Kirk Hooker combines two of the toughest trades in his professional career: welding and commercial diving. As a commercial diver that performs underwater welding and related services, his 9-to-5 job is unconventional, to say the least. Not for the faint of heart, commercial diving requires extensive training, physical ability, technical knowledge and a bit of guts.
“It can be dangerous,” he says, “but if you know what you’re doing, it isn’t nearly as dangerous as it sounds.”
For Hooker, a high school program became the launching pad for a career in welding. The diving component came later.
“My welding career all started in high school,” he says. “The vocational program I took during my last two years of high school gave me the foundation for everything I’ve done since. It’s stuck with me my entire career.”
After high school, Hooker graduated with an associate degree in industrial technology from Ivy Tech State College in Indiana. A conversation with a friend, however, helped him make a decision that would forever change the direction of his career.
“We were talking about underwater welding and I thought, yes why not go for it?” he recalls. “I always had an interest in scuba diving, and I was already passionate about the welding. I was able to find a school in Jacksonville, Fla., – this was pre-Internet – so two weeks after graduation, I drove down there and enrolled in a commercial diving program that covered diving physics and marine construction skills.”
Hooker completed the program, came back to Indiana and began working around Chicago, Lake Michigan and the surrounding waterways. Today, Hooker has more than 21 years of experience in commercial diving, working on marine construction projects and similar jobs. His typical workday through his full-time job with Chicago Underwater involves welding, cutting, repairs, inspection, salvage and maintenance. While many might assume welding takes up most of his day, he says cutting underwater takes more of his time.
Recently, Hooker found himself repairing dock walls along the Chicago River – steel structures constantly battered by barges and freight ships delivering salt and ore.
“Those barges are tough on the steel,” he says. “They’ll come in and crash into the docks and knock big holes in the steel. We go down, cut out the damaged steel plate and weld in new plate sections. Sometimes, the repairs involve a combination of wood and welded steel brackets that we can pour concrete behind.”
Wet welding
For those in the biz, underwater welding is often referred to as “wet welding” – work that requires the diver and their electrodes to be fully submerged. The primary process used in wet welding is stick welding performed with a variety of specialty waterproof electrodes.
“It’s basically the same process as welding on the surface,” Hooker says. “The electrodes have waterproof coatings that keep the flux dry once it’s in the water until it ignites and starts burning.”
When Hooker describes underwater welding, he makes it sound pretty straightforward, but obviously, there are challenges involved – the electric current being one. To overcome current issues, the diver needs to be in the right place.
“You need to ground the clamp as close to the workpiece as possible and to not be in between it and the ground,” he explains. “It’s just kind of a rule of thumb that you don’t want to stretch out too far. And you certainly don’t want to have the ground behind you while you’re welding in front of you because then at that point, the current is traveling. The water will conduct the current and it will pass through your body.”
A diver’s visibility – or lack thereof – can also create a variety of challenges. It is not uncommon for divers to find themselves in murky water, which does not provide good visibility to begin with, let alone to weld in.
Bubbles can also get in the way; the bubbles and steam that come off the weld arc immediately head upward in the water. If the diver is in the vertical position, looking down, those bubbles and steam impede their view of the arc in the puddle. To overcome this, they weld downward.
“This goes against the typical idea of vertical welding,” Hooker says, “because underwater, the diver is going to weld downward to counteract the bubbles and steam that are rising up. On top of that, the weld puddle solidifies much quicker because it’s being rapidly quenched by the water, so the suitable direction to travel for underwater welding is down.”
To overcome these visibility issues, divers wear lighted helmets or use hand-mounted LED lights rated for underwater use. Most divers that are welding use a shade 5 filter in clear water to reduce UV exposure.
“Underwater, the arc flash isn’t as big as it typically is on the surface,” Hooker says. “Due to the refraction of the water, the UV rays in the water go in different directions, which means the arc flash isn’t as dangerous for your eyes in the underwater world. That’s why you can get away with a shade 5 in even crystal-clear water versus a shade 9 or 10 that you would need on the surface.”
In addition to a wetsuit, divers also wear rubber gloves to keep from getting shocked.
“However, getting shocked is part of underwater welding,” Hooker says. “It’s going to happen.”
Relying on teamwork
Understandably, commercial divers need to be in good physical shape to do their job. Strength, endurance and awareness are essential day in and day out.
“Climbing up and down a ladder in the water serves as a good example for why you have to be in shape,” Hooker says. “The helmet itself weighs 32 lbs., the bottle on your back weighs 30 lbs. and you have a weight belt on. On top of that, you’re soaking wet and the diving suit holds water. You have every bit of 100 to 130 lbs. extra weight on your body when you exit the water. There isn’t a lot of room for weakness in this industry. You need to be strong for your team and for your personal safety.”
Working a diving job requires a three-person crew, according to OSHA, but four is the number Hooker and the company he works for prefer. The crew involves a main diver that performs underwater welding and cutting. Second is the person in charge of the radio for full communication with the surface and the “rack” where they monitor the air pressure, run the video unit and control the power switch – “making it hot” for welding.
The third person is the tender that manages the air hose. Their job is to constantly feed or pull up on the diver’s slack. The fourth person is a second diver geared up and ready to go for safety reasons. Everyone on the team is a diver in most cases where they take turns and rotate positions.
The amount of time a diver can stay underwater depends on depth. At 25 ft. or less, they can stay down nearly all day. Once they go deeper, the time is limited by air supply and decompression limits.
“There are a lot of checks when it comes to making a dive,” Hooker says. “It’s very important that we all work together as a team because without the topside guy, the guy in the water is nothing.”
Taking care of business
When Hooker, who has a topside D1.1 AWS welding certification, is not working for his main union job, he focuses on Hooker Welding Service LLC. His company provides welding, fabrication and repair services for a variety of jobs such as heavy equipment, agriculture, industrial, commercial, residential and more
Hooker’s time is now split performing about 60 percent commercial diving and 40 percent working for his business. He started his own business because the commercial diving industry can be seasonal and not always busy.
“It might be where we don’t get a day off for two months, and then we have days where there is no work for a month or two,” he says. “In the winter months, it can be a little slow.”
In the tank
And if that was not enough to keep him busy, Hooker also spends time visiting high schools and other events with a unique educational device – a 1,300-gallon mobile dive tank for doing underwater welding demonstrations. He uses Fronius welding equipment through an ongoing partnership.
“It started when a teacher asked me to demo underwater welding for his students,” he says. “After I performed the demo in a rented dunk tank, I spent hundreds of hours engineering, designing, fabricating, etc. to build a proper underwater welding dive tank with an acrylic window.”
The dive tank is a way for Hooker to share his passion for commercial diving and promote the trades for high school students.
Finding an additional use for his dive tank, Hooker recently began electrode testing for Broco Rankin in Ontario, Calif., a provider of underwater welding consumables.
“The U.S. Navy had a big project that required a ton of underwater welding,” he says. “They needed certain criteria to be met for the electrodes to be accepted. I performed an underwater weld metal test on an 8-in.-tall vertical V groove on 3/4-in. plate in my tank. The purpose of the test was to obtain 100 percent pure weld metal – making sure that there were no imperfections within the groove. I spent nine hours straight in my tank, welding and grinding between each pass to ensure I removed all the slag and any inclusions. I can tell you I was brutally exhausted by the end of that dive.”
The results passed AWS D3.6M specifications and earned Hooker an AWS underwater welding qualification. He says more testing is on the way, as well.
Making it worthwhile
What advice would Hooker give young people interested in commercial diving?
“I would first recommend learning how to weld and joining a trade union, such as with the pipefitters, ironworkers or carpenters,” he says. “Commercial diving is hard to break into and often pays poorly at first. Many people don’t last more than a couple of years – it’s tough work with the travel, long hours and dangerous conditions. Younger divers have to travel a lot until they prove themselves. Places like Florida pay less than less-desirable areas like Chicago. Offshore jobs can pay up to $250,000 a year, but you’re gone for months at a time.
“Honestly, it isn’t glamorous, but it can be rewarding if you’re tough and dedicated,” he adds. “I’m willing to talk to anybody that wants to call me or reach out to me on social media that has questions. I’ll tell them the facts and the truth as I know them and make sure that they know what they’re getting into.”
If you’re focused on welding above ground, check out the lasts on the Fronius manual welder. https://fsmdirect.com/manual-might/
