CityView Magazine

CityViewNC.com | 25 "All my friends tend to commemorate this anniversary. I try to ignore it," he said with a chuckle from the dining room of his three-bedroom home in western Fayetteville. For an interview, he sat at the dining table, speaking through a cloth mask in keeping with safety precautions. e mask commemorates his trip to the Supreme Court. His wife, photographer Cindy Burnham, was cooking a batch of homemade spaghetti sauce in the adjoining kitchen. atcher, the couple's gentle giant of a rescue dog, mostly laid on the floor next to the one-armed patriarch of the family. On that cold January night 10 years ago, Allen had just returned to his home from a hockey game. e light had burned out in the garage, so he couldn't see aer parking his Chevy Suburban SUV. Earlier, Allen had laid out all his scuba gear to be serviced, so the underwater tanks and dive bags were lined out. But Allen forgot that he had an oxygen tank in one of the regular aluminum scuba tanks in the garage, placed between his Suburban and Cindy's car. "I hit one of the tanks with my knee. And then I could hear the oxygen tank start to wobble back and forth," he said, "so I kind of took a step away from it. I didn't want it to hit my foot and then there was this pop. I remember thinking, 'Oh, man! is is gonna hurt' because I knew instantly what had happened. ere was this bright white flash and then this pressure wave – woohhh – that hit me. immunity and could not be sued for copyright violations. e case has drawn attention worldwide. A former television cameraman for, among others, WRAL in Raleigh and WTVD in Durham, Allen started shooting underwater in 1983. He established a Fayetteville business largely based around his love of the sea: Nautilus Productions specializes in documentary production and underwater videography. Since 1983, he has logged more than 1,500 dives. at's more than 1,000 hours underwater. He has never stopped. Over the summer, he dived with the sharks again. "If I couldn't dive," Allen said matter-of-factly, "it's time to die." Obviously, it wasn't Allen's time to check out of this life a decade ago – at 11:20 on the night of Jan. 3, 2011. During Allen's long recover y, he under went about a dozen surgical procedures. His wife Cindy ended up needing a dozen stitches across her nose and eyes, and there was glass on her chest and in her feet. CityViewNC .com | 25

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