No I'm not saying his testing was dubious, but if the matter had ever come before a court, the chain of evidence would have been rendered useless by that action. Investigations are supposed to follow very strict forensic guidelines. Have a local instructor, no matter how qualified, test that air was not within those guidelines. That's all I'm saying.
---------- Post added January 29th, 2015 at 09:45 AM ----------
I'm not suggesting anyone lied. I'm suggesting that if proper investigative procedures had been followed then we might have at least gained a valuable addition to the long history of accident analysis. Instead we gained nothing but a lot of people talking about what "probably" happened. Probably means nothing.
---------- Post added January 29th, 2015 at 09:49 AM ----------
Some really great discussion on the forum (aside from a few instances of "sound and fury" that were not unexpected.) If anything is to be learned from these kinds of tragedies, then healthy discussion is the way to learn. Thank you everyone.
We do know- with relative certainty- what happened.
During suit up witness/buddies saw him with a stage of O2.... The label said oxygen.
Witnesses/buddies asked him to analyze.
He did not. He Stated he knew contents were Air.
Witness buddies observed him suffer an Oxtox seizure.
Gas analysis at scene at time of incident showed the stage bottle contained 98% O2.
Darwin prevails.
Forensic analysis was unnecessary because the obvious cause was user error. No one planted a fake label on a bottle of O2. He wasn't ambushed in the cave. No one drowned him.
To suggest "we'll never know what happened" is fanciful at best maliciously inaccurate in reality.
No one needed to do a detailed forensic analysis of the cause of death of the diver because there was a clear chain of the accident causation.
Unless you have reason to believe: 1) all the witnesses lied 2) the analyzer was completely inaccurate, 3) the instructor didn't know how to use it or lied about the reading, or 4) that the bottles were switched before analysis... Where is the unknown variable?
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