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June 2002

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Subject:
From:
Steven Catron <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
SouthEast US Scuba Diving Travel list <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 18 Jun 2002 21:18:51 -0500
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Looks like the site has changed in the last few hours.  Identical text
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Diver found alive after being lost for six hours
By DEBORAH BUCKHALTER
Floridan Staff Writer
The first words spoken by the diver rescued Saturday after being trapped
six hours in one of Jackson County's underwater caves let his hero know he
was aware of just how close a call he'd had. "Hey, you looking for a dead
guy?," Mark Orr asked Scott Hunsucker as the two made contact in the air
pocket that saved Orr's life. Hunsucker, a trained rescue and recovery
diver, who was called from his Pensacola home to help find Orr, was
shocked to find his quarry alive. Of more than 480 divers who have been
reported missing while exploring a cave, only four have been found alive.
That's counting Orr. Orr became separated from his party late Saturday
afternoon while diving with three companions in a cave approximately 100
yards from the Chipola River behind Riverside Cemetery. With the air in
his tank running out, he was able to locate an air pocket he'd found
earlier in the dive. The pocket was in an area called a "sump," or a dry
cave beyond the wet cave he was initially lost in. Only between two and
three minutes of air remained in his tank when he reached it and sat down
on a pile of sand to breathe, his perch surrounded by carcasses of bats.
He was there six hours and was napping when Hunsucker and fellow diver
Daniel Neives arrived, their lights waking him from his slumber. "I was
speechless," Hunsucker said about discovering Orr alive. "I was expecting
to be on a body recovery mission. He shouldn't be breathing. When he asked
me if I was looking for a dead guy, I had to say 'Well, yeah.'" Hunsucker
said he had four good reasons to believe he'd find a body rather than a
living person on his search, and he minced no words when he talked to Orr
after the crisis about the circumstances that led to his predicament. "It'
s not the cave's fault; cave diving is a very safe activity if you play by
the rules," Hunsucker said. "We have five basic rules; they broke four."
First of all, and most importantly, Orr wasn't a certified cave diver.
That left him without the special training he needed, education that goes
beyond what's needed for open water diving. Secondly, they didn't use
continuous guide lines - something like kite string - that would have run
from the surface to the divers to help them negotiate their way back to
safety in case they got separated, or if silt prevented them from seeing
their way. That's something they would have known to do if they'd had the
proper training, Hunsucker pointed out. Thirdly, they failed to dive with
enough air in their tanks. You need to have enough air so that you use
only one third on your descent and in the cave, a third coming out, and a
third in reserve. "Typically, a cave diver will go in with an average of
240 cubic feet of air. I think they went in with single aluminum tanks
that held something like 80 cubic feet, and they had used more than one
third of their air when they were still in the cave," Hunsucker explained.

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