At a U.S. Coast Guard station on Tuesday, Peter Pilkington will begin to get the answers he has sought since his son died more than three years ago while working for a small Houston dive contractor.
He wants to know why Brian Pilkington, a healthy, 23-year-old commercial diver, suddenly died in March 1996 off Sabine Pass while inspecting an offshore oil rig in 28 feet of water.
He wants to know why the Coast Guard, the federal agency in charge of marine safety, conducted what he considers a shoddy investigation into his son's death. It was an inquiry in which no witnesses were interviewed or any piece of diving equipment examined or retained by officials, Pilkington said.
And he wants to know why two Coast Guard officers let the dive take place, even though they had cited the Cliff's Number 12 offshore rig, operated by a Houston-based drilling firm, for safety violations that day because a required predive safety inspection had not been completed.
"We have fought to get this hearing for the last three years," said Pilkington, a 51-year-old architect and building contractor from the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Wash. "It was unconscionable to me that . . . after this young man died . . . there was no investigation.
"Not a single witness was ever interviewed by the U.S. Coast Guard until three years and four days after the accident," said Pilkington, referring to interviews taken in advance of Tuesday's hearing.
Testimony from 10 to 15 witnesses is expected to begin Tuesday morning in Beaumont, where the U.S. Coast Guard is convening a formal board of investigation, revisiting the initial inquiry conducted after the young diver died on March 4, 1996.
Coast Guard officials say the decision to reopen the inquiry was the result of information provided by Pilkington, who has conducted a costly three-year campaign to find out what happened to his son.
Coast Guard officers in Port Arthur had determined, in a report issued 13 months after the accident, that Brian Pilkington had improperly attached an air hose, allowing water into his diving helmet, and that he panicked and drowned after becoming entangled on the rig.
But Pilkington said a poorly maintained air compressor failed near the end of his son's three-hour dive, cutting off his air supply.
Coast Guard officials did not examine the compressor, allowing the dive contractor to remove it. Employees of a Houston equipment dealer who examined the compressor told Pilkington it failed because a shop rag being used as an air filter was sucked into the machine.
Pilkington has filed complaints with state bar officials against the lawyers for the rig owner, Cliff Drilling Co. of Houston, claiming they concealed evidence and made up the story about his son disconnecting his air supply to limit their client's liability.
The attorneys did not return a call from the Chronicle.
In January 1998, his son's widow accepted a multimillion-dollar settlement in a civil suit she brought against the company and the contractor.
"We certainly will be looking into the Coast Guard's conduct as well," said Lt. Commander Tom Beistle, the Coast Guard officer who will conduct the proceedings.
"The purpose of the hearing is to investigate the facts underlying the casualty, to determine if any Coast Guard regulations were violated," said Beistle, adding that the inquiry will also determine "if Coast Guard (diving) regulations are appropriate and need to be amended to better promote marine safety."
During his private three-year inquiry, Pilkington said he not only learned the tragic and preventable circumstances of his son's death but the often hazardous working conditions facing commercial divers across the country.
He and others, including a nationwide commercial diver's trade group, say the Coast Guard has done a poor job of protecting divers despite having the legal tools - in two sets of federal safety regulations - to do so.
"They're not enforcing the regulations," said Frances Stepp, president of the National Association of Commercial Divers in Charlottesville, Va. "All the players in the industry agree on one thing - the enforcement is not being done. The Coast Guard is not going out and investigating these casualties and accidents like they ought to."
Critics charge the Coast Guard rarely takes action against commercial diving firms found to have violated federal safety regulations.
"My point is not to put anyone in jail," explained Pilkington. "But if the Coast Guard continues to let them violate the law without punishing them, what's to keep them from continuing to violate the law? Nothing! . . . They (divers) refer to the Coast Guard as the big dog with no teeth.
"The regulations are there. We're only asking them to enforce the existing regulations," he said. "We also think there ought to be a few more for backup divers, backup equipment and certification" of commercial divers.
Backup equipment is currently not required for commercial diving in less than 130 feet of water, but maybe could have saved Brian Pilkington's life.
Since the dive team did not have a scuba tank or extra air hose with them, those on board the rig spent a futile 20 minutes trying to splice together welding hoses to use in a rescue attempt, which failed.
In the end, a fellow diver simply held his breath, dived down and found Brian Pilkington's lifeless body. He was airlifted to a Port Arthur hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Pilkington contends that the Coast Guard's investigating officers never visited the accident scene, did not question any witnesses in person or take any sworn statements and refused to examine or secure any evidence. And when U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton of Washington inquired about the investigation, the Coast Guard claimed the compressor had been tested - and later issued a letter of apology about the mistake.
And it was only Monday that OSHA inspectors visited the offices of G&G Marine - the Houston dive company Brian Pilkington worked for - to examine the records on required maintenance and testing of the company's three air compressors currently being used.
In a sworn statement taken on May 19, conducted in Houston by Lt. Cdm. Beistle, company owner Danny Gilbert acknowledged he has never sent his three diving compressors for air quality testing, as required every six months by federal dive regulations.
Gilbert said he couldn't remember if the air compressor Brian Pilkington was using the day he died had been sent in for required testing.
"How about the three (compressors) that you've got now? Do you have air tests done on them routinely?" Beistle asked.
"No sir, we haven't had," Gilbert replied, explaining later his practice is to test compressors by sniffing the air. " . . . if it smells foul, you don't use it . . . if the air compressor is putting out pressure and the air smells good, I'll dive it," Gilbert said.
Asking if that was a suitable substitute to the required testing, Gilbert replied, "I don't know."
Gilbert did not return a call from the Chronicle.
The events of Brian Pilkington's case are all the more important because diving deaths are not isolated events.
"Of the 116 occupational diving fatalities reported to OSHA for 1989-1997 (13 per year), 49 (five per year) occurred among an estimated 3,000 full-time commercial divers," according to a June 1998 weekly mortality report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The average of five deaths per year corresponds to a rate of 180 deaths per 100,000 employed divers per year, which is 40 times the national average death rate for all workers."
Coast Guard officials in New Orleans said Tuesday that 27 divers had been killed and 28 had been injured from 1992 to December 1997 in the 8th Coast Guard District, which covers most of the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to the Florida panhandle and extends north to the Canadian border.
However, after first saying the casualties were the result of commercial diving, Coast Guard officials on Wednesday said they include both recreational and commercial diving accidents. And, Coast Guard officials in New Orleans said they could not readily determine from their own records how many of the 55 incidents, if any, resulted in sanctions against commercial diving contractors.
"The Coast Guard can't tell you about (commercial) diving deaths, they keep no statistical information, they have no idea about how many accidents have occurred. They have nothing, and OSHA doesn't either," said Stepp, the head of the commercial divers group.
Besides Brian Pilkington's death, there have been other young commercial divers killed, according to accident records obtained by Stepp.
In October 1997, 31-year-old Troy Elwood died two minutes into his first commercial dive 15 feet beneath a dive boat operated by Cal Dive International Inc., a large Houston-based commercial diving firm.
Coast Guard officials later found a company employee had fabricated records showing that maintenance had been performed on faulty valves on the dive boat's air compressors that allowed Elwood to breath a fatal amount of pure helium instead of compressed air, according to Coast Guard documents.
No action was taken against the company, Stepp said.
"This was blatant neglect," he said. "Somebody should be up on murder charges for this."
In November 1997, Pattison resident Jerry McHazlett, a 35-year-old commercial diver who was married with one son and expecting another, had a heart attack and died shortly after making a 200-foot-plus dive below an oil rig in waters offshore of Louisiana for Cal Dive.
Joe Walker, a Houston attorney who filed suit against the diving contractor, alleges that McHazlett was not medically fit to dive, that an inoperative hatch on the diving bell prevented co-workers from reaching him during the first crucial 20 minutes of the emergency, and that Cal Dive had no procedures to deal with this type of emergency.
"I think if the divers down there had a procedure, a plan, this guy's life could have been saved," Walker said. "But they didn't know what to do."
McHazlett's sudden death occurred when his wife, Tami, was expecting the couple's second child, John Jerry McHazlett III, born a year ago.
"I have two sons who will not know their dad, and he was a terrific person," Tami McHazlett said. "He had a lot to contribute, a lot more things to do in life, and I feel that he was just ripped away from us."
The young widow is angry, and said Cal Dive officials were not candid with her about the circumstances of her husband's death.
She had to hire a lawyer to collect the supplemental life insurance purchased by her husband after Cal Dive refused to pay, claiming her husband had not filled out an eligibility form.
"The feeling I got from the company was just basically `how is this going to impact our bottom line,' " said McHazlett, referring to a meeting with company executives a month after her husband's death.
"There was no remorse, there was no `This is not going to happen again.' They didn't take responsibility for anything."
New Orleans attorney Patrick Baynham, who is defending Cal Dive, called the suit frivolous and said McHazlett's autopsy indicated "he had 100 percent blockage in one artery and 95 percent blockage in the other."
"To say this is somehow related to Cal Dive procedures is absolutely ridiculous," said Baynham. The attorney said CPR was begun immediately on McHazlett by his co-diver, with only brief interruptions as the co-diver cleaned debris from the hatch so it would seal properly before the diving bell was brought to the surface.
Baynham, who has handled the majority of Cal Dive's legal work over the last five years, said the Houston diving firm is one of the world's largest and safest.
"Like all these diving companies, they have an extensive safety program. (And) Cal Dive has extensive training, both prior to going offshore and once someone is offshore," Baynham said.
Another fatal diving accident occurred in May 1997 when Brent Lewis, a 24-year-old diver, died after his air hose was severed as he blew silt from beneath the Lady of the Isle casino boat near Bossier City, La.
OSHA investigators found the water intakes on the underwater pump Lewis was operating were fitted with a makeshift rope guard, allowing his air hose to be sucked in and cut. The diving company, Cal Dive, contested OSHA's proposed $4,500 fine and paid a $2,250 penalty, according to Stepp's inquiry into the case.
"If you call the industry . . . and ask them can they tell how many deaths there have been in the last 10 years, they tell you they have one death a year. But we have documents that stipulate that is not so," said Stepp, who said she had obtained records from the Coast Guard of five commercial diving deaths in 1997 and two in 1996.
She was referring to the Association of Diving Contractors International, a Houston-based industry group formed in 1968 and representing 360 dive companies, the majority headquartered in the United States.
"We have a safe industry," insists Ross Saxon, the ADC's executive director since 1992. "We are going to have accidents and fatalities, but all we can do is do our damnedest to continue to reduce them. I think we have a hell of an excellent track record and it will get better."
Saxon said that in the 1960s and 1970s, 10 commercial divers were killed each year and others seriously injured, prompting the Coast Guard and OSHA to draft safety regulations with help from the ADC.
In the last decade, Saxon said, there were an average of 1.5 diving deaths per year among commercial divers working for ADC members.
"I can say in the last 14 months, as far as member companies of our association subject to U.S. regulation are concerned, we've not had a serious injury or a fatality that's been reported," Saxon said.
But Saxon said the Coast Guard's task of overseeing commercial diving operations is huge, and estimated there are perhaps 50 or 60 taking place each day in U.S. waters.
"Could the Coast Guard enforce better? Yes. Are they properly equipped to do so? Most probably not," Saxon said. "They are an agency of the government with a tremendously large area of responsibility, with budget restrictions and they are not trained in commercial diving.
"I think the Coast Guard must look to the industry to be self-regulating."
Houston attorney Walker, a commercial diver for 10 years before he went to law school, said the complexity of the commercial diving industry exceeds the Coast Guard's expertise.
"It's a very high burden to place on the Coast Guard, which does not have a deep diving division; they really don't have the facilities or the manpower," said Walker, who advocates the use of independent diving experts to investigate diving accidents.
Walker said he is preparing for an August trial in a negligence case where commercial diver Todd Baldridge, then 28, lost consciousness and suffered disabilities in a May 1996 accident during a 258-foot dive from an oil platform in Louisiana.
An open bottom diving bell, required by federal regulations on dives of this type, was not in place, said Walker, adding that Coast Guard investigators did not cite the violation in their report.
"I keep seeing the same kind of accidents, over and over," Walker said. "Maybe the only thing that will change that is making the insurance premiums go up enough where the company will be forced not to be dangerous."
Pilkington said he hopes the Coast Guard inquiry into his son's death will result in changes that will prevent more tragic deaths.
"It took me three years and probably $300,000 to get where we are right now," he said. "Initially, it was to try and clear my son's name - now it's to try and make a difference."
Source: http://www.chron.com...id=1999_3146970
The above article was published by the Houston Chronicle on Sunday, 20th June 1999! To date, no reforms have been made by the US Coast Guard to the out dated CFR's that govern the standards that US diving companies use to define the legal minimums for diving operations.
Since Brian Pilkington's death, according to the Incidents Diving list, there have been more than 100 fatalities in the US, and over 25 in the Gulf of Mexico. Still, nothing is being done by the USCG!
Shame on them!
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