BlankThe book "Sea Lab" mentioned in this obit is available on Bookshare:
Synopsis
Sealab is the underwater Right Stuff: the compelling story of how a US Navy
program
sought to develop the marine equivalent of the space station--and forever
changed
man's relationship to the sea.While NASA was trying to put a man on the moon,
the US
Navy launched a series of daring experiments to prove that divers could live
and work
from a sea-floor base. When the first underwater "habitat" called Sealab was
tested
in the early 1960s, conventional dives had strict depth limits and lasted for
only
minutes, not the hours and even days that the visionaries behind Sealab wanted
to
achieve--for purposes of exploration, scientific research, and to recover
submarines
and aircraft that had sunk along the continental shelf. The unlikely father of
Sealab, George Bond, was a colorful former country doctor who joined the Navy
later
in life and became obsessed with these unanswered questions: How long can a
diver
stay underwater? How deep can a diver go? Sealab never received the attention
it
deserved, yet the program inspired explorers like Jacques Cousteau, broke
age-old
depth barriers, and revolutionized deep-sea diving by demonstrating that living
on
the seabed was not science fiction. Today divers on commercial oil rigs and
Navy
divers engaged in classified missions rely on methods pioneered during Sealab.
Sealab
is a true story of heroism and discovery: men unafraid to test the limits of
physical
endurance to conquer a hostile undersea frontier. It is also a story of
frustration
and a government unwilling to take the same risks underwater that it did in
space.
Ben Hellwarth, a veteran journalist, interviewed many surviving participants
from the
three Sealab experiments and conducted extensive documentary research to write
the
first comprehensive account of one of the most important and least known
experiments
in US history.
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Robert Barth, 89, Dies; A Risk-Taking Pioneer Of Deep-Sea Diving. By John
Schwartz.
Mr. Barth was the sole 'aquanaut' to play a major role in all four stages of
the
Navy's landmark program to open the depths to long-term habitation.
The hatch would not open. Six hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific
Ocean
off the Southern California coast, Chief Warrant Officer Bob Barth struggled to
get
inside the Navy's new Sealab 3 habitat. The 340-ton undersea platform, where he
and a
nine-man crew were scheduled to spend 12 days together, was leaking, and Mr.
Barth
and a fellow diver, Berry L. Cannon, had headed down with two other divers to
fix it.
Suddenly, Mr. Barth realized that Mr. Cannon was having convulsions, that his
respirator had floated free and that his jaws were clenched shut so that it
could not
be reinserted. The scene played out on the closed-circuit television monitoring
the
habitat from the surface; Mr. Barth frantically tried to get his crewmate back
to the
diving pod, where the other two divers waited.
One of them, Richard Blackburn, helped wrestle Mr. Cannon back into the capsule
for
the slow return to the surface. As they rose, they tried to resuscitate Mr.
Cannon,
but without luck; using their intercom, they called to the surface to say he
had
died. Mr. Cannon's death marked the end of one of the great programs of naval
exploration, one that had begun with a dry-land test called Genesis and had
moved
through three versions of the Sealab underwater habitat, from the late 1950s to
1969.
The program greatly increased the depths at which humans could safely live and
work.
The divers were called aquanauts, an under-the-sea analogue to the glamorous
astronauts who circled the earth and landed on the moon.
Only one aquanaut was deeply involved in all four stages of that grand
adventure: Mr.
Barth, who died on March 26 at his home in Panama City, Fla., at 89. The cause
was
complications of Parkinson's disease, his son, Dale, said.
The dangerous experiments Mr. Barth took part in paved the way for exploits of
deepwater espionage, undersea construction and demolition projects around the
world.
He never achieved conventional fame, but he was the "ultimate aquanaut," said
Leslie
Leaney, the executive director of the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame.
"His
contributions benefited the world of science and national security, but also
the
economies of all nations that explored for offshore oil."
In 2010, the Navy named its aquatic training facility in Panama City for Mr.
Barth.
"Nothing that Navy divers do is one guy," he said at the dedication. "There is
always
a whole bunch of people involved in it."
The comparison between aquanauts and astronauts was apt, said Ben Hellwarth, a
journalist and the author of "Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and
Work on
the Ocean Floor. "Much like the first NASA astronauts of the U.S. space
program, Bob
Barth volunteered to put himself on the line to do something extraordinary that
had
never been done," Mr. Hellwarth said, "'and not everyone in the Navy thought it
was
such a good idea."
Mr. Barth would say: "Some people called us guinea pigs. They called us a lot
of
other things, too," a suggestion that skeptics thought anyone involved in the
program
was stupid, crazy or both.
Many Navy higher-ups doubted that the program could lead to anything useful,
Mr.
Hellwarth said. The Sealab program got its start with Capt. George F. Bond,
then head
of the Medical Research Laboratory at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Conn.
Mr.
Barth was stationed there.
The concept that Captain Bond developed was "saturation diving," which involves
putting divers under high atmospheric pressure before descent and bringing them
back
to normal very gradually.
Under the pressures of diving, atmospheric gases get forced into the
bloodstream and
bodily tissues. Come up too fast, and the gases bubble out, like the fizz of a
carbonated soda when you pop the lid. Without careful decompression, escaping
gas can
cause the potentially fatal condition known as the bends.
The best mixture of gases for such excursions had to be determined. Under high
pressure, too much oxygen becomes toxic. Too much nitrogen can have a narcotic
effect.
The experiments led to gas mixtures that, for great depths, were composed
largely of
helium, which made the divers' voices high-pitched and squeaky. Helium also
transfers
heat more quickly than nitrogen and oxygen do, which meant that deep-sea work
could
expose the divers to bone-chilling cold.
Levels of carbon dioxide had to be carefully managed; Mr. Cannon was poisoned
by too
much carbon dioxide, and it was later discovered that a crucial canister, which
was
supposed to be filled with a chemical that absorbed the CO2 in recirculated
air, had
been empty.
Mr. Barth possessed a natural authority, his former teammate Mr. Blackburn
recalled.
"He would lead from the front," he said, meaning that he would be the first to
take
any risk that was expected of his crew.
Mr. Barth could be profane and direct. "You didn't want to get on the wrong
side of
him on a bad day," Mr. Blackburn said, but added that "he always had some kind
of
prank up his sleeve."
Friends referred to him as "Sweet Old Bob," with the abbreviation intentional.
Robert August Barth Jr. was born in Manila on Aug. 28, 1930, to Robert Sr. and
Phyllis (Ludwig) Barth. His father was an Army officer on the staff of Gen.
Douglas
MacArthur; his mother managed a shoe store. They divorced when he was 10.
According to biographical information provided by Mr. Hellwarth, with the
coming of
the World War II Mr. Barth's mother and her second husband stayed behind in
Manila
while young Bob was put on a ship to the United States, where he rejoined his
father.
He was later reunited with his mother and stepfather, and they moved to
Chicago, and
later South Africa.
At 17, Mr. Barth took a job as a seaman on a cargo ship bound from South Africa
for
Baltimore; once in the United States, he signed on with the Navy, where he
encountered Captain Bond.
He married Georgia Murrow in 1951, and they had a son, Bobby, who became a rock
musician. They divorced in 1954. In 1958, he married Joyce Ann Williams and
adopted
Dale, her son by her first marriage; the couple had a second child, Samuel, and
later
divorced. In 2014 he married Sharon Kay Kinsey. She survives him, as do his
sons.
After retiring from the Navy, Mr. Barth worked in commercial diving and later
took a
Civil Service position with the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. In 2000 he
published a
memoir, "Sea Dwellers."
The Sealab program included one real-life astronaut, Scott Carpenter, one of
the
original seven Mercury astronauts and the second American to orbit the earth.
His
daughter, Kris Stoever, said that he and Mr. Barth had 'formed a fast
friendship. Mr.
Carpenter, who died in 2013, wrote the foreword to "Sea Dwellers."
Ms. Stoever's brothers got a taste of the kinds of pranks that Mr. Barth could
pull.
One summer Mr. Barth was visiting the Carpenter family vacation home at Palmer
Lake
in Colorado, south of Denver, and Mr. Carpenter was trying, without success, to
interest two of his children, Matthew and Nick, both in their preteens, in the
maritime art of tying knots.
"The boys didn't want to do it," Ms. Stoever said. "Bob Barth tied them to a
tree."
Matthew, in retrospect, finds it funny, Ms. Stoever said; Nick does not.
Neither
could recall the knots Mr. Barth employed.