Female diver missing after Vandenberg wreck separation

UPDATED

An elderly female scuba diver has gone missing after becoming separated from her buddy in strong currents while diving the USNS General Hoyt S Vandenberg wreck off the Florida coast – the second serious incident at the site in a fortnight.

The woman was named as 79-year-old Ellen Ruth Domb from North Palm Beach, Florida by Monroe County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), which described her as a 5ft 6in white female.

UPDATE 10 December: Ellen Domb

The US Coast Guard called off the search for Ellen Domb on 8 December, after searching across some 7,200sq km for about 60 hours.

Domb had been diving with her husband Bill from their yacht, The couple had married when they graduated from MIT in 1968, and she said she had spent wedding money given for buying furniture on scuba gear instead. “Dive travel has been a big part of our adventures,” she said – flying had been another.

She worked as a physics professor in California before moving into the aerospace and defence sectors, and from 1996 became heavily involved with TRIZ, the Theory of Solving Inventive Problems, continuing as a creativity counsellor before retiring to travel and dive.

The Vandenberg is located about seven miles off the coast of Key West and the separation occurred at around 11am on Friday, 5 December.

A multi-agency search effort involving the MCSO, US Coast Guard, the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and Key West Police Department (KWPD) was continuing the following day.

Domb’s disappearance came less than two weeks after a fatal incident on the Vandenberg, when scuba instructor Nicholas Strazzulla, 50 and also from Florida, lost consciousness on 22 November. He was brought back up and taken to a medical centre but died later that day.

The 45m-deep Vandenberg, a decommissioned 156m military missile-tracking vessel, was scuttled in 2009 and is the largest artificial reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Search operations after diving incidents there can prove challenging, as in the 2023 case of missing 44-year-old diving instructor Tommy Faulkenberry, which led to a fruitless six-day search operation over thousands of square miles.

Another female diver, Jordan Fisher, 50, died on the wreck in 2021 after a small group including her husband and a divemaster lost sight of her on their way back to the line.