2 Students Surmount 'Impossible' Obstacle

              Shreveport Journal - August 25, 1975
DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE - Two sophomore
medical students, Barron O'Neal (left ) and
Stephen Glenn lifted a sunken barge weighing
20,000 pounds from 20 feet of water. They were
told it couldn't be done but five weeks of concen-trated
work were crowned with success. Raising
the barge from Sunny Point Lake near Curtis was
a first for the scuba divers. (Journal Photo by
Don Graham )
2 Students Surmount
Ilmpossible' Obstacle
By ANN DEMENT
Jourual Staff Writer
They said it couldn't be done. They
said two adventurous boys could not
raise more than 21I,1XXl pounds of
weight out of water 211 feet deep. They
said an established underwater re­covery
firm would charge $50 an hour
to do the job. But Barron O'Neal and
Stephen Glenn proved everybody
wrong.
It took almost five weeks of hard
work but what began as a joke to
O'Neal and Glenn turned into one of
the most rewarding challenges they
have ever undertaken. They lifted a
sunken barge weighing more than
211,000 pounds from the bottom of Sun­ny
Point Lake near Curtis.
"It all began as a joke last spring
when Barron and I were trying to
forget about school worries and de­cided
to start our own underwater re­covery
service. The next thing I knew
Barron had gotten a license and we
were in business," Glenn said.
Both sophomore medical students
at Louisiana State University School of
Medicine in Shreveport, O'Neal and
Glenn began scuba diving as a hobby
and liked to do it in their spare time.
"We heard that Mr. Les Cooley was in­terested
in having a barge lifted from
the bottom of his lake and went to see
him ," O'Neal said.
WHAT BEGAN as a $25 a day job
which was to consist of pulling the
barge out with towing line and a trac­tor
was quite an experience, O'Neal
explained. "This was our very first job
and we told Mr. Cooley that if we were
unable to get it up, he did not have to
pay us anything and if we did succeed,
he could pay us what it was worth," he
said.
One of the problems in getting the
barge out was that it sank adjacent to
a gazebo built on the water and if the
barge was pulled to the side it could
easily bring the gazebo down.
Other problems, O'Neal explained,
were that it sank over a year ago, it
was stuck in four feet of mud, and vis­ibility
in the water was very poor. "We
had to refy a great deal on feeling," he
said.
After the first attempt at towing
failed, the boys next tried using air­filled
barrels to raise the barge. This
too was not enough to dislodge the
massive structure.
O'NEAL AND Glenn then decided
to remove the water from inside two
pontonns which filled with air, would
~rdinariJy hold the barge afloat. They
deVISed a method of replacing the
water with air which proved to be the
answer in raising the barge.
"Our big day was Aug. 8 when the
barge popped out of the mud. We bad
been working about an hour and forty­five
minutes when I could feel the
water pressure changing. I started
swimming as fast as I could away
from the barge. Then it happened, it
was like a cork popping from a cham­pagne
bottle. The barge, lodged in four
feet of mud and in water 211 feet deep,
popped more than eight feet out of the
water," O'Neal said. He admitted it
was frightening.
Cooley said he used the barge for
transporting material from one end of
the lake to the other. He had put some
200 pound railroad irons on the barge
to take to another part of the lake and
over several days the weight of the
irons caused the barge to sink.
Despite all the hazards of the un­derwater
world, which included biting
fish , deadly y(}-yo fIShing lines and .
hooks, and a large scratchy pecan tree
near the barge, O'Neal and Glen suc­ceeded
in their first recovery en­deavor.
O'Neal even got a little extra
surgery out of the whole ordeal -
while scuba diving he was bitten by a
fish who thought two moles on his back
were delicious water bugs.