The scariest part about being underwater when an earthquake hits is that you have no idea what you’ll find when you surface. It could be the apocalypse, but you have no way of knowing until you venture out of the water.
At least that was the biggest fear gripping British diver Charlie Cresswell, who was 22 meters deep at the USAT Liberty wreck in Tulamben, Bali, on a night dive when the 7.0 earthquake struck northern Lombok on Sunday.
The quake, with an epicenter just 98 kilometers from Cresswell’s position, would kill at least 381 people, injure hundreds more, and force thousands to evacuate.
The earthquake struck about just 10 minutes into Cresswell’s dive. The group couldn’t get back out of the water immediately because they were on a shore dive, meaning they hadn’t been dropped off by boat, but entered the water directly from the coast. They were approximately 100 meters from shore when the earthquake hit, Cresswell said.
“It could’ve been a 9.5 and could’ve destroyed the island for all we knew,” the 21-year-old Londoner told Coconuts Bali over the phone on Wednesday.
“We didn’t really know how bad it was, we couldn’t see the shore. We didn’t know if the earthquake had been in Amed or Lombok.”
While his mind immediately shot to the safety of his girlfriend, who had been waiting for him just off the beach in Amed, his immediate concerns were also with what was going on underwater.
“The ground didn’t move noticeably, but sand was thrown up massively and seriously reduced visibility.”
He was also worried about the incessant pressure building in his ears and whether or not the wreckage from the USAT Liberty was shifting dangerously close.
“When you dive, you feel the pressure building in your ears and they have to pop. It felt like this was happening a thousand times in my ears when the earthquake was happening and there was this constant buildup of pressure, but I couldn’t release it all.
“It wasn’t painful, but was quite scary. I’d never experienced anything like that at all.”
Cresswell was in a group with three others, including Sven, a guide from Amed-based Fab Dive, as well as a German diver he didn’t catch the name of, and Amy, the dive partner assigned to him before they went out.
Even though the four were physically quite close together when the earthquake hit, not everyone immediately understood what was going on.
“My dive buddy was panicking a bit; she was trying to pop up to the surface,” Cresswell said, explaining that Amy didn’t realize it was an earthquake messing with the pressure in her ears.
“She thought it was just happening to her, so she was trying to bolt to the surface. I had to pull her down,” he said.
Ascending too quickly while diving can lead to the formation of bubbles in the body and can result in “the bends,” or decompression sickness, which is fatal in rare cases.
Within two minutes of the quake hitting, Cresswell had burned through the amount of oxygen he’d usually use in 15 minutes.
“I was straining a little bit to hold (Amy) down, make sure everyone was alright, and also trying to move us away a little bit from the Liberty in case that shifted or slid down at all,” he said.
“I was just choking in the oxygen, rather than in a normal dive, where you would keep it steady.”
Ultimately, what was supposed to be a 40-45 minute dive exploring the wreckage of the USAT Liberty, an American cargo ship torpedoed by the Japanese during WWII, was ended at 30 minutes.
Just minutes after making it to shore, locals told the dive group that there was a tsunami warning so they rushed 100 meters up a hill with what felt like the entire rest of the town until the warning was called off about 20 minutes after they got there.
Several days later, Cresswell says his ears are now back to normal, and in fact is diving again. Having cancelled his plans to go to the Gilis, which have been evacuated, he’s instead exploring Nusa Lembongan underwater, where he’d gone on two dives the morning he spoke to Coconuts.
The Brit’s earned a fair bit of attention since posting his dive log to Reddit, which he told us denotes a depth of 24 meters, as that was the deepest point of the dive.
One question that’s provoke considerable curiosity was whether or not the fish in his vicinity did anything odd in response to the earthquake, or if they seemed like they could sense it coming. Understandably, it wasn’t something he was taking much note of under the circumstances.
“Many people on there have asked me what was going on with the fish, but to be honest, I really wasn’t focusing on them,” Cresswell said.
“Our divemaster Sven, however, did say there seemed be a lot of fish hiding when we first got in.”
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