A
family outing took a bizarre turn for the worse when scuba diver Christopher Le
Cun found himself sucked into the intake pipe of a nuclear plant.
While
on a dive trip with his family and friends off Port St Lucie in South Florida,
Le Cun spotted some shadows underwater and dove in with a friend to take a
look. While underwater, he found himself caught in a current, and then he was
suddenly sucked into the intake pipe.
“When I was first sucked
into the pipe, it was so turbulent it was unbelievable. […] I had to hang onto
my mask. It was 20-30 seconds before I got my bearings.”
For
five minutes, Le Cun was violently tossed about inside the intake pipe,
travelling as much as 350 metres. During the time, he contemplated taking off
his mask, as he imagined the turbines at the end of the pipe. However, he
thought about his family, and changed his mind.
Suddenly,
he saw a light in the distance, as if someone lit a match. “Then all of the sudden,
it was on me. It spit me out into the sunlight into this canal and there were
tons of fish around.”
Le
Cun ended up in a pond at the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant.
A
worker there said that Le Cun had been lucky, as they would have left for the
day five minutes later. Using the worker's mobile phone, Le Cun called his wife
who was still on the dive boat. However, he could not reach her, as she was
calling the coast guard and other authorities for help.
Having
survived the ordeal, Le Cun is filing a lawsuit against Florida Power &
Light Co., the operator of the power plant, for not properly labelling the
intake pipe and placing his life in danger.
A
spokesman for the plant refutes this, saying that “there is an eight-foot buoy floating at the point
of the intake piping, which has been in place since the plant opened, and
states that people should stay 100 feet away. There are three intake pipes,
which extend for a quarter mile along the floor of the ocean, and the one that
the diver swam into is 16 feet in diameter with a protective cap.”
While
Le Cun agrees that there had been a buoy (the dive boat had actually been tied
to it), he said there was no notice telling people to keep away. As for the
protective cap, he said that “that thing is not designed to keep anybody or anything
out.”
Actually,
this is the second time a diver had been sucked into the intake pipe. The first
incident occurred in 1989, to diver William Lamm, who described the experience:
“I thought I was dead. It
was darker than any dark I have ever seen. I tumbled and bounced all over the
sides of the pipe.”
As
for Le Cun, the incident has left him with emotional scars. He described diving
as “something I've always
enjoyed with my family and friends, but I've only been in the water once since
it happened and I didn't enjoy it. Maybe someday I'll do it again.”
Mares
9th March 2016
