Diver missed decompression stop coming up

The latest person to die diving to wrecks off Long Island had thousands of dives under his belt, yet missed a decompression stop en route to the surface -- a sign of an emergency, police and dive experts said Friday.

The diver, Timothy John Barrow, 64, of Reading, Pa., was the second person to die in five days diving off the John Jack, which is based in Montauk for the summer.

Barrow died Thursday after surfacing in distress from the wreck of the Norness, a tanker sunk during World War II.

On Sunday, Michael A. LaPrade, 27, of Gardena, Calif., died on the wreck of the Italian liner Andrea Doria. He was the 16th person to die diving to that wreck.

The East Hampton Town Police Department, the lead agency in the investigation, is awaiting autopsy results on Barrow and LaPrade from the Suffolk County medical examiner's office. That may take weeks, perhaps months, Chief Edward V. Ecker Jr. said.

There were "no obvious signs" of equipment failure or empty dive tanks in Barrow's or LaPrade's cases, Ecker said.

He said Barrow "was a very, very experienced diver" using state-of-the-art equipment who'd "had many dives under similar situations, dangerous situations."

"The only thing that was strange about it was that, being such an experienced diver, he didn't stop at his required decompression stop," Ecker said. "That indicates something must have gone wrong, that he had some sort of emergency and had to get out."

Bill Pfeiffer of Nesconset, president of the Long Island Divers Association, echoed Ecker's comments. "That he came to the surface without performing decompression, considering his level of experience, would indicate that he was experiencing some kind of extraordinary difficulty," Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer said Barrow was "an avid technical diver. He only dives deep wrecks."

Barrow, whom he had met, often chartered the John Jack for deeper dives such as the ocean liner Andrea Doria and the German U-boat 869 off the New Jersey coast, Pfeiffer said.

"He had the training and the equipment to do so," said Pfeiffer, an experienced wreck diver himself.

Pfeiffer said Barrow was apparently using a rebreather, which removes carbon dioxide from a diver's breathing mix so it can be reused, rather than using scuba tanks of mixed gases and exhausting the used gas into the water.

He said rebreather divers are trained to carry bailout systems for breathing during emergency ascents."Even if the rebreather had failed at 200 feet, he would still have gas in another bottle on his side that he could simply switch over to and have adequate gas to get to the surface safely," Pfeiffer said.