The following is simply a lighthearted dramatization of a scuba gear related incident that really in a small community in Canadian Northwest Territories. Fortunately, no lives were lost: only some gear that was not diving equipment went missing underwater, along with some dignity.
“Ooooooh!” Earnest voiced his surprise on opening the black suitcase that had arrived by freight at the fire department where he was a volunteer. Beside him, his brother Frances in both the familial sense and in the fraternal one of the emergency service whistled his pleasure. Joseph didn’t make a noise but his heart palpitated from excitement when the opened box showed a bright yellow fiberglass wrapped air tank of a set of scuba gear: he didn’t notice that ‘u’ was missing.
They didn’t get many fires because the community was so small. The last two had been training exercises and the real one previously was only a fish-smoking tent. The guys had mounted a picture of that one on the training room wall because the total loss of the tent had been one of the biggest fires here – ever.
None of the men thought about the scuba gear for several days. Joseph, the fire chief, ha learned that a guy from the Territorial Fire Marshal’s office would arrive in a few weeks, to show them how to use it but really, it hadn’t looked all that complicated. Then Friday night rolled around and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a special: The Undersea World of Jacque Cousteau. Joseph knew the others would’ve seen the underwater adventures the French men in scuba equipment gear were having because the CBC was the only available television channel. When the special ended, Joseph rushed to the fire hall and as expected, Earnest and Frances were already there and trying out the scuba gear.
“Remember the snowmobile Frances lost in the spring?” Earnest asked. His brother had parked his sled on the frozen Mackenzie River but hadn’t managed to collect it before the ice broke up. All three had watched, but only two of them were laughing, when the machine had slid off a chunk of broken ice and disappeared underwater.
“Tomorrow,” Joseph answered with an eager grin, “we can go find it in our new diving equipment.”
Out they went, three firefighters in a boat and they dropped anchor at the place where they remembered the snowmobile going underwater. They each put on their scuba gear, as they had practiced last night and as they’d seen the frogmen on TV doing. Then as Earnest and Frances rolled backwards off the sides of the boat, the fire chief had a belated thought. ‘Why would the fire marshal’s office send us out scuba gear?’ But the idea surfaced just too late. The two brothers were already surfacing and sputtering as their facemasks filled with murky river water, when Joseph hit the drink.
Two of the three expensive sets were lost, likely coming to rest beside the never-to-be-found sled. A firefighter’s SCBA isn’t designed for or usable as scuba gear. This small scuba gear story is truth and not fiction. Only the names were changed to protect the sheepishly guilty.
