When Joe Borho and Jim Couser go to work, they know it’ll be wet and possibly very cold and muddy. It is usually also quite dangerous, requiring that they be totally focused and concentrated throughout each job. Jim and Joe work for Siemens Water Technologies as dive service crew supervisors. The job of these veteran divers is to make sure that Siemens' underwater equipment is maintained and repaired so that customers experiences as little down-time as possible.
Siemens' divers are specialized in what are called intake or traveling water screens. These screens are designed to remove trash and large pieces of debris (typically greater than ¼ inch) from rivers, lakes, oceans or water basins. The traveling water screens are vertical conveyor machines partially submerged in water. The equipment is put to work in difficult environments and has to cope with mechanical wear, corrosion and damage.
Siemens’ intake screens can be found in, among other facilities, desalination plants, refineries, municipal potable water plants or electric power generating plants.
Forming the Division
The maintenance of Siemens’ underwater equipment used to be outsourced to external diving crews, but with poor results. Ken DeCoursey, Service Manager for Siemens Intake Products, recalls the problems Siemens and its customers faced with the external crews: “The sub-contracted crews had low incentive to provide full customer satisfaction. They knew that we were depending on their service no matter how they performed because there are so few service providers in this field. We felt that they were not totally loyal and sometimes put our request at the bottom of the list for another job. This wasn’t a situation we could be satisfied with. On top of everything, they were quite expensive and these costs were making us uncompetitive.”
In May 2005, Siemens established an intake dive crew within Siemens Water Technologies based in Madison, IN. Demand was high and the newly-formed division performed their first service project that same month. Demand was so high, in fact, that a second dive crew was added in March of 2006, 1-1/2 years ahead of schedule.
Teams of Three
The crews operate in teams of three, with one or two members heading underwater while a tender, who is connected to the divers via cable, remains on the surface and communicates with his colleagues below the surface via intercom. The divers, when kitted up, look like they might have walked straight from the set of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, only with much more hi-tech equipment. Images captured by the high-resolution cameras on the divers’ helmets, for example, often provide the tender with better visibility than the divers themselves have, enabling him to provide them with additional information about their environment.
“Sometimes the water is so muddy that you can’t see your hand in front of your face, even with strong flashlights,” says Jim Couser, who has been with Siemens since 2005. When asked how the divers can perform in such extreme conditions, he gives a simple answer: “By knowing your equipment really well.”
Preparedness
But, despite his modesty, it takes more than the knowledge of equipment to do this job. Being a certified commercial diver requires a specific kind of mental and physical preparedness. Jim’s and Joe’s crews sometimes climb into murky lakes, rivers or even narrow wells that most of us wouldn’t even dream of dipping our toes into. Not everyone is cut out could do this work.
In fact, it takes nine months of training for a qualified diver to progress to becoming a certified commercial diver, and to be accepted as a trainee requires passing stringent physical examinations to make sure the applicant's body is up to coping with the immense strains of the job. Of course, an engineering background is also necessary, so that the diver can maintain and repair the equipment. But the applicant also has to be mentally prepared to submerge into up to 140 feet of sometimes extremely unwelcoming water to pull off some often very complicated feats of engineering. Alongside the physical pressures of deep water, the mental pressures of this demanding job also mean that a good sense of humor is a pretty important part of each diver's toolkit too.
Not All Dirty
While most of the work is cold and unpleasant, sometimes the crews get to dive in near-perfect conditions. Joe recalls one particular job that saw the team working in Indonesia, a diver’s paradise: “Some people pay a lot of money to go diving there, yet we got to go dive there for work. That was neat,” says Joe.
Fluid Teamwork
Ken DeCoursey relished setting up the division and himself diving into an unfamiliar environment: “I really enjoyed putting the dive teams together. Siemens Water Technologies never had this type of service offering in the past, and I had to learn the trade of commercial diving pretty much from scratch. For example, I had to find out what equipment we needed to order before I could begin to outfit and hire our teams. Each job is a little different, which is one of the things that make this job so exciting.”
What Joe Borho likes most about his job is meeting new people all over the world. “I became a diver because I have always loved the water and traveling. As for teamwork, on a dive crew we are family. We spend so much time together that we get to the point that we know and can anticipate each other's thoughts and actions.” It is that kind of fluid team work that means they know they can trust each other with their lives whenever they once again head down into the murky depths.