell us problem areas and we could mark them in chalk on the top of the dam. I was in charge of feeding him the umbilical, which is the tubing that feeds him air from the service. If he had too much slack then it could become tangled, and if he had too little then he wouldn’t be able to move well. So I had to make sure I was pulling it up and giving him more as needed based on where he was at the dam. He brought a gopro in with him so that he could show the engineer if there were problem areas. Inspecting the deeper part of the dam went smoothly, but when he started doing the shallower part there were quite a few cracks in the stone that would suck water in. Through the communication box, he asked for us to toss him some more dye tablets so that he could place them in front of the crack and track where the water was leading. There were multiple cracks/little holes, and Rick put the green tablet in each of them. The downside of this is that once the green dye showed up on the other side, we weren’t exactly sure which hole they came from. If they were to want to pinpoint this issue, they could either space out when they put the dye in, or use a different color dye. The point of the inspection though was just to address any issues. Once Rick was out of the water, we made our way down to the gate house, where the water was coming out of the dam. The engineer, Alex, realized there were little rocks in the stream of water there that weren’t there last time he was here, so they must have been coming from somewhere else. We tracked it down to the other gatehouse or the entrance of this one, and decided the rocks likely weren’t coming from inside the dam. I really enjoyed the whole process of problem solving that revolves around Rick’s job in commercial diving. We finished that job up earlier than expected, and got lunch with Alex.     

Overall, I really enjoyed my time training and working with a commercial diver. My time with Rick this week has made me realize that this side of diving is appealing to me, and I want to explore it more in the future.