Posted on 04/23/2023 9:15:47 AM PDT by Paal Gulli
By Michael E. Ruane
The Washington Post • April 22, 2023
... Earlier this month, a team of elite Navy divers and archaeologists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) ended a five-week, deep-water search of Hansa Bay for the bones of Heaven Can Wait's crew.
The project unfolded about 10 miles from an active, 6,000-foot volcano in one part of World War II's vast Pacific Ocean graveyard. It was the deepest underwater recovery mission for the DPAA, the government agency that seeks to account for service members missing in action from past wars.
And it was the first time the Navy's so-called SAT FADS - Saturation Fly-Away Diving System - had been used in such a role, the Navy said...
..."Remains do survive . . . even after 80 years of being on the sea floor," said Katrina L. Bunyard, a DPAA underwater archaeologist and historian.
Andrew Pietruszka, Project Recover's lead archaeologist, said, "Fish and other animals and microorganisms, they'll eat all the soft tissue" but leave the bones. "That's why we get, typically, decent preservation."
Tennyson's grandson, Scott Jefferson, 52, of Queenstown, New Zealand, said he thought the plane's loss "was a mystery that would never be solved. . . . I'm just overwhelmingly grateful to everybody that made this happen."...
(Excerpt) Read more at stripes.com ...
"Saturation" divers stay down for days at a time because once their tissues are completely saturated with dissolved gasses, that's all they can hold. So once they've reached the "saturation" point, the "decompression" procedure is the same, regardless how much longer they stay down. From 200 feet (and once saturated), decompression will take three days, not an insignificant period of time.
So they lower a pressurized "diving bell" to their working depth. Since the "air" inside (which might be a mixed gas) is already at the same pressure as what they've been breathing, they can come and go as they please without further complicating or lengthening the decompression procedure to come. That way they can spend almost four weeks on the job (before physiological needs require them to surface) while only having to decompress the one time.
Pressure inside the diving bell @200 feet will be about 92 psi(g), 107 psi(a).
But for that time they're completely isolated because they can't escape to the surface and sending down rescue divers would complicate the logistics of decompression and put even more divers at risk. Which is why saturation diving is one of the riskiest (and highest-paid) manual labor professions.
“Everybody comes home...”...
..except from Afghanistan!
How many Americans, including servicemen, were abandoned by XiJinBiden and his band of globalist/fascists? Funny how the MSM have completely forgotten about these people! Have ANY gotten out? Do any remain alive in Afghanistan? Who knows?
How many Canadians were abandoned by Crime Minister Castreau and his band of globalist/communists, when the Ambassador abandoned Kabul, in the middle of the night, with no warning to the Canadians that remained, including apparently, members of CSOR?
Sorry, Stars and Stripes. While it is good to recover the bodies of WW2 vets, how about recovering ALIVE, CURRENT members of the US military, held in that sh&$hole that is Afghanistan? Same goes for Castreau’s Canaduh!
My pre-supposition has always been that sea water dissolves them or micro organisms eat them.
No.
leave them
I have seen too many people damaged in recovery operations
Not worth it.
Dunno but I've seen Jacques Cousteau programs where divers explored WW-II wrecks and showed lots of skeletal remains in good condition after 30 years in tropical waters.
The US military cemeteries overseas are not American soil but in every case their use has been "...granted to the United States in perpetuity...." (https://www.abmc.gov/node/534720)
Burial at sea historically was done to spare the living from the unpleasantness and possible health hazard of stowing a rotting corpse onboard. And sailors historically have been an uncommonly superstitious lot. Two of these don't apply if all you've retrieved is skeletal remains (but sailors are still sailors).
On a modern naval vessel, the only refrigeration (big enough to store a corpse in) is the food locker, and I'm pretty sure there's something in naval regulations prohibiting storing a dead body with the lamb chops.
Nowadays it's almost always possible for naval vessels to avoid burials at sea by airlifting remains ashore. Unless I'm mistaken, the last naval burial at sea in time of war was during the Falklands conflict.
According to this reference, there were 338 people aboard the Titanic who were never accounted for and so presumed drowned and lost. No one knows how many of them might have remained inside when she went down but there were at least a few because there were two firemen who volunteered to stay behind and continue stoking the boilers in boilerroom #5 so the ship's lights would remain on. And the survivors stated the lights indeed were still on when she slipped under the water.
The expeditions to the wreck have only once found something they think was human remains (image here). All that's recognizable is a pair of crewman's dungarees and a single shoe, the rest buried in the silt. There are no bones apparent but that doesn't mean there aren't any. My hunch is there were only a very few others, and if they also were tending to their duties until the water came in, they might well be in the deep recesses of the wreck, where no probe has ever reached.
You forgot Laos. Reagan wanted to go get them and Congress put the kabash on the plan.
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