
DATE: Friday, September 19, 1997            TAG: 9709190963

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  153 lines

HAITI WAS A HARSH JOB FOR NAVY DIVERS COMMANDER CHEERS THOSE WHO RETRIEVED BODIES OF FERRY VICTIMS

Seventeen years as a Navy diver had steeled Cmdr. Chris Murray for practically any challenge under the sea. But no amount of training could have prepared Murray and his Hampton Roads-based team of divers for the setting they walked into last week on a beach in Haiti.

Detachment Alpha from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2 had just arrived in the coastal town of Montrouis. Its job: to recover the bodies of victims of the ferry Pride of Gonave, which had sunk 300 feet offshore Sept. 8.

Murray's plan was to dive from the nearby beach. That, however, was before he saw the place: ``There were no less than a thousand locals, quite angry, quite upset, quite vocal,'' he recalled. ``They were wailing, showing grief.'' There was talk of bad voodoo, and fury at the Haitian government for not responding faster to the accident.

This, Murray quickly decided, was not a suitable base from which to plan a level-headed operation.

What unfolded over the next several days was one of the more bizarre and courageous episodes in the history of the dive unit based at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base.

The operation ended Monday with the recovery of the last of the missing bodies. Murray, who is now accompanying his unit's detachment back to Little Creek aboard the salvage ship Grasp, described the events in an interview from the ship this week.

``It was tough,'' Murray said. ``No other job I've been involved in compares to this one.''

The commander became aware that the team might be Haiti-bound within a day of the accident. The three-story ferry had sunk on its 10th day of service in Haiti, reportedly after the captain lowered anchor and many passengers hurried to one side to get off, flipping the boat. Doors in the decks below were locked. There were no life jackets, survivors said.

About 170 people are now estimated to have drowned; 50 survived. U.S. Coast Guard officials said the boat had been licensed in Miami to carry 80 passengers. Haitian authorities had approved it to hold up to 300.

The Little Creek-based detachment and its 15 divers were formally assigned to the recovery operation last Wednesday. They were joined by two communications specialists from explosive ordnance disposal units at Little Creek and Fort Story, and five Navy divers based in Puerto Rico.

Arriving in Haiti on an Air Force C-141, the Hampton Roads team met with representatives of a team of 22 Canadian recreational divers who, using scuba gear, had already recovered 79 bodies from the wreck.

``They did a tremendous job with what they had, went beyond the limits, really,'' Murray said. ``It was quite heroic. . . . They gave us drawings and did a debrief for us that just saved us a lot of time.''

Initially, the Navy divers used scuba gear, too. With the beach out of the question as a diving platform, they'd set up aboard the Florida-based Coast Guard cutter Confidence.

The ferry was sitting upright 120 feet below the surface. But its bow was pointed down a steep slope and it was listing to starboard. To secure it, the divers ran a 5-inch-thick nylon line to shore and hooked it into a steel rope that they'd looped several times around a mango tree.

Murray said the divers videotaped the ferry extensively because they would need as much information as possible before beginning the more complicated job of using helmets and surface-supplied air to go into the ship's deepest corners, where most of the remaining bodies were located.

But he soon was made aware of another reality. Haitian President Rene Preval, whose government was facing sharp criticism for its handling of the ferry accident, was anxious to see the remaining bodies recovered as quickly as possible.

News reports noted that in Haiti's voodoo religion, it is important to recover bodies and give them last rites so that the spirits can find final rest. And last Thursday, The Associated Press reported, grieving residents of one Haitian community vented their rage by burning the rival ferry of a man they claimed used voodoo to hex the Pride of Gonave.

That day, a meeting convened aboard the Confidence involving Preval, the president's wife and several other Haitian officials. At Preval's request, relatives of some of the drowning victims were brought aboard, along with one survivor of the accident.

As the citizens spoke more and more heatedly, Preval's wife, who was barefoot, translated their words into English for Murray. ``It got to where they were quite angry,'' he said, ``and the president said, `We must do something, we must do more.'

``So I went back to my divers and said, `Hey, this is important. If there are some bodies you can free without exceeding our normal safety regulations, you need to bring up some victims.' ''

Over the next several hours, he said, the scuba divers recovered seven bodies. It was a start, but what the crew really needed was a platform where they could set up using surface-supplied air.

That arrived Saturday from Panama in the form of an Army utility landing craft. ``The master of the vessel, an Army chief warrant officer, was an unbelievable ship handler,'' Murray said. ``Trying to get anchors to really take a bite on that slope at that depth was a pretty good challenge in itself. But he put his ship exactly where we wanted it in a three-point moor.''

That done, the trickier job of diving with air hoses and helmets began. Sunday morning, the divers walked into the water off the bow ramp of the LCU and descended to the bowels of the ferry. Thus began a sunup-to-sunset effort that day and Monday.

What they found deep inside the ferry was unsettling beyond description. ``You'd go into a compartment and it was just mass bodies,'' Murray said. One by one, ``you had to take them through multiple hatches to get them out. It was physically tiring, very hard.''

Events on the beach were upsetting in a different way. The Haitian coast guard dragged the bodies to shore, where they lay until an ambulance could take them to a makeshift morgue. Later, as the bodies multiplied, Murray saw them tossed into what appeared to be a dump truck and hauled away.

At one point, he said, a rock-throwing fight erupted, apparently after police stopped a man from approaching the body of a drowned relative.

On the other hand, while he was ashore during news interviews, ``I had a couple of local villagers come up and talk, and they were thankful for us being there,'' he said. ``With that, I felt like we were really making a difference.''

The operation proved that the armed services can work well together, Murray said. ``We flew down with the Air Force. The Coast Guard bedded us down. We ended up diving off an Army LCU, and the Marines provided us security. . . . It was a joint job in its truest sense.''

And it demonstrated the skills of his divers. Coming up from the ferry, they had 3 1/2 minutes to get out of their gear, go through several stages of decontamination and get properly situated in a decompression chamber. ``We were able to do it in less than 2 1/2,'' he said. ``It was just such a team effort and the guys were just so good. It was a very close, high-morale effort.''

Tuesday morning, after recovering the last of 72 bodies they'd extricated, the Navy divers joined in a brief memorial ceremony over the sunken ferry. Standing in formation on the bow ramp of the LCU alongside a couple of the Canadian divers, they dropped a wreath into the water.

``It brought a sense of closure to the people and my divers and the other people who supported us,'' Murray said.

The divers boarded the Grasp on Wednesday and are expected back at Little Creek within the next few days.

``I think it has turned out to be a positive,'' Murray said of the voyage home. ``I think it will be good to just talk among ourselves, so when we get back, we can say, `Hey, it's over, we've done it.' We'll have a couple of days to unwind.''

One image will be hard for Murray to forget, however. That was looking down the beach from his diving platform to a place where more passenger ferries were loading.

``They would load and they would continue to load - what we would say was excessively,'' Murray said. ``And there we were: diving and bringing up bodies.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

``A sense of closure'': After recovering 72 bodies from the sunken

ferry, Navy divers from Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base joined in

a ceremony to drop a wreath over the wreck.

ASSOCIATED PRESS photo

Navy divers prepare to dive into the wreck of the ferry. Cmdr. Chris

Murray, from Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, tells of a job rife

with underwater risks and from mourners angry and wanting to get

relatives' bodies right away.

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