The Producer's Story:
Risking It All for Science
by James Barrat
Dying to dive
While some people might die doing science, a lot of
people die cave diving: each year an average of 20 worldwide.
The U.S. National Speleological Society defines a successful
cave dive as "one you return from." "Extreme Cave Diving" is
really about the blue holes of the Bahamas. It's about
cutting-edge science that gives us important data about our
climate and reveals a lot about the Eden of now-extinct
animals that once lived on the islands of the Bahamas. But
blue holes are immense, flooded caves, and the only way to
explore them is through the dangerous sport of cave diving. In
our 21-day expedition, and the resulting film, diving and the
threat of dying sometimes overshadowed the science.
Onboard we had some of the world's best divers. Dive leader
Brian Kakuk is probably the planet's premier science and cave
diver. Jill Heinerth is an internationally sought-after
technical diving instructor. Wes Skiles, our director of
photography, is arguably Florida's greatest cave explorer,
living or dead. All our divers have been feature-film dive
doubles or consultants.
Yet each knew several other, equally expert divers whose dead
bodies they had recovered from caves. Including the expedition
leader, anthropologist Kenny Broad, the dive team has
recovered the bodies of more than 100 cave divers. To imagine
recovering just one, think of a flooded, crumbling 10-story
building at night. There's a dead body in the basement. You
have to find it and drag it to the roof. Could you? What if it
was a friend? Wes Skiles recovered the body of his best friend
from a cave. He also recovered three brothers who realized
they were hopelessly lost and out of air. Wes found them
holding hands.
Is diving really that dangerous? No, but diving in caves is.
More people have died cave diving than climbing Mount Everest.
Cave divers say of their sport, "There are no injuries, just
fatalities." I've filmed in three war zones, but I think the
chances of someone dying were higher in blue holes than in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Zaire. In the war zones, you hold onto
the not-unreasonable hope that you can keep crew members alive
by being extra careful. I didn't think I could do anything
about the dangers of the blue holes, except drain
them—which is a ridiculous notion, and a crime, because
damaging blue holes would be like burning a library.
Blue holes
At their deepest level, blue holes are anoxic, and this lack
of oxygen helps to preserve whatever falls in. Our team was
able to recover two skulls belonging to ancient humans, the
fossils of vertebrates that are now extinct in the Bahamas,
and fossils of birds that aren't just extinct but have never
before been described by science. Living within the blue holes
are at least one new order of multi-cellular creatures,
descended from animals that evolved millions of years ago, as
well as single-celled organisms virtually indistinguishable
from the first life-forms on Earth. Parts of blue holes are
like our planet's first seas, from a time four billion years
ago when the Earth had no oxygen. NASA was interested in the
expedition because the extreme life-forms found in blue holes
are similar to what they hope to find on other planets.
Things can go wrong, of course, no matter how thoroughly you
prepare.
In the geological sciences, blue holes hold just as many
wonders. When cut open, stalagmites from blue holes display
layers like the rings in a tree. Analysis of their composition
reveals a year-by-year diary of the Bahamas' climate for the
last 200,000-300,000 years, including rainfall, the chemicals
in the rain and air, even the temperature. They don't just
record past periods of extreme climate change, but also tell
us how fast that change can grip the planet.
My greatest challenge in making "Extreme Cave Diving" was
learning enough about the different sciences related to blue
holes to interview the scientists who joined the expedition:
marine biologist Tom Iliffe, ornithologist David Steadman,
molecular biologist Jenn Macalady, cave scientist Nancy
Albury, geochemist Peter Swart, and others. The second
greatest challenge, with which I had a lot of help, was
writing and editing for months to squeeze an often
unpredictable expedition with untidy results into a neat
package of one-hour television.
Everything but the sweat
We traveled and lived on the 66-foot
S.S. Tiburon, an expedition ship that had just
enough room for our crew of some 14 people and about four tons
of gear, including dive gear, cameras and related
paraphernalia, computers, printers, junk novels, and about 50
tanks for various mixes of air. We lacked for nothing in
amenities on the boat, though our close quarters meant that a
virus remained in constant circulation among the team. Most
importantly, the AC worked—July in the Bahamas is the
hottest and most humid month of the year.
We shot at seven blue holes in about 21 days. On a typical
day, we'd rise with the sun, offload gear from the ship into
vans, then go to the hole and put together a rough base camp.
We'd film the dive preparations and jump-ins, and then we
wouldn't see the dive and underwater film team until they
emerged carrying their scientific finds, usually two or three
hours later. So, at some part of each blisteringly hot day,
everyone would vanish into the deep except for a scientist or
two, my topside cameraman, the gifted and tireless Gordy
Waterman, ace soundman Dave Strayer, and me.
We'd use this time to shoot interviews with the film's
characters who weren't diving, or laboratory scenes with our
scientists examining blue hole finds. At night we'd review
tapes, log their contents, back up media, and have a
production meeting to discuss what was working and what
wasn't. The underwater crew had tanks to fill and gear to prep
and repair. We'd hit our bunks around midnight, smelly and
exhausted. To imagine what our lives were like, think of the
glamorous, gin-soaked Bahamas of Casino Royale.
Now take away everything but the sweat.
Reliance
I kept track of the divers' morale and health, both of which
had ups and downs, and I sometimes worried about them. They
are an exceptionally proficient group—masters of knots,
knives, seamanship, and, of course, diving. Otherwise, they
wouldn't have been much use to a film or a scientific
expedition, and, frankly, probably would've died long ago.
However, there's a term our divers used called "task-loading,"
which means unconsciously adding tasks to the things you have
to do, or being conscious that you're over-burdened and not
speaking up. Task-loading kills people. The dive team was
task-loaded to the gills. In addition to the variables of
technical diving and collecting samples, they had to contend
with the problems of lighting and filming underwater. Add to
that the ordinary hazards of cave diving—cave-ins,
silt-outs, faulty gear, decompression sickness, nitrogen
narcosis, oxygen toxicity, running out of air, and, of course,
simple, everyday drowning. Take all that and put it on a tight
schedule. Oh, and whenever you're above water you're being
filmed, and the producer expects you to be engaging 24/7.
But we came back with no injuries, largely because we were
wary, and we had planned to be wary. While pushed, no one
dived whose ability or safety was compromised, as far as I
know. Sick people stayed in bed. Besides being our chief
science diver, Brian Kakuk was also the diver in charge of
safety, and he has an uncanny sixth sense about other divers.
So we had a good safety structure. Other than a couple of
rebreather malfunctions and a small cave-in, we had no
dive-related safety incidents.
You may endanger everyone on a dive by having one unlucky
moment.
Things can go wrong, of course, no matter how thoroughly you
prepare. For example, it's nearly impossible to predict
avalanches of loose rock, and big cave-ins. In the
film, Kenny Broad says, "We're swimming over boulders the size
of houses, and you know they came from the ceiling." I've no
doubt that luck played a part in our expedition, and that
teams with even greater attention to safety than ours have
lost members.
In the end, I took away a great appreciation of the divers'
self-reliance. I'm a PADI Rescue Diver—which on this
shoot was a qualification about as useful as being a good
singer—and I've always had drilled into me that you
never dive alone. You dive with a buddy. In cave diving,
however, you may head into a cave with several buddies, but
you're always diving alone. That's not existential
hyperbole—if something goes wrong in a cave, your buddy
probably can't help you. You train to self-rescue. You're just
too far from safety to think about survival any other way. In
fact, you may endanger everyone on a dive by having one
unlucky moment. Suppose, for example, that you're the last
person to squeeze through a tight passage and you get
hopelessly stuck. One second you're a valued member of a
cave-diving team. In the next, you're the cork in the bottle
containing the lives of your friends.
