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Navy Salvage & Diving Supervisor Notes Learning Curve

By JOHN C. MARCARIO, Assistant Editor

Keeping stakeholders within the Navy current on his team's capabilities is his biggest obstacle, said Capt. Richard Hooper, supervisor of Salvage and Diving.

"When they are confronted with a problem, we don't want them to default to an easy solution, like putting a ship in the drydock or that they don't default to 'oh, we can't do that because it's impossible because we lost an object at many thousands of feet of sea water,'" Hooper told a gathering on the exhibition floor March 20 at Sea-Air-Space.

The team's core missions, according to Hooper, is ship salvage, towing, heavy lifting, undersea search and rescue, oil spill response, underwater ship repair and diving certification.

Some of its biggest accomplishments have been its response during hurricanes Katrina and Rita; recovery operations after TWA flight 800 exploded in mid-air over the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, N.Y., in 1996, killing all 230 passengers on board; assisting after the Exxon Valdez spill; and wreck removal surveys in Um Qasr, Iraq.

Ship salvage is the team's main task, but ship repair is the "bread and butter work they do everyday with the Navy," said Hooper.

Hooper took command as supervisor of Salvage & Diving in September 2006.