Posted on 01/13/2014 8:28:22 PM PST by Lmo56
The Navy divers knew it was a risky operation. The Aberdeen “super pond” was deep enough to hold a 14-story building. Its water was black and cold. And the bottom was a tangle of muck and debris.
An Army diver had died there a month earlier. And now, with some crucial equipment broken, James E. Reyher said Ryan Harris had to make the dive with scuba gear, and little margin for error.
Even for a quick “bounce” dive, scuba tanks would give them only about 11 minutes of air to go down 150 feet and get back up. It was only a training evaluation, but no Navy scuba dive had gone below 130 feet in years.
The two men were asked if they wanted to make the dive. They could say no. But they thought that might affect their standing and their coming deployment. So Reyher and Harris entered the frigid water that day last winter and began their descent.
On Monday, a court-martial was to begin for a Navy supervisor in connection with the deaths of Reyher, 28, and Harris, 23, on Feb. 26 in the man-made pond at the Army’s test center, in Aberdeen, Md.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I come from a career-Navy family. The supervisors getting court-martialed oughta be keel-hauled for 24 hours ...
The three DAMNING sentences in the article follow:
"The dive was supposed to have been done with Mark 16 re-breather units, which recycle air and allow more time underwater. But two of the four Mark 16s were broken, and three had to be working for a dive to be made." ...
" ... Although Navy rules said scuba dives below 130 feet could be conducted only in cases of “operational necessity,” none of the divers seem to have realized that did not include training, the report said."
"Operational necessity" DOES NOT include training - those nimrods ...
AND, regs mandated AT LEAST 3 tanks - DO THE MATH !!!
Regs get violated on a routine basis in the military. See, it looks good on an NCOER that you organized PT tests, damn the requirement of no organized gathering during deployments to avoid undue stress and risky rocket bombing on unarmed open soldier group mass targets...
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