CEO done City’s economic development corporation looking for new leader. PAGE 21 Artistic award Marian Smith earns city’s Honour in Culture recognition. PAGE 29 Mariners second VIBI earns silver medal at national championships. PAGE 3
Potential exciting PAGE 29
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TUESDAY, MAY 15, 2012
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nly three men have ventured to the deepest recorded point on the surface of our planet. Movie director and ocean explorer James Cameron joined that exclusive club March 26 when he made the first successful solo dive – the only human being ever to do so – to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, almost 36,000 feet below the surface of the south Pacific. It was the first manned dive to the bottom of the trench since 1960 when U.S. Navy Lieut. Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer and engineer Jacques Piccard crewed the bathyscaphe Trieste. To descend and return safely from the crushing, cold depths of the trench, Cameron relied on a carefully selected team of engineers, including Tim Bulman, owner of Nanaimobased Indepth Marine. ◆ Bulman, 42, is an electrical engineer, commercial diver and submersible pilot/technician with 14 years’ experience working with manned submersibles and deep-ocean remotely-operated vehicles. Bulman moved his company to Nanaimo in 2003, the same year he met Cameron and was hired to rebuild lighting control systems aboard two Deep Rover submersibles purchased from a French film company and used to film the documentary movie Aliens of the Deep. When the aging electronics proved unreliable, Bulman established his credibility by retrofitting the submersibles with new lighting controls that worked. In the world of manned submersibles, reliable people and equipment get recycled. Someone always knows someone else from previous projects.
VOL. 24, NO. 7
DEPTH DEPT PTH PROBE PRO OBE BY CHRIS BUSH I THE NEWS BULLETIN
Nanaimo electrical engineer TIM BULMAN played key role on James Cameron’s team exploring the Mariana Trench
Tim Bulman works on electronics within the DeepSea Challenger prior to the expedition.
The same people often work on and retrofit existing craft and technological innovations in the business are frequently the result of modifying or rejigging existing technology.
In 2004, while working with Cameron’s team on a Discovery Channel documentary about the Titanic – Bulman worked on fibre optic data links for remotecontrolled submersibles that
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probed the interior of the wreck – Cameron invited him to work on the DeepSea Challenge. “In manned submersibles, it’s a pretty small network of people worldwide, so when [Cameron]
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Nobody had a system that would work 11 kilometres deep. They didn’t exist.
bought the subs from France, he had mostly Americans working on [the project] and I’d worked with most of them before on previous jobs,” Bulman said. “So when they needed electronics help, they’d call me up and ask if I was available. It was all word of mouth and then, once it worked for him, then he phones back and asks, ‘are you available for this one?’” ◆ Getting equipment to function reliably at enormous depths and pressures presents daunting engineering challenges. Bulman was hired to work on the communications systems between the Deepsea Challenger, the submarine Cameron would pilot to the bottom of the trench, and the surface support craft. Bulman worked remotely on the project for months before he joined the team full-time in Australia in November as a subcontractor to Cameron’s California-based company, Light Storm Entertainment. The communication system Bulman worked on was completely new. “Nobody had a system that would work 11 kilometres deep,” Bulman said. “They didn’t exist.” See ‘ENORMOUS’ /5