Everyone knew Hurricane Iris was coming. But the Americans aboard the chartered dive boat Wave Dancer didn't have to worry--that was the captain's job. While Belize residents were preparing for the storm, the divers continued exploring the country's world-class reefs. When Iris finally struck, it would claim 20 lives in that impoverished country--all of them aboard Wave Dancer.Leaning against the rail of Wave Dancer, Glenn Prillaman and Dave DeBarger could feel the thrum of the ship's engines under their bare feet. It was late afternoon, October 6, 2001, and they had been anticipating this moment for a year. The sun was hot, the air balmy. From their perch at the rail, the two best friends could smell the acrid smoke of Belize City as they looked out over swaying palm trees and a jumble of corrugated roofs. Back home in Richmond, Virginia, it was just another fall Saturday. But as Wave Dancer edged away from the long wooden dock, nothing but blue water and sky stretched before them. The president of the Richmond Dive Club, Prillaman, 48, lived for scuba diving, and Belize is one of those exotic places that captures the imagination of every diver--Lighthouse Reef, the Blue Hole, water as clear as Perrier. The club had bought all 20 berths on Wave Dancer, a live-aboard vessel operated by Florida-based Peter Hughes Diving, Inc., one of the world's top dive charter operators. Ten more club members were aboard the Belize Aggressor III, a similar boat owned by another company. And now both groups were heading out to the longest barrier reef system in the Western Hemisphere for a week of good living. DeBarger and Prillaman were the core of the three-year-old club. They lived a mile and a half from each other, and they'd dived together nearly 90 times. DeBarger was 57; when his wife died of cancer, it was Prillaman who'd coaxed him back from despair. Now, here they were at last, and DeBarger and Prillaman sensed they'd soon have stories to tell. They knew a storm was boiling somewhere far out in the Caribbean. In fact, the cyclone was becoming a tightly wound killer named Iris. It was 135 miles east-southeast of Jamaica, blowing west at 18 miles an hour. Two days later, Iris would hit Belize dead-on, zeroing in on the tiny harbor where Wave Dance would attempt to find refuge. News reports made it sound simple: Iris hit; Wave Dancer flipped. It was a freak accident, the kind of thing you couldn't blame on anyone. "The boat was securely tied up, the captain was competent," Peter Hughes says. "We did everything we should have done." But interviews with more than 23 survivors, eyewitnesses, and crew members reveal a more complex story. The wreck of the Wave Dancer was not a single, sudden event but a cascading series of errors, a chain of missed opportunities on the part of both the ship's captain and the divers themselves. When events brought the dive club members face to face with the real Belize, they weren't prepared for the choices they had to make. They confused the comfort of their ship with safety from the storm and relied on the assurances of their captain instead of on their own common sense. The resulting disaster left orphaned children, a trail of bitterness and blame, and 23 lawsuits in its wake. Even today, long after the dead have been buried, and as the International Merchant Marine Registry of Belize prepares to release its report on the accident, one stark fact remains: Iris tore into the heart of Belize, destroying thousands of homes and causing millions of dollars of damage, but the only people it killed in that impoverished country were the Americans and crew aboard the Wave Dancer. As the blue-and-white vessel motored toward Lighthouse Reef, 50 miles southeast of Belize City, Prillaman and his friends explored their new home. A hundred twenty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, Wave Dancer had four decks, a spacious salon of burnished wood with a full bar, and ten double staterooms, each with its own TV, picture window, and bathroom. There were to be five dives a day and a gracious staff to attend to the passengers' every need. For a week, Prillaman could feel like Donald Trump. But the ship was no millionaire's playground. Glenn Prillaman was a fun-loving real-estate agent; Dave DeBarger, the club's vice-president, worked for the Richmond public television station. They and their friends were middle-class citizens who sought a modest adventure on the fringes of a wild country. Wave Dancer itself was a tightly run business. To fill the eight ships he operated around the globe, Hughes kept prices low. Seven nights in Wave Dancer's most expensive state-room cost just $1895, including meals, drinks, and dives. Its captain, Philip Martin, 33, was relatively inexperienced: Wave Dancer was the New Zealand native's first command in Belize. And, as with many such vessels, the ship itself was flagged in Belize, exempting it from stringent U.S. Coast Guard inspections. Chris Young, a former captain of the ship, says that Hughes made a number of modifications to Wave Dancer that put passenger comfort ahead of safety. In some places, the vessel's watertight hatches were removed and replaced with doors purchased at Home Depot. "They were just normal household doors and not watertight at all," says Young. (There were no changes made to the vessel that would compromise the vessel's safety," responds Hughes, who describes Young as a disgruntled ex-employee.) As Wave Dancer closed in on Lighthouse Reef, its fax spit out the latest weather report. No problem, DeBarger remembers Martin saying. Iris is tracking northwest, and we're heading south. If the captain wasn't going to worry about a far-off storm, DeBarger figured, neither would he. The Belizean crew wasn't as confident. Belize's citizens are bottle-fed on hurricanes. Radio stations air regular public service announcements from the country's National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) detailing what to do when a hurricane strikes, and Belizeans take them seriously. As Prillaman and his pals relaxed on deck, Bart Stanley, the ship's wiry 29-year-old dive master, entered the bridge and read the latest forecast. Iris was south of Haiti, picking up strength, and marching west by northwest toward Cozumel, Mexico. Exactly where it would hit was anyone's guess. "Captain," Stanley said, "maybe we should go back to Belize City. If the storm comes, then we can get everybody off." "No," Stanley remembers Martin saying. "We'll monitor the weather and see what happens." (Martin, who returned to New Zealand following the accident, could not be reached for comment.) Near midnight, Wave Dancer tied up to a buoy at Lighthouse Reef. On Sunday, the 20 club members enjoyed a number of dives. Meanwhile, Eloisa Johnson, the boat's gregarious 31-year-old cook, monitored Iris's approach on the galley radio, along with her co-workers, housekeeper Brenda Wade and relief cook Angela Luk. The forecasts were unrelenting: "Iris is moving toward the west near 17 mph," stated the 9 a.m. forecast from the National Hurricane Center (NHC). "Maximum sustained winds are near 85 mph...Some strengthening is forecast during the next 24 hours...A hurricane watch may be required for portions of Belize later today." If the weather seemed strangely fine, there was a reason. As hurricanes go, Iris was extremely small, with hurricane-force winds extending only 25 miles from a center so compact that U.S. hurricane-hunting aircraft had trouble identifying its eye. That Sunday, up and down Belize, people began moving inland to higher ground. But Wave Dancer simply shifted to a new mooring nearby. Captain Martin brought up the storm that evening at dinner, recalls dive club member Rick Patterson. "The captain said it was nothing to be concerned about, but the storm had drifted south," he says. If the weather held, Martin added, they might be able to get in a morning dive at the Blue Hole before heading for shelter. "That was quite agreeable to all of us at the time," Patterson says. Martin then offered his passengers a choice: He could take them to Belize City, where they could wait out the storm in a hotel, or they could stay aboard as he motored to Big Creek, a small port near the Guatemalan border. Martin believed Wave Dancer would be safe in the well-known hurricane hole where the ship had ridden out 1998's Hurricane Mitch (and which was, at this point, south of Iris's projected landfall). "Why go eight hours to Belize City, get off, and sit in a hotel or on a beach for a couple of days when we can just stay on the Boat?" thought DeBarger. The club members took a poll and quickly came to a verdict: They'd stay on board. If Martin thought the boat was safe, they'd be safe, too. Then they asked Martin if they could have copies of any forthcoming weather faxes for their dive logs, a nifty souvenir of their encounter with Iris. But as Eloisa Johnson, Brenda Wade, and Angela Luk cleaned the galley that evening, they felt increasingly anxious. Iris was turning south and strengthening. When Belize issued a hurricane warning for its entire coast that night, the three women and Bart Stanley confronted Martin on the bridge. "Everybody needs to get to a shelter," Stanley said. Martin shook his head. "No, that'll never happen," Stanley recalls him saying. Johnson argued that before the arrival of Hurricane Mitch, Wave Dancer had returned to Belize City to drop off any crew members who wanted to go home to their families. But Martin wouldn't budge. "These people paid a lot of money for this," Luk recalls him saying. "And if you girls get off, who will cook and clean the cabins?" Club member Mary Lou Hayden, a 53-year-old nurse practitioner, noticed the women's agitation. They were huddling together, running out onto the deck with their cell phones, whispering. "I just watched them," she says. Had club members pressed Stanley, Wade, or Johnson, perhaps they would have understood Iris's danger. Had they shared concerns with Martin as a group, perhaps he would have headed in or at least told them how to prepare for the coming blow. The club members--20 on Wave Dancer, 10 on the Belize Aggressor III--had hoped to rendezvous at each dive site. But the boats hadn't connected, and that evening, Aggressor captain Jerry Schnabel also told his clients that a hurricane was approaching. Unlike Martin, Schnabel returned to Belize City. The Aggressor arrived around midnight and took on fuel. Instead of discharging its passengers, though, the boat headed for Big Creek. As Monday dawned, Wave Dancer's kitchen crew--Wade, Johnson, and Luk—turned on the radio. Iris was closing in. Just 285 miles east of Belize City and moving at 20 miles an hour, "Iris is now an extremely dangerous Category Four hurricane expected to make landfall tonight. Winds have rapidly increased and are now near 149 miles per hour," reported the NHC. Eloisa Johnson called her sister, Dorita, on the ship's satellite phone. "Girl," Dorita recalls her sister saying, "I don't know if I'm ever to going to see you guys again. We have a new captain, and he doesn't want to listen to us. I've told him 'Please, bring us in to Belize City.'" As she broke into sobs, the call was abruptly cut off. A few minutes later, deckhand Eleno "Chico" Cortez shook Bart Stanley awake. "There's a helicopter outside!" he said. Stanley rushed on deck to see a British Army helicopter (Britain maintains a military presence in Belize, a former colony) hovering above the waves, displaying a sign that bore a single word handwritten in block letters: HURRICANE. Captain Martin could wait no longer; he fired up the engines and headed for Big Creek. (According to Hughes, Martin had begun preparing to depart for Big Creek before the arrival of the helicopter.) Peter Hughes blamed the tragedy, the worst in the history of recreational diving, on a "...huge, freak wave or a freak tornado", but many of the families of the victims believe the accident was caused by corporate greed, human error, stupidity and negligence.Johnson still didn't want to go to Big Creek; by now residents of southern coastal Belize were evacuating. At noon she called her sister again, and then called her live-in boyfriend, Alberto Hall. "This captain is crazy," she cried. "He's not listening to us." Angela Luk phoned her brother in Belmopan, Belize's capital. She'd been working on Wave Dancer only a few months. Unlike Johnson and Wade, longtime Peter Hughes employees with families to support, Luk felt little attachment to her job. "We're coming in to Big Creek, and I'm getting off the boat," she said. She wanted her boyfriend to pick her up. Bart Stanley packed his bags. His wife was Honduran and had no family in Belize; he wanted to get back to her and his kids in Belize City. Luk offered him a ride. Big Creek, down in the banana country of southern Belize, lies several miles inland at the head of a wide lagoon in the midst of thick mangrove swamps. There is a 150-yard concrete dock, a prefabricated warehouse, and stacks of containers waiting to be shipped, along with a handful of rusting cars and a large pile of trash. It feels like the end of the world. A mile up the road is Independence, a village of pitted dirt roads and dilapidated shacks. But despite its apparent poverty, Independence has a concrete school, a large concrete general store, a bank, and two no-frills hotels. It's a small town full of people who look after one another. Presiding over it all is Tony Zabaneh, 67, a tall, black-haired man of Palestinian descent who chairs the village council. He owns the general store, the local soccer team, and the warehouse at Big Creek. If you have a problem here, you go to Tony Zabaneh. The Aggressor arrived at Big Creek at 9 a.m. on October 8. Zabaneh drove down to meet it at the dock. Though the local hotels were full, he told Captain Schnabel, "I can get as many people as you need in a shelter, and I can even transport them." As dive club member Dave Mowrer remembers it, Schnabel gathered a group of passengers in the Aggressor's salon. Sun streamed in the windows. Air conditioning wafted over them. "You can leave or stay," he said, "but if you leave you've got to take your own provisions. I think you'll be safer on the boat, but it's up to you." (Schnabel could not be reached for comment.) Mowrer looked out the windows. Out there it was hot and muggy. "All you could see were tin roofs and shacks," says the 55-year-old owner of a small water-purification company. The Aggressor was cool. Packed with good food and drink, not to mention medical supplies. Mowrer framed the question to himself: "Should we go out into a Third World country or stay here?" "We felt we'd be just as safe where we were," says club member Tara Williamson, a 49-year-old legal assistant who was also on the Aggressor. The passengers voted; they'd weather the storm on the ship. Wave Dancer arrived in Big Creek sometime in the afternoon. Peter Hughes believes it was by 2 p.m.; several passengers say it was after three o'clock. Either way, it was late. Vessels crowded the lagoon. Already lined up at the pier were two shrimp boats, a tug-boat named Miss Gayle, and the Aggressor. When Wave Dancer tied up, its bow and superstructure protruded 50 feet past the dock, broadside to the direction of the coming hurricane. No matter. Wave Dancer's crew secured the ship as best they could. Angela Luk's boyfriend was waiting on the dock. So was Zabaneh, ready with his Land Cruiser and a van to evacuate passengers. Hughes says that "the passengers collectively decided they would feel safer and more comfortable remaining on the boat. In our business, until something goes wrong, the customer is always right. So they were allowed to stay on board. That will never happen again." | | Although maritime safety agencies warn boat operators to move passengers ashore when hurricanes threaten, Peter Hughes kept guests onboard and took no precautions to ensure passenger safety. But several passengers on Wave Dancer say they never learned of Zabaneh's offer. "They never indicated any danger to us," says Mary Lou Hayden. "Had they, I would have demanded to move inland." In the end, apparently, none of the passengers asked to leave the boat. The Belizeans knew better. "The hurricane is coming straight to us," Luk told Martin, "and I'm getting off." "If you leave, you're not coming back," she remembers him saying. Bart Stanley's cell phone rang. It was his brother: Stanley's family was safe in Belmopan. Wade and Johnson were crying on the dock; they were afraid to lose their jobs. Luk was leaving anyway. "You coming or staying?" she said to Stanley. "My family's OK, so I'm going to stay with the girls," he said. As Luk drove away, Eloisa Johnson called her boyfriend. "The guests don't want to get off," she said, "and if we leave we'll lose our jobs. Will you pray for me? I love you." Numerous passengers saw the women crying on the dock. "It was really tense," Hayden says, "but I didn't know what was going on, and I just trusted the captain." At 3 p.m., the sky now overcast, the NHC warned, "Landfall of extremely dangerous hurricane only hours away. Preparations to protect life and property in the hurricane warning area should have been completed." Iris's maximum sustained winds were now 145 miles an hour. Zabaneh's employees and the Aggressor's passengers cleared the dock of wooden pallets that might become missiles in the wind. DeBarger didn't like the looks of how Wave Dancer's lines were tied. He pointed them out to the ship's engineer, who told him not to worry. (Hughes maintains that the lines were tied properly.) If they'd been in an American port, the Coast Guard and local police would have urged all passengers to leave the boats. But here in Belize, nobody was going to tell anybody what to do. Instead, club members on the two boats, who hadn't seen one another for two days, celebrated their reunion. "Don't come over here without a beer or a blonde!" Prillaman yelled over to the Aggressor. Once more, Zabaneh, wearing a yellow rain slicker and high black galoshes, tried to persuade Schnabel to evacuate his passengers. "This is a bad one, and it's coming directly to us," he said. Schnabel said no thanks. After all, as Dave Mowrer thought at the time, what did Zabaneh know? "He was just the mayor of some Third World village." Zabaneh was struck dumb. Everyone in town had moved inland or to shelters. But the Americans were lounging around, drinking beer and wine. "They were in a party mood," he says. The port seemed sheltered, the boats were familiar and, for all they knew, safe. The Americans believed they'd be out diving again the next day, with a bonus: a hurricane tale to tell. Zabaneh headed back to his empty van. At six, black clouds built and the wind rose. Brenda Wade and Eloisa Johnson served curried shrimp. They were cleaning up when Iris hit. It was 8:30 p.m. One second there was light drizzle and 20 knots of breeze; the next, violent winds howled like a freight train. Rain spewed sideways as if shot from a fire hose. On the Aggressor's deck, the crew worked the lines, fighting to loosen them as the water rose. Rocks, sticks, and stray pieces of metal flew through the air, smashing into the boats. One, two, three, four, the Aggressor's windows blew out, scattering glass across the salon. Rain poured in. The plummeting air pressure made passengers feel as if their eyeballs were being sucked out. The Aggressor's passengers scurried to the narrow passageway one deck below. Water gushed in as they put on life vests and grabbed flashlights. Which is what everyone on Wave Dancer should have been doing. Instead, Dave DeBarger and Rick Patterson were heading to their cabins when they encountered Captain Martin carrying a roll of duct tape. Windows of the Aggressor were blowing out, he told them--let's tape ours. The ship started rocking and shaking. Up in the salon, crew members Stanley, Johnson, and Wade watched the surreal scene of the Americans still chatting over dessert. No one was wearing a life vest. Johnson and Wade were terrified. "Just stay close to me," Stanley said. Wave Dancer jerked. "A line is broken!" someone shouted. Bart Stanley looked out the port window; he saw nothing but blackness and rain, but then realized that the boat was swinging away from the flooded dock. "Oh, my God!" he heard a woman scream. "We're gonna flip!" At that moment Wave Dancer lurched onto its port side as a six-to-ten-foot wall of water surged into the lagoon and against the boat's exposed hull. Belowdecks, Dave DeBarger and Rick Patterson were thrown across the hallway. For a moment, the boat seemed to stabilize. In the salon, Stanley heard the engines rev. "We're OK!" someone yelled. But then Wave Dancer rolled onto its port side again. Screaming people flew across the salon, hurtling out of their chairs and over the bar. Water rushed in and filled the cabin. The lights went out. Earl Young, skipper of Miss Gayle, saw Wave Dancer "break free completely. And suddenly there was darkness, nothing." Wave Dancer was upside down. In the black, flooded salon, Bart Stanley groped for Wade and Johnson. His lungs were bursting. "I'm going to drown," he thought. He pictured the inverted room and tried to swim to a door. Chairs, cushions, books, venetian blinds--tangled debris was everywhere. He thought of his youngest daughter, 14 months old. And then there it was, an opening. He kicked and pulled and paddled and felt flesh. A hand. He grabbed it, lost it, found clothing and held on tight, kicking for his life as he and deckhand Chico Cortez surfaced into screaming winds and waves slick with diesel fuel. On the bottom deck, Mary Lou Hayden had just emerged from her cabin when the boat went turtle; for reasons she still doesn't know, she had picked up a three-inch-long flashlight. Suddenly, she found herself standing on her hands, "Dear God," she thought. "I don't think I'm going to survive." After that, she says, "I just went into autopilot." She flipped over, turned on her flashlight, and, in water already waist-high, made her way down the inverted staircase to a door she couldn't open. There, Rick Patterson spotted Hayden's light and struggled to reach her. In flip-flops, he kicked out the door's window, and the two swam through. Dave DeBarger, at the opposite end of the hall, turned and saw a dim glow from Hayden's flashlight. "I had a minute left before I was going to die," DeBarger says. He swam to the light, found the window, and shimmied through. Their lungs burning, all three bobbed to the surface in the howling storm. Floating beside them in a life raft still tied to Wave Dancer were Stanley, Cortez, and the ship's engineer. DeBarger, Hayden, and Patterson climbed in. Captain Martin was perched on Wave Dancer's upturned hull. Over on the Aggressor, Dave Mowrer had climbed topside with a powerful dive light to see if he could help his boat's crew. Mowrer could barely stand in the wind. He shone his light over the lagoon and spotted something blue. Then he noticed the Aggressor's second mate desperately attempting to launch the ship's Zodiac off the stern. "What the hell are you doing?" he yelled over the wind. "There's a boat over," the mate said. In a sickening flash, Mowrer understood. Wave Dancer's hull was blue. And all he could see was blue. Mowrer played the beam over the water. He expected to see life rafts. People crying for help. Lights. He saw nothing. Mowrer rushed down into the passageway. "Wave Dancer has capsized," he announced, grabbing two other club members to help with the rescue. As they hurried back on deck, the Aggressor's second mate was returning in the Zodiac, ferrying survivors. Captain Martin was diving into the roiling water, searching for his missing passengers and crew. A few minutes later, he swam up dragging Glenn Prillaman. He was blue, unresponsive. Mowrer compressed his chest. Hayden blew air into his lungs. And DeBarger held his best friend's hand. "C'mon, Glenn!" he said over and over. But Glenn Prillaman was dead. It was 9:30 p.m. The wind had calmed--the eye of the hurricane, they believed. Stanley was sobbing. "The girls!" he said, hugging the Aggressor's cook. "The girls are still over there. I've got to find them." Mowrer and another diver slid on their wet suits, commandeered boats, and headed for Wave Dancer. Martin went with them. They banged on the hull and smashed windows, hoping to hear a response from anyone trapped in an air space. Silence. Mowrer lowered himself through a window and groped. A foot. He pried the lifeless body loose and pulled out housekeeper Brenda Wade. Next he found R. Christy McNeil, the club's trip coordinator. They lined their friends' bodies, one after the other, along the dock. By 4 a.m. there were ten. Iris had come and gone in an hour; the second wave never hit. At dawn a British dive team arrived and found eight more bodies. The last two wouldn't be recovered for another three days. Upon hearing on the radio of an over-turned ship in Big Creek, Eloisa Johnson's boyfriend sped six hours across flooded dirt roads to the port. Johnson was lying faceup on the dock. He picked up his girlfriend and hugged her; her ribs felt crushed. She was still in her apron. The bodies of the dive club victims, who had come to Belize from towns such as Midlothian, Chester, and Glen Allen, Virginia, and who ranged in age from 31 to 60, were brought to Belize City. Among the dead were five married couples. DeBarger and Hayden identified the remains of their friends in the back of a refrigerated meat truck. In Richmond, one funeral followed another, 17 in six weeks. DeBarger "cried at every one of them" he says. He and Hayden, who'd barely met before the trip, dated for a few months. Rick Patterson got engaged to a woman he met on the Aggressor. And DeBarger stepped into his old friend's job as club president and presided over both the comforting of the victims' families and the continuity of the club itself. Ironically, membership soared, a fact he attributes to the massive publicity surrounding the accident. In Belize, those affected by the disaster had no club to lend them support. Eloisa Johnson wasn't killed doing what she loved, but simply doing her job. "Our words didn't matter to that captain," says Johnson's sister, Dorita, who also worked for Peter Hughes. "We never understood you had to give your life to the guests." One hot afternoon down in Belize, I find Bart Stanley sitting on Wave Dancer's dock. He didn't work much in the months after the accident, and his telephone didn't stop ringing. Reporters called. Lawyers called. He wouldn't talk to any of them. He is afraid of getting sued. Guilt gnaws at him: "I have dived for 15 years and been on water all my life," he says. "But no one would listen. And I lost the girls. All those people...just screaming and hollering." He can't get Brenda Wade and Eloisa Johnson out of his mind. Twenty-three lawsuits (twenty on behalf of the dead, three on behalf of DeBarger, Hayden, and Patterson) alleging breach of contract and wrongful death were filed against Peter Hughes Diving, Inc., and Captain Martin. The lawsuits argued that Martin and Hughes had been in constant contact and that all of Martin's decisions had been directed from Miami, a charge Hughes denies. Hughes and his lawyers maintain that the accident was caused by the Aggressor, which struck Wave Dancer in the chaos of the storm, causing it to break free. Hughes has a videotape, shot that night, that he says confirms his version of events. However, he refused to make a copy available to Adventure, saying it could only be viewed in his presence or that of his lawyers. But whatever the precise cause of the sinking, the fact remains that if the passengers had not been on the boat, they all would be alive today. Wave Dancer spent 14 months in the water at Big Creek before being auctioned off for scrap. Peter Hughes has a new boat, Sun Dancer II, taking guests to the reefs. "Belize has been good to me, and I think I've been good to Belize," he says in his office in an industrial park in suburban Miami, his giant schnauzer's head resting on his lap. "The Wave Dancer tragedy cost us an absolute fortune." Because the lawsuits might have taken years to go to trial--and because the ship was owned by a tiny Belizean company, not Peter Hughes--the plaintiffs agreed to settle the case for Wave Dancer's $5 million insurance policy. "I say a prayer for these people every night of my life," Hughes says. "But I didn't cause their deaths." In Richmond one night, I sit with club members Tara Williamson and Dave Mowrer over half-eaten dinners. "I have a lot of anger," Mowrer says. "That captain murdered my friends." Williamson is quieter and more introspective, and I ask her if she thinks staying on the Aggressor was the wrong decision. She pauses for a long time. Finally she says softly, "I think the captain should have known enough to get us off the boat and not left it up to us to decide. But if you force me to answer the question, I guess we should have gotten off. But saying that makes me really sad. Because with a little more caution on our part none of this would have happened." Editor's NoteAt the request of family members of Wave Dancer victims, CDNN launched an ACT NOW campaign calling for justice and accountability. At the same time, family members contacted Dave DeBarger to enlist the support of the Richmond Dive Club for the ACT NOW campaign, however, DeBarger and the Richmond Dive Club summarily refused to support the campaign. DeBarger also refused to cooperate with Belizean authorities investigating the accident and harshly criticized family members who stood up and called for a full and proper investigation of the Wave Dancer tragedy. |
