SEALAB III: Another Letter to the Editor!

Dear Michael,

Regarding Ben Hellwarth’s Letter to the Editor (October 2, 2024) addressing my article on SEALAB III and its evidence advancing the conclusion that Aquanaut Berry Cannon was electrocuted, and not killed by CO₂ poisoning, I find his complaints weak. 

Hellwarth takes exception to my use of the word “speculation.” Perhaps a better word would have been “hypothesis”.  Forensic engineering applies scientific method, an understanding of engineering, and a knowledge of industry recommended practice to resolve questions relating to system failure. We start with a list of what we know and work to create a sequence of events that include those facts.  True, there was no camera on Berry on the backside of the habitat, but we have enough other information to piece together a likely scenario.  

I appreciate Ben’s interest, time, effort, and, indeed, personal sacrifice, in researching and writing his book, SEALAB: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor.  His service to keeping the memory of the USN’s Man-in-the-Sea program alive is gratefully acknowledged.

My approach, after thorough background research of prior work and archives of photographs, was to engage the surviving Aquanauts themselves and let them direct my thinking to be consistent with their experiences in the program, on site, and at depth.  I am in awe of their legacy and deeply indebted to their friendship and openness.  I felt their story had always been suppressed in favor of the topsiders with careers to defend.

I understand Ben does not agree with the detailed assessment I submitted for your readers’ consideration, referring to my due diligence as “some pretty arcane stuff.”  It should also be noted that Bill Bunton, author of Death of an Aquanaut, likewise does not agree.  That’s fine.  Their books are in print (Bunton, 2000, Hellwarth, 2012), and they feel the work is done.

But with new knowledge comes new understanding. Engineering and science are not static. Neither is history. There are those of us intrigued with the still unfolding story of SEALAB III.

I stand corrected on the matter of diver selection for Dive #2.  Aquanaut Richard “Blackie” Blackburn recalls Mazzone wanted Barth and Cannon to make the dive again as they had trained to open the habitat, whereas Blackburn and Reaves had trained in other matters. Tomsky left that to them to work out. Blackie adds, “As to who made the final call on IF and who would make the second dive, I believe it was Barth and Mazzone, although that discussion was done on the electrowriter between Barth and Mazzone, so the rest of us in DDC did not really know what was said.” He believes none of the four divers, including himself, were in any shape for such heavy thinking after the first dive.  The interval between dives was far too short but made urgent by the rapid helium loss of the habitat.

Hellwarth’s interviews and reporting on SEALAB III in his Chapters 13 and 14 shed new light on an event that had seen sketchy reporting since the events of February 1969.  At the time, best effort was made to sweep the subject under the carpet, and the glory of the impending Apollo 11 moon landing was a timely public distraction. Ben’s work on this subject was a service to the saturation diving community. While a talented and skilled journalist, he lacks the experience and frame of reference for forensic engineering. His reporting gives false equivalency to all points of view on the end of SEALAB III.  He reports the conclusions of the BOI as the end of the matter. So did Bunton. Wikipedia reports the same story. It’s uncontroversial. Repetition does not make it true. Reading the reports by journalists of the day raised many more insightful questions. Some of what I wrote appeared in print just days after Berry’s death.

The BOI conclusion never made sense to this reader.  It never added up. The BOI conclusion appeared to force the data to fit a predetermined conclusion.  The report of baralyme in the exhaust hose of the rig with the empty canister is enough to refute that.

The SEALAB III story continues to evolve as more logs, journals, reports, and personal stories come to light. Hellwarth’s book was published in 2012.  I received a copy of the NOSC report to the BOI “SEALAB III Sequence of Events” in 2020, eight years later, which contained the report of the ground fault alarms. The BOI had that in their hands in 1969. Perhaps had the reference been in Ben’s, it might have changed his perception of the hazards to the divers.

In previous writing, I did not include two observations made by Aquanaut Richard “Blackie” Blackburn as he recovered Berry’s body from the seafloor: Berry’s eyes were fully dilated, and there appeared to be a blue halo around his face.  Those observations may be of value to undersea and hyperbaric medical personnel as we continue to press for P.A. Wells’s exoneration.

The one matter I felt understudied in my writing is Dr. George Bond’s “series of operations during the 1967 winter months” for a condition that “escalated to partial paralysis of my hind quarters, and unremitting pain.”  (Bond, Papa Topside, pp 151). How did that leadership vacuum affect the SEALAB III program?  Bond disarmed the question for me: “When I returned to the SEALAB project in July, I found the characters and the staging had shifted, but the basic plot was remarkably unchanged.” That period of history deserves greater scrutiny. SEALAB III is a deep, vast, and complex story.  Following the story sometimes feels like a night dive on a reef with a narrow-beam flashlight.

Just this past August, I came across two new references attributed to Capt. William Nicholson, SEALAB III Project Manager. One was an oral interview (February 8, 1999), and the other a Letter to the Editor, USNI Proceedings (June 1995).

In my article, I make the point that the SEALAB III habitat should have been pressure tested with helium when in dry dock in September 1968. That’s standard engineering practice. In his oral history interview in 1999, Nicholson said the same thing, “The habitat was built in a San Francisco shipyard. When they put it together, they did not do a good job with the seals. When we tested it, we tested it with air because we were running on a very tight budget. I think we had five million dollars a year for that program, and NASA was running at five billion a year then. We were small peanuts. When we tested it, we put it in the dry dock, flooded it, and pressurized it. Everything worked, but we were using air and that was a mistake. When we put it down off San Clemente Island, it had serious leakage. We pressurized it with helium, which was necessary for a six-hundred-foot operation.”  He adds, “I have regrets about that. That’s the one thing that bugs me occasionally. I wish I had insisted on their using helium for the original tests in the shipyard, which would have been expensive but would have solved it.”

However, photographs and statements from Aquanauts show that the habitat was never fully submerged in the dry dock. The helium leak test, or even the air test, would need the habitat to be submerged to the point that a leak could be seen. It also would need somebody in the water looking.

In that same interview, Nicholson said something curious: “In the Sea Lab Program, underwater living, our objective was to get to six hundred feet so that we could work at six hundred feet. We got there by a series of tests, deep-diving facilities, sea experience, and whatnot. The actual underwater living was the thing that got publicity, but that was not our goal.”

Underwater living was not the goal of SEALAB III, said Nicholson.  It was divers working at 600ft.

That goal could have been accomplished by the checkerboard DIVERCON project alone, managed by Dr. Larry Hallanger, NCEL-Port Hueneme, as part of the SEALAB III project. Hallanger had already run an underwater test of the assembly sequence a year before the SEALAB III deployment and was fully prepared to perform that as part of SEALAB III.  His primary concern was that the dive rig had never been tested below 70 ft.  His dive logs confirm that.

Nicholson’s comment also raises the question as to why Jack Tomsky insisted his gas shack operators hold interior habitat pressure at over-ambient when Barth was trying to open the hatch on two dives. The divers knew the hatch couldn’t be opened as it hinged inward and was being held shut by the force of the interior air pressure. Tomsky knew that, too. As I recently walked to Jack Tomsky’s grave to pay respects with my friend Mariano Lorde, an alternative explanation occurred to me: Tomsky never intended for the habitat to be populated. He meant to keep the divers out, to keep them safe. I have begun to see Jack Tomsky as a sympathetic character, which is an evolution since even my most recent article in InDepth Magazine.

Nicholson’s comment also raises the question that if the primary goal of SEALAB III was to have divers work at 600ft, why were there so many problems with the things the divers needed: thermal protection, breathing systems, communication, Helium speech descramblers, PTC heaters and baffles on the scrubber system, power tools, and general diver oversight.

Psychology must be considered in the course of all human interaction, though that is arguably not my strong suit. My take on William Nicholson remains.  He had more confidence than competence. He was blinded by his ego. Tomsky was brought in by Bond. Who brought in Nicholson? Reflecting in 1999 on taking over the leadership role of project SEALAB, Nicholson said, “That program was really fun. It was the Sea Lab Program, which got lots of publicity. I enjoyed that. I got to do a lot of diving. I got to know a lot of interesting people. I got to know Cousteau, and Scott Carpenter worked for me. I got him back from the Air Force, from the NASA program, when they wouldn’t fly him anymore. I called him up and said, “Do you want to come back to the Navy?” He came back and worked for me. We had real fun doing that. It was a good program.” In truth, Carpenter was already part of the Man-in-the-Sea program since SEALAB I.

But when the program went south, and an Aquanaut was killed, his take was “The Sea Lab Program got the Navy to where it wanted to go. We finished that. We lost the diver, and we lost public relations, which was a big problem, because the press had made a big deal about it.”

Nicholson’s perception of his responsibility? “I was two steps removed from that. I was back in Washington, and I had a Sea Lab manager who was running the Sea Lab Program out there. I guess I would sum up all the things I am talking about here as follows: I was running a group of very competent engineers. It’s not that I individually did anything; I did very little, individually. I taught at MIT. What I did there was mine. But all the rest of these things were as head of a group or team.”

Unlike Cannon, Wells and Tomsky, Nicholson suffered no repercussions from SEALAB III.  He only felt, “That was a low point in my career, but we did get to six hundred feet.”

Other questions remain. On the Board of Inquiry were Capt. John D. Chase, Capt. Tor Richter (Medical Corps), Cmdr. William R. Liebold, and Master Diver Art Nelson. Liebold was one of the nine survivors of the USS Tang (SS-306), the legendary WWII submarine of Captain Richard “Killer” O’Kane that was sunk by its own torpedo. He spent the duration of the war in Japanese POW camps. In a printed eulogy, it was remembered that, “It was very important to Bill that ‘nothing but the truth was told’ in the several books in print and at the USS Tang Museum that Bill provided input for.”  Liebold was later CO of the EDU in Washington, DC.

Such men do not suffer bullying. Such men do not take the easy way out.  All of which makes the BOI conclusion so perplexing. The end of SEALAB III may have been the doorstep to The Projects, the likes of “Ivy Bells”, but the transition was deficient.

The electrocution of Berry Cannon has to be told in the context of the severity of the project’s shortcomings. As Project Manager, Nicholson owns the primary responsibility for the failures.

The full story of SEALAB III deserves its own book, though the story is still unfolding. The habitat was on the edge of the continental shelf, ocean engineering, human endurance, and operational management. There is the danger of stalling the story again by putting it between two covers and assigning an ISBN number. But if Hellwarth would like to wade into those waters again, I’m predisposed to collaborate with him. I’d certainly welcome his help in seeing Paul Wells exonerated.

Forensic engineering gives us answers we can accept. It provides closure. The fire of Apollo 1 was due to an unsealed electrical switch in a pure oxygen environment; it was a 12v motor on an upgraded 24v electrical circuit in an oxygen tank on Apollo 13; it was the conclusion, “The decision to launch was a management decision,” of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

I forwarded Ben’s article without comment to the surviving SEALAB Aquanauts for their reaction. Many replied:

Larry Bussey

“Greetings Kevin and Team; 

 In his article, Mr. Hellwarth implores us to concur with his findings, seemingly refuting our intimate association with P.A., knowing and trusting his work ethic, and relying upon his expertise to ensure our gear was safe and ready in all respects. No, we have no empirical evidence of Berry’s electrocution, but Kevin’s exhaustive research combined with Blackie’s personal witness, convinces me unequivocally that a faulty electrical connection on the habitat caused a grounding connection when Berry grabbed it attempting to stop the leak.  Your research, Kevin, has certainly provided a ‘new and improved explanation’, as Mr. Hellwarth was hoping for…and clearly received, in my opinion.  Cheers ~ Larry

Richard Blackburn

“Thanks for sharing. Agree 100 percent on electrocution And NO empty canister at start of dive number 2, there were too many people that handled the canister for it to have been empty without noticing. (See Keith Moore comment).  Blackie”

Martin Harrell

“Please keep in mind that the initial finding of the Board of Inquiry was that, even with all of the finger-pointing about an empty canister, they could identify no cause of Berry’s death. However, upon reading the Board’s report, the Chief of Naval Material reportedly — and I heard this from what I considered reliable sources at DSSP — reconvened the Board and told them that THEY WOULD REMAIN IN SESSION UNTIL THEY WERE ABLE TO DETERMINE A CAUSE OF DEATH!  What were they to do?  They had no additional evidence, but they did have an empty canister!

“Moreover, the electrical ground faults in the power supplied from the IX-501 were well identified by ground fault detectors.  I was aboard the IX-501, continuously monitoring helium and oxygen gas usage, when I was notified about this. As you are, Larry, I now am more convinced than ever that electrocution caused Berry’s death.”

“Later, after Tomsky canceled the project, I found out why: I watched a crew connect a power cable to a pigtail (about 100 feet long) which came out of the side of the habitat. They wrapped the connection first in electrician’s tape, then in fiberglass tape, covering about two or three feet on either side of the connection. Then they painted the entire taped section liberally with epoxy resin and let it harden.

“Later, when I was making a failure inspection of the habitat at the Hunters Point Navy Yard, I discovered what happened: Due to faulty—and I’d call it totally unsatisfactory—workmanship (with intent to conceal it from quality assurance inspectors at that shipyard), there was a clear path for helium to penetrate through the interior of that pigtail, contained only by the rubber (plastic?) sheath of the cable—until it reached that connection. There, it ruptured the sheath, giving helium a clear path into the sea and seawater a path into the cable. Martin”

Andres Pruna

“Sorry, I find Mr. Hellwarth’s opinion just typical of a writer protecting his book.

AP”

Jim Osborn

I’ve read both, and while I think Hellwarth’s book is a good one, I agree with Andre’s assessment. I don’t think anyone, like Kevin, has done more digging for and assessing the information gleaned from those who were there and never got the chance to put on record the real issues.

“I was on the sidelines when the accident occurred, so I have to believe those who were there and have the knowledge and experience to tell the real story. Best to all, Jim Osborn”

Only conjecture: Had someone with experience in deep sea saturation diving been in Nicholson’s position, Berry Cannon might still be alive today. To read Cannon’s paper, “Unusual Engineering Problems in Undersea Living,” presented at the 1966 conference, “Man’s Extension into the Sea,” gives a measure of the man and his impending contributions that the U.S. Navy lost.  Paul Wells could have lived out his life as the consummate dive professional he was known as among his dive buddies.

My goal is not to simply tell a story, my goal is to correct the history being told. That takes courage. The model for that since my youth has always been the Aquanauts.

Kevin Hardy

San Diego, CA

DIVE DEEPER

InDEPTH: SEALAB III (1969): The Divers’ Story by Kevin Hardy

InDEPTH: Remembering Sealab I by Ben Hellwarth

InDEPTH: Letter to the Editor: Regarding SEALAB lll by Ben Hellwarth