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A 46-year-old British man died last week while on a scuba diving expedition from Montauk to the notoriously dangerous wreck of the Andrea Doria cruise ship.
The diver, whom police identified as Steven Slater of Gateshead, England, was among a group of experienced divers who were descending to the Andrea Doria, about 60 miles southeast of Nantucket, on Monday, July 26, when he suffered a technical mishap. Despite efforts by the crew, who administered CPR and oxygen on the dive boat for two hours, Mr. Slater could not be revived.
East Hampton Town Police, who are investigating the incident with the Suffolk County medical examiner’s office, said they believe Mr. Slater had a problem with his diving suit and ascended from the 240-foot-deep wreck too quickly, suffering acute decompression sickness, a condition known commonly as “the bends” that causes a dangerous expansion of gases in the blood.
“We know that he descended to the wreck and at some point encountered some sort of malfunction with his dry suit and related equipment, which caused him to ascend, straight up,” Police Captain Chris Anderson said on Thursday, July 27. “There was nothing to indicate he wasn’t following best practices regarding his diving procedures. The medical examiner will explore the possibility of a medical emergency, but all indications right now are that it was equipment-related.”
Capt. Anderson said that the county has taken possession of Mr. Slater’s dive equipment for examination.
He said other divers had said that Mr. Slater, a seasoned diver who was a member of a UK-based group of highly experienced divers who have descended to wrecks in water as deep as 500 feet, shot to the surface in just a couple of minutes, compared to the more than an hour a diver needs to take to avoid decompression sickness.
“It had to be scary,” Capt. Anderson said. “The diver he was with, she took 70 minutes to get up.”
When Mr. Slater was brought back aboard the dive boat, the Ol’ Salty II, the crew notified the U.S. Coast Guard of the medical emergency and that they were performing CPR. A helicopter was dispatched to the boat’s location but a decision was made not to remove Mr. Slater from the boat because he had been unresponsive for so long, Capt. Anderson said. Instead the boat was ordered by the Coast Guard to return to Montauk, a 12-hour trip, where it was met by investigators.
Mr. Slater becomes at least the 16th person to have died diving on the Andrea Doria, which is swept by strong currents and whose depth causes extreme stresses on equipment and bodies. In 2011, two scuba divers perished in the same week while on expeditions out of Montauk, one of them at the Andrea Doria.
The Andrea Doria sank in July 1956 after colliding with another cruise liner, killing 46 of the some 1,700 passengers aboard. The hulk of the wreck attracts divers from around the world and has earned the wreck a nickname as “the Mount Everest of diving.”
The Ol’ Slaty is based in New Jersey but has been operating out of Montauk this summer to shorten the trip for diving expeditions to the Andrea Doria. The boat’s captain, Nick Caruso, posted a lament on Facebook as the boat returned to Montauk last week with Mr. Slater’s body.
“We’re coming home. Sad end,” he said. “Our deepest, sorrow and sympathy to the family and friends of the lost brother wreck diver.”
27east on Jul 27, 2017