OMG terrible, did the poor guy make it out of the fire?
No. They discovered his body with his mask and scuba suit burned to his body. The investigator did not immediately figure out this mystery until later. Imagine what the investigator originally thought.
This is only part of the story.
THE NEXT TIME YOU THINK YOU ARE HAVING A BAD DAY: Fire authorities in California found a corpse in a burned out section of forest while assessing the damage done by a forest fire.
The deceased male was dressed in a full wet suit, complete with SCUBA tanks on his back, flippers, and face mask.
A post-mortem revealed that the person died not from burns, but from massive internal injuries.
Dental records provided a positive identification. Investigators then set about to determine how a fully clad diver ended up in the middle of a forest fire.
It was revealed that, on the day of the fire, the person went for a diving trip off the coast some 20 miles away from the forest. The firefighters, seeking to control the fire as quickly as possible, called in a fleet of helicopters with very large dip buckets. Water was dipped from the ocean then flown to the forest fire and emptied. You guessed it.
One minute our diver was making like Flipper in the Pacific, the next he was doing the breast stroke in a fire dip bucket 300 feet in the air. Apparently he extinguished exactly 5’-10” of the fire. Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed! This article was taken from the California Examiner, March 20, 1998