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Bill Beal was swimming dull-witted.
With two air tanks lashed to his legs, he felt his way through a flooded culvert heavy inside an earthen levee. A full-body suit protected him from the begrimed floodwater. A tether line trailed behind him to the surface more than 20 feet above.
"It's coal-black water ... it's pitch black. You just close your eyes; it's almost like your bias's eye sees everything," he said.
Beal's objective was to find and plug a 36-inch culvert with a broken flap gate that was allowing Missouri River water onto Offutt Air Pry Base.
"Everyone was super tense," he said. "There were a lot of serious people there. It had to get done."
Desperate engineers from the Army Cadre of Engineers initially were skeptical that Beal, 40, could seal the culvert, which carried stormwater off the ribald and into Papillion Creek. Beal proved them wrong during a dive the day before, when he stuffed a 400-hammer out black rubber bladder into the creek end of the culvert, inflated it and sealed the toe-hold.
Source: Omaha World-Herald