Gary Burger Makes a Splash in the Missouri Lawyers Weekly for his Diving Expertise

CREVE COEUR, Mo. - Dec. 17, 2013 - PRLog -- Undeterred but not unhampered by more than 30 pounds of scuba gear, attorney Gary Burger executes a back flip into the clear 58-degree water in the underground lake of the Bonne Terre Mine.

Outside, it’s a bright October day. Inside, the gloom and the air temperature of 62 degrees are the same every day, no matter the season. St. Louis plaintiffs’ attorney and dive master Burger —  wearing flippers striped with yellow, the color that’s visible the longest underwater — is counting off the members of his 11:30 a.m. tour group, his second of the day.

Burger, followed by eight tourist divers and three “safety” divers, including fellow attorney and dive instructor Jim Mondl, quietly bobs off to a spot circled by three massive stone pillars. The divers descend, leaving bubbles and the colors from their chemical light sticks dancing on the dark water’s surface.

Before the dive, Burger expounded on some of the highlights of the dive trail — a “reverse waterfall” of bubbles, calcium falls, a dynamite hole, an ore cart and a bench where lead miners used to rest while keeping a lookout for bosses.

The old mine operated for nearly 100 years before it shut down in 1962. Without pumps, the areas below the water table started filling with water.

Major stockholders Doug and Catherine Goergens started converting the mine in 1981 to what’s now touted as the world’s largest fresh water dive resort. Jacques Cousteau christened the flooded lower three levels The Billion Gallon Lake in a 1980s feature on the mine, a place of eerie beauty that boasts 100-foot visibility underwater.

Burger started his day as a dive master at 6:30 a.m., and he’s less than halfway through a volunteer work day the day after a Friday of depositions for his day job at Cantor & Burger. He and Mondl, of admiralty law firm Tonkin & Mondl, are two of three attorneys working in the mine about an hour’s drive south of St. Louis.

Dive master Sharon Cody, a family law attorney with St. Charles-based Todt, Ryan & McCulloch, has a cold and laryngitis that limits her diving for the day, but she still shows up and gears up. Diving for Cody is a family affair. She and her husband, Michael, and one of their adult sons, Josh, a dive master, spend weekends in staff quarters at the mine.

“What the heck, I’ll do it, too,” Cody says of her decision to start working at the mine in 2002. She figured she’d never see Michael, who is director of tour guides, otherwise.

Cody joined the staff when she was in law school. “It was not very smart” because of the demands on her time, Cody says.

Mondl, whose title of instructor outranks that of dive masters, has been diving for 34 years and has been on staff at the mine for 15. Burger is the relative newcomer, with three years’ experience in the mine. He’d had a case with Mondl when he joined the staff.

Diving can be dangerous, with hazards including getting lost, drowning and the bends — a painful and sometimes fatal condition caused by nitrogen in the blood when a diver rises too fast. And in the mine, unlike in open water, a diver can’t always rise to the surface.

But the mine’s safety record and the training is excellent, the attorneys all say in a joint interview between tours. The average dive tour guide works in the mine for two years before leading a tour. He must be able to know where he is after being led blindfolded to a place in the mine, and he must lead staff down a specific trail with the mine’s lighting turned off, using only a flashlight.

“The training you get here is like training for a lawyer,” Burger says.

All three attorneys also say they’re more concerned about the safety of the divers with them than fearful of danger to themselves. You can get frightened watching and not being sure someone’s going to be able to get out OK, Cody says.

“That’s the part I thrive on,” Mondl says.

Mondl says the pay is “enough to keep you in scuba gear.” Burger doesn’t have the requisite experience to earn a paycheck.

But the dives, which cost tour group divers about $70 each, more than compensate for the hazards and long and not-particularly well-paid hours.

Above water, the mine has a sense of tangled and halted time. A walking tour includes a stop at a mule yoke sealed to the ground with cobalt calcite deposits, and a boat tour passes Styrofoam casing that had held dynamite.

Underwater tours also are marked by equipment from various decades of the mine’s operation paired with effects created by reactions with water. Guides create different effects playing their lights on underwater “smoke” from oxidizing iron trapped in caverns. Bubbles collect on the some cavern ceilings, creating a look that Burger describes as “reverse mercury,” for the bubbles that liquid metal forms.

The attorney-divers also enjoy the adventure of exploring tunnels and the equalizing effect of being underwater, where everyone feels weightless.

And there’s the tranquility.

“No one can talk to you,” says family law attorney Cody. “You really get an hour of absolute solitude.”