Diving a Hurricane Aftermath: The First Week

By Gus Marchetti, Salvage master. Reviewed by Amanda McCallister, editor.

Marine Salvage & Recovery | Dock & Pier Repair The morning of August 29, two days after Hurricane Mareno moved through, I was on the stern of a 30-foot North River, counting telephone poles tilted across the bay like a spilled box of straws. The water was the color of used motor oil, and the surface was dotted with things I couldn't yet name. Earl eased the boat forward, wiping his face shield with a rag. "It's a long week," he said. He's been diving since before I could swim. I've been doing this for 22 years, and he's not wrong. The first week after a hurricane is not about salvage. It's about reconnaissance and staying alive. We were there because the port authority needed a full hazmat assessment and a navigation-hazard survey before any commercial traffic could move. That's always the call. In the first week of a storm, you're not lifting boats or pulling containers. You are looking. You are mapping. You are putting your people into water that might be the dirtiest they've ever seen, and you are doing it because if you don't, someone else will, and they'll do it wrong.

The Water Is a Witch

Hurricane water is not regular seawater. It's a slurry of sewage, fuel, lawn chemicals, and the contents of a thousand garages. In the first week, visibility is usually less than half a meter. In places it's zero. You can't see your hand in front of the face plate. We run out a guide line from the boat to a fixed object—a piling, a tree, a wreck—and we use that as a spiderweb. Divers move along the line and work in pairs, one in and one out, with a tender who has been assigned nothing else. The current is the other problem. Storm surge doesn't flush out in a day. The tide swings are exaggerated for weeks. On a spring tide you can have four or five knots in a channel that should run one. That means you have to plan your dive windows carefully. We check the tables every hour, and if the window closes, we pull the divers out. It doesn't matter if they are twenty minutes from done. It matters that they get back.

The First Week Is Not a Salvage Job

You don't lift anything in the first week unless it's blocking a navigation channel. The insurance company wants to know where the missing boat sank, but they can wait. What we're doing is a systematic survey—sonar first, then divers where the sonar sees something. We mark each hazard with a small buoy. We tag each piece of debris with a GPS waypoint. By the end of the first day, the chart looks like a dot plot of everything we've seen. We record the state of any wreck we can approach. One thing people outside the trade don't understand: the survey is the hardest diving. You're not going to a known object. You're covering a grid in zero visibility, feeling along the bottom, sweeping in arcs with one hand on the line. Imagine trying to find a wallet in a washing machine full of mud and fish guts. That's what it's like. And you're doing it in a dry suit that's swelling and sticking with pressure, while the topside radio tells you the next storm is forming in the Atlantic.

The Gear Is Your Lifeline

In the first week, we don't dive in wetsuits and a pair of fins. We use full-face masks with voice comms so a diver can talk to the tender. Every diver gets a bailout bottle, and we mount a decompression chamber on the deck if we're going to be out more than a day. Tetanus shots are up to date. The LEPC - the local emergency planning committee - always asks about the protocol for contaminated-water dives. We use dry suits with heavy gloves, and we have a decon station on the boat: spray, bleach solution, clean rinse, and bins for the gear. You also have to think about season. In late August the water is coming off a summer of heat. That means thermoclines are sharp. You can go from 88 degrees at the surface to 65 at the bottom in twenty feet. The warm layer cuts visibility even more because the algae blooms are still going. And with the water this warm, there are jellyfish. They don't seem important until you have a diver with the bends and you're trying to decompress with a jellyfish sting on his neck.

The Season Keeps Screaming

People forget the season isn't over just because one storm made landfall. The worst thing you can do is be on a wreck in a channel when the next depression starts spinning up. We watch the National Hurricane Center like a hawk. If there's a chance of another storm in the next five days, we wrap up diving early and make sure the sonar data is safe. That's not cowardice; that's math. You can't dive in twenty-foot seas, and you can't leave a diver on a line when a boat's anchor is dragging. The first week also wears on you differently. The water has a smell that gets into your gear and your dreams. You see things you don't forget—a child's stroller in the roots of a palm, a car on its roof in a marina, a boat perched on a dock pilings three feet in the air. You direct the divers around them. You don't stop to mourn. You don't stop at all until the light is gone. Then you go back to a hotel room that smells like bleach and take a long look at the next day's forecast.

Frequently Asked Questions

How soon can divers go into the water after a hurricane? Usually on the second or third day, once the storm system has fully passed and the initial surge has receded. But 'can' doesn't mean 'should.' We spend the first day surveying from the surface and checking for obvious hazards like live wires, leaking fuel, and strong currents. If there's any sign of a gas leak or a sewage spill, we delay or put on heavy hazmat gear. What is the most dangerous thing a diver encounters in the first week? The water itself. Between zero visibility, strong currents, and the chance of contamination from fuels and chemicals, it's like diving in a sewer. The debris is also nasty—rusted rebar, fishing line, sharp metal edges on boats. That's why we use full-face masks with comms and have a spare diver ready on the boat at all times. Why not just use sonar and underwater drones instead of sending divers? Sonar and ROVs are tools, but they can't tell you everything. Sonar can miss a small but dangerous fragment, and an ROV can't feel or move through zero visibility in tight places. A diver with a gloved hand can identify a leaking valve on a chemical tank or find a torn hull that will leak oil. In the first week, we need eyes on the bottom, not just a picture from a sensor.