For Conception crew, surviving the fire is just the first step in a long healing process

In July, Ann Crawley led a group of teenagers and children on a successful diving trip aboard the 75-foot Conception.

Last week, she woke up to a flood of messages from friends and family informing her that the diving boat had gone up in flames off the coast of Santa Barbara, killing 33 passengers and a crew member who were asleep below deck.

For Crawley, a former crew member of the Conception and an accomplished diver, California’s worst maritime disaster in modern history is deeply personal.

“It was the first boat that I ever worked on in America,” Crawley, who is from Chicago and now works as an underwater photographer and filmmaker, said in a Skype call from Tonga where she has been filming humpback whales. She is still processing the news of the fire, which claimed the lives of divers she knew and forever altered the lives of surviving crew members she knows and deeply respects. At times during the Skype interview, she could not help breaking into sobs.

Crawley worked aboard the Conception and other boats in the Truth Aquatics fleet almost 20 years ago. But she believes she understands the feelings — and the pain — of the five crew members who tried and failed to save the Conception’s passengers, then jumped overboard as flames overtook the vessel.

“Every single one of us who worked as crew are all united as are every single passenger who has ever been on one of these vessels,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “Do NOT doubt that we were/are/and always be the ones to serve our passengers.”

“You are doing it because you love the ocean and you love other people who love the ocean,” Crawley said. “You don’t want them to perish like that.”

Mental health experts said people who live through traumatic events like the boat fire can experience a type of survivor’s guilt, which can be compounded if they are in a position of authority or have responsibility for the safety of others.

Asking “Why me?” questions — why some people perish in a disaster and others live — is very common among survivors, said Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University who studies shame and guilt.

“It shows that we’re all connected,” he said.

But the experts said the fact that the diving community is so tightly knit may help those affected by the fire — whether crew members or the family members of those who died — move forward.

“It really does set in motion a very basic and probably evolutionary tendency to seek other people out when we feel stress,” said Anthony Mancini, a psychology professor at Pace University.

Mancini said that after the initial shock, most people show resilience. And in some cases, the traumatic event can even have a positive impact in the long run. He studied survivors of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting and found that people who said they had experienced anxiety and depression in the months leading up to the shooting showed a marked improvement in their symptoms several months afterward, despite the trauma they experienced.

“It seemed to be the case that the event kind of stitched them into a social network that had long-term beneficial social consequences,” Mancini said. “That’s certainly possible here.”

Praveen Kambam, a forensic psychiatrist at UCLA, said, “Overall, there can be a variety of responses to stressors and incidents like this, but the majority of people will bounce back and those things will be time-limited.”

Those responses might include nightmares, for example, or trouble sleeping, he said. But he added, “There are things to watch out for that may be more problematic and require intervention and treatment.”

Some people, for example, may experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Kambam said, which could include feelings of survivor’s guilt. And in a case like the boat fire, where the cause is under investigation and the actions of crew members are being scrutinized, those feelings of responsibility may be even more intense.

Mancini, of Pace University, noted that how the crew ends up making sense of the tragedy “matters enormously for how it affects them.”

Grief, he said, “is a process of trying to wrap your mind around something in a way that you can live with and when people get bogged down, they’ve arrived at a meaning that they can’t live with.”

Mancini, Kambam and Ferrari all emphasized that even serious or long-term responses to traumatic situations are treatable with therapy or other professional help.

Crawley, the former Conception crew member, said she hopes the public will recognize that in many cases, the people who work on such boats save lives. In one instance, Crawley said, she rescued a diver who had a heart attack.

The number of lives saved by the crew of dive boats, she said, “It’s incredible.”

Regardless of what happened aboard the Conception, Crawley said she believes the fire will bring the diving community and others together.

“California is where I really found, working on these boats, this family and community of ocean people,” Crawley said. “And these boats are connectors. They’ve connected me with people all over the world.”