NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (WAVY) — It’s been one week since 55-year-old Daniel Irizarry lost control of his car on the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge Tunnel and then crashed into the James River.
Irizarry’s body was recovered with the car nearly eight hours after it went under.
Christopher Rhodes was the lead diver responsible for hauling the red Chevy Traverse out of the river last Monday.
“At 35 feet of water, there’s not a whole lot of sunlight down there to begin with, with all the silt on the bottom,” said Rhodes, a senior diver and firefighter. “I was working in conditions where I couldn’t see my hands, so everything is by feel. Trying to rig up a car at depth without being able to see what you’re doing can be a challenge.”
Rhodes told 10 On Your Side that when the SUV was first located and the current slowed, he found the car upside down with the windshield broken out.
“Generally when a car goes in the water, of course the engine will be the heaviest thing,” Rhodes said, “so the engine will start to sink, and once it goes under, the car will generally flip over. That’s how I found the car. It was on its roof.”
A second diver met Rhodes at the bottom of the river with two 50-pound cables to pull up the car.
“Each diver has communications with each other and also the surface,” said master diver Jeremiah Johnson.
Johnson came up with the technical plan to retrieve the SUV safely.
“This is a specialty team — low-frequency, high-risk operation,” Johnson said.
From the time the car was rigged to when it was lifted took about 40 minutes — a scenario Rhodes told us the divers of the Newport News Fire Department train heavily for.
“We are Emergency Response Diving International (ERDI) certified,” Rhodes said. “There’s extensive [training], it takes over a year — easily over a year, lots and lots of dives. Lots of hands-on training, on the bottom dealing with cars. Wrapping up axels and different parts of cars under the water to be able to lift them. It’s not very often we need to lift a car off the bottom, but here in Newport News we are capable of doing that when necessary.”
