vladimir
The Voice of Reason
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Your post makes a lot of sense to me. Society and individual actors have to do a cost-benefit analysis of some sort. At what cost do you prevent the last 100 deaths? In this age of rampant morbid obesity, does the 100-hour course make the difference, or does it just deter the unfit? If the unfit don't scuba dive, do they then die on their couches with a joystick in one hand and a nacho in the other?Unfortunately, it seems that no one considers the current rate of ~100 deaths/year to be a problem, and given market & business pressures, I'm afraid that "extra" people will have to die for several years before there is enough attention to recognize a problem and prompt a meaningful correction within the Industry to stabilize and restore balance. What's particularly disconcerting is that we may have already passed this "Houston, We Have A Problem" tipping point, but we are unable to recognize it because due to the downturn in the Economy which has certainly reduced the number of dives done per year: we need to remember that our "100 deaths/year" is a raw number that doesn't have the contextual insight of an actual incidence rate. Once again, not knowing exactly how many dives/year are actually performed limits our ability to assess what's really going on.
-hh
There may be a benefit to getting those extra divers out there--those who wouldn't have passed the swim test for my YMCA course in 1975. Not just to the dive industry, which I couldn't care less about, but to those individuals. We can not roll things back to the way they were when scuba was an adventurous activity that atttracted active people, but, as you suggest, maybe it should be stressed more that the one-week open-water certification is only good for following a divemaster around in bathtub-like conditions. That may have the additional effect of moving more divers to the "elite" training that was once the norm.