Dive to survive: With homemade scuba equipment and zero viz, Myanmar’s salvage divers push extremes

In the 1970s, shipwrecks from World War II were found at the bottom of Myanmar’s Yangon River. People living by the river in the township Dala invented their own diving equipment and designed special dive boats to search for debris from these sunken ships.

They first used bicycle pumps to push oxygen through long rubber tubes into handmade masks. Since then, they’ve improved their equipment, now using homemade gas-powered air compressors to pump the air. With their handmade masks and chains to weigh them down, Myanmar’s salvagers can dive as deep as 200 feet and stay underwater for up to 30 minutes.

Once they disappear into the brown water of this highly polluted river, they are unable to see anything at all. They can only feel with their bare hands for what is down there, searching for treasures like copper, iron and even more ­valuable metals, which then get sold on the wealthier side of the river in downtown ­Yangon for melting down and ­reuse.

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Income can be up to $100 per day depending on what they can find. On some days, the divers find nothing at all. If they are lucky, they can get ­assignments from ­companies to ­salvage a sunken ship or do ­other ­underwater work like ­cleaning concrete piles of a bridge. Working in crews of four or five per boat, they dive twice a day during high tide. Between 20 and 30 ­diving crews operate out of Dala.

Most of them wish to have another job on solid ground, not in the water. It is a ­dangerous job, after all, and many have been injured ­during diving. But they need the money to support their families. The divers work every day just for the simplest ­basic needs: food and a roof over their family’s heads. Sunken ships are tragedies, but for the divers, they are a means to survive.

Here's a look at the people behind the difficult job: