LUNENBURG — Anyone who might have survived the crash of Swissair Flight 111 probably wouldn’t have lasted the night in the water, according to a local doctor and diver.

Dr. Jim MacLean is a Lunenburg physician and former Navy diver who has taught medical diving courses which included instruction on hypothermia. He is currently a member of the Lunenburg fire department’s dive team, which was put on standby the night of the crash. The amount of time a person can live submersed in the ocean depends on many factors, the most important of which is the water’s temperature. Authorities have said the Atlantic Ocean off the South Shore at this time of year would have been between 14 and 16 degrees Celsius.

“You’re going to lose heat pretty quickly at that temperature,” Dr. MacLean says. “There have been cases where people have lasted a long time in much colder water than 14 degrees Celsius, but they’re extremes.
“I do a lot of diving and I dive all year round and I can assure you that this water is very cold right now.”

Hypothermia sets in when a person’s body temperature drops below 35 degrees. The heart stops beating when core temperature reaches 28 degrees. The amount of time in between depends on factors such as how much fat tissue a body has to preserve heat, what clothing the person is wearing and how far they are submersed. Injury also matters.

“If you’ve lost blood, you’re going to die much quicker. With that sort of accident, I’m sure there were lots of injuries so people would die pretty quickly, I would assume — unfortunately,” the physician says.

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Children also lose heat faster than adults so they tend to die quicker. At some point during the hypothermia stage, people lose consciousness.

“The exact temperature at which you lose consciousness varies from person to person,” Dr. MacLean says. “As your core temperature goes down, people just go unconscious because the blood supply decreases to the brain.”
While it is difficult to predict how long a person in the water would live because of the many variables, textbooks indicate an unclothed man of average build becomes helpless in 30 minutes and dies in an hour when water is 6 degrees Celsius. At 14 to 16 degrees, Dr. MacLean estimates the same man would survive at most three to four hours.

“Fishermen have fallen into the sea in the North Atlantic and survived for 15 hours, but that’s freakish. Those are extremes,” the physician says.

The search for survivors of Flight 111 was called off at 8 a.m. Friday, more than 33 hours after the crash. Resources then switched their focus to recovery of debris and investigation.

posted on 09/09/1998