Death in the Tank

In the flat, long light of a late afternoon last week, the oil exploration boat Submarex rode gently in the Pacific swell near the Southern California town of Redondo Beach. Below the water's surface. Professional Diver Eldon W. Smith, 31, began his ascent. Suddenly, the men on the Submarex intercom heard a scream tear from inside Smith's helmet: the diver, apparently rising too fast, was struck with caisson disease--knifelike jabs of pain caused by the accumulation of deadly nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream--the "bends."

Carefully, the seamen raised the pain-racked Smith to the surface, rushed him to the recompression chamber at the U.S. Navy's Terminal Island yard. He was unconscious. Doctors put him on a bench inside the windowed, diving-bell-shaped chamber. With Smith went Diver William J. Biller, 33. long experienced in recompression emergencies, to help in the battle for life. With the chamber door slammed and bolted, Biller waited as compressed air began to shriek in. Soon the air pressure inside the tank built up to 73.4 Ibs. per sq. in.--the equivalent of the pressure 165 ft. below sea level.

As the pressure rose, Biller massaged Smith's spastic muscles and chest. Outside the chamber, doctors watched carefully, consulted over the intercom with Biller, felt new hope when Smith regained consciousness for a few moments. Soon Diver Smith's wife and two sons arrived, agonizingly watched the rescue work through the chamber windows. The frantic minutes dragged by: the decompression cycle began. For eight hours and 40 minutes, Bill Biller worked desperately. Then, thrashing in gasping spasms before the anguished and horrified eyes of his wife, Eldon Smith died.

Now Biller began another long wait. The chamber pressure equaled that of 60 ft. below sea level; he would have to stay in the tiny (4 ft. 10 in. wide, 9 ft. 11 in. long) tank for the long, slow decompression cycle to bring him back to the earth's atmosphere. He sat there with the dead man's body for the rest of the night, then all through the next day and the next night, and into early hours of the following morning. He slept a few fretful moments on his tiny bench. Once or twice he whistled the snatch of a tune, nibbled on some food passed through an air lock, glanced at some magazines.

Finally, the last of the pressurized air whistled dryly out of the tank, and Biller heard the clank of eight bolts. It was 39 hours after he entered the chamber--30 hours since Eldon Smith died--when the entrance hatch opened and Bill Biller returned somberly to the world of the living.

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