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Belize
Aggressor Passengers (RDC)
Robert Salvatori
A
surviving member of the Richmond Dive Club remembers the storm, and his
friends.
“The Boat Started Disintegrating”
Richmond Style Weekly
Interviewed by Laura Davis
10/15/01 3:28:26 PM
Software consultant Robert Salvatori, 41, is a member of Richmond Dive
Club. He was on a dive trip in Belize when Hurricane Iris struck last
week. Seventeen of the club’s divers and two crew members died.
I
was on the Belize Aggressor. We were behind [the Wave Dancer], and they
were in front of us at this dock. We did the normal preparation and got
everyone ready.
When the storm hit, we decided we’d all go
down below. So we all went down below and put on our life jackets and
shoes and, you know, all our survival gear. That’s when we lost contact
of the other boat — when we couldn’t see them anymore due to we didn’t
have any windows out in front of us anymore.
The wind picked
up — what they say was 140 miles an hour with gusts to about 180. … It
picked up speed and kept picking up. It hit real hard and then it sort
of died out afterwards.
The boat started disintegrating around
us. We could hear things just ripping open. There were a lot of reports
that our boat wasn’t damaged, but it really was. Water was pouring in
above us in the front part of the boat. We felt something from the
front — it turned out later to be the Wave Dancer — slammed into our
bow and put a hole up in there and tore us up in the front as they
slung back and forth, too. We stayed down there for a long time and the
wind kept building and the boat kept groaning more and more.
Then
there was this very intense pressure change. I don’t know how to
describe it. It was like a vacuum, like someone just opened up a bottle
and your ears just popped open. One of my ears is still closed due to
it. I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes before and I’ve never had the
pressure change remotely like this. So evidently we were sort of near
the eye, like within 12 miles of it. We were coming close to the eye
and things started to settle down a little bit.
The captain
asked another instructor who was on the boat to come down and get me,
but to be quiet because we didn’t want to have general panic on our
boat. We went upstairs, and that’s when we were told that the Wave
Dancer had capsized. Our crew knew that but the passengers didn’t —
they stayed below. However, the winds were still probably about 80, 90
miles an hour at this time. So we were trying to get ready to try and
do a rescue effort.
We could see the boat right near us upside
down. So we did everything we could within our abilities to start
preparing. We’re alive today because of our captain and crew, because
they jumped on it. We were fortunate to get … a secured docking and to
prepare our boat and our crew.
So when the storm hit, we all
had life jackets on. We all had shoes because we knew there’d be a lot
of glass in the area. We all had lights so that if we went in the water
we’d be able to be found.
So we went outside; we went to go
help the other boat. When we got over there, they started bringing
people over. Glenn Prillaman was the first person over. I immediately
yelled for my wife who’s a nurse. She started performing CPR on Glenn
Prillaman. He evidently expired a while before. They performed CPR, we
got oxygen out on him; we tried everything.
The people in our
boat at this point are starting to realize what’s going on. The storm
is lightening up a little bit. We think we’re in the eye, so we start
trying to give comfort to those people, trying to get them warm
clothes, towels. They were pretty, as you can imagine, keyed up. We
started doing that and our guy took our boat over there. We had a
dinghy. A crew member named Steven took that over there and he brought
some people back. Unfortunately, from that point on, they were all
expired. We didn’t know that. At this time we thought there was a lot
of hope.
We sent our boat over there a second time, and the
engine conked out and he went to pull on the cord and the cord broke.
So we had to leave the boat there. So Steven and our crew member
grabbed somebody he could find and swam them across the water.
[Dive
club member] Dave Mowrer focused on the boat. He punched out windows
and was reaching in there where he could but it was very dangerous,
because you couldn’t see anything, because there was diesel fuel and
oil everywhere. It was very slippery. He kept falling down on the boat
and was cut up pretty bad. But he kept trying … trying to hear
anything, any noise.
I saw bodies in the mangroves … so I
started pulling people out of there. People would come by with little
boats shuttling back and forth. I would help try and get the bodies up
on these boats to go back. All the bodies seemed to be in the general
area of the boat. So we just kept trying to work around the boat to do
as much as we could do. The next day the British army showed up and
they took over for us.
I lost some really good friends on that
boat — my dive buddies, people I’d gone through all my classes with. We
were pretty much a real tightknit group. Not only did we have monthly
meeting, but we saw each other every week — a lot of us. A lot of us
dove two or three times a week … together. We camped together. You
know, just like the week before we all got out, a bunch of us, to
dinner.
I’m personally meeting with a son of my buddy. He lost
his mother and father in the event, and I want to go talk to him a
little bit about what happened and kind of let him know his dad was
enjoying himself beforehand.
The club will keep going on. It’s
all about camaraderie and sharing and enjoying life, embracing life.
That’s the key. I plan on diving as soon as possible.
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