the diver speaks –

The tragedy of the Bayesian, the super-sailing ship that sank off the coast of Palermo due to a “downburst”, continues to dominate the news at the end of August. Investigators are at work. The first certainties arrived after five days and were presented at the press conference organized by the prosecutor’s office: “The sailing ship sank by the stern in a very short time”, confirmed the deputy prosecutor Raffaele Cammarano. “Five of the six victims were found in a cabin on the left side, and this suggests that they tried to survive by breathing every last centimeter of air, they were looking for oxygen bubbles to survive”, he added. Meanwhile, attention is growing on the story and the first reconstructions are emerging that are based on the story offered by the survivors of the shipwreck. Also important are the statements released to the Corriere della Sera by the diver and national coordinator of the Speleo-Submarine Task Force of the Fire Department Giuseppe Frison.

“I have the flashlight on my head, the Ariadne’s thread tied to my side and obviously I have air. I go in. I find myself in front of all kinds of floating material. I have to be careful that the door doesn’t close behind me so I don’t get trapped. All this in the dark, in very narrow spaces. I have the flashlight, of course. But in those conditions it’s like driving a car in fog: if you turn on the headlights you see worse, it creates confusion”, the expert said. The dives didn’t last more than ten or twelve minutes to “avoid the martini effect”, that is, the effect of nitrogen which “no longer makes you very lucid”, he explained. “You have to imagine a house overturned and full of water. You no longer have any points of reference”, continued Frison, reconstructing for readers what he remembers of the operations conducted. The diver also participated in the Concordia dives. “There were 7-8 of us in all of Italy doing something like this. I still have in my ears the unpleasant memory of the creaking sounds we heard while we were looking for the bodies between the ship and the rock”, he concluded.