Thats a damning report.
Lots of complacency, on everyone's part including the divers, management, Safety, and policy.
It's 2007, almost 2008. There are better methods of communicating with divers than by banging on something with a firehoe, particularly when non-tethered divers are being used for essentially commercial diving objectives.
Why wouldn't you shut down Unit 5 with divers in the water? Huge issue here.
And the "Safety Officer" who was also the "Safety Diver" - Second huge issue. He should have been suited up and on-site, and with full gear at hand, rather than being incommunicado, somewhere that he needed to "drive to the scene", and then discover upon his arrival that he did not have all the gear necessary to function as a safety diver. (Think ice diving - with tenders maintaining contact with tethered divers, and a safety diver on standby for each dive...)
Essentially, the entire dive plan was based on complacency and a faith that nothing would go wrong that the team couldn't handle. The "What, Me Worry?" approach to dive planning.
There was no means for divers to communicate with the tender (which is why you have a tender in the first place), there was nothing the tender could do to "tend to" the needs of the divers during the dive, and there was no safety diver on deck who could be deployed in the event that something went wrong with the dive. (Which was at least a plausible scenario to foresee - because the pumps were allowed to continue running in Unit 5 while the divers were inspecting the grating in front of the other units. A completely foreseeable scenario would involve the divers mistaking one grate for another and getting pinned by the suction of the pumps.) So...once a disaster occurred, there was basically nothing that could be done about it in a timely enough manner to assist the trapped divers (except to bang on an iron grating with a hoe........).
What a horrendous chain of failures to plan, consider potential problems, and have the means at hand to mitigate those problems.
