Retired officer drowns - Alberta

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Sad news indeed. Have to agree with Nadwidny that speculation doesn't do anything but piss people off. If theres anything to learn from I'm sure it will be forthcoming when the investigation has been completed.

Unfortunately, that seems to rarely be the case, unless a local Underwater Council or similar organization (or DAN) spearheads the effort. Ontario's underwater council produces annual reports, and I remember seeing something similar from BC or Alberta written over a decade ago, but those kinds of investigations take a lot of time and concentrated effort -- Often volunteer run organizations don't have the people, time, resources, or access to detailed enough information to do that kind of analysis, and publish it. Investigating police agencies rarely release detailed enough information, as can be seen by going through all the incidents in the history of this forum...

That leaves little else when there's a vacuum of information. Hopefully someone can provide facts so that we can learn from these tragedies, otherwise it's left to speculation. Speculation without substance is useless, IMHO, but trying to interpret what is represented in the often technically poorly written articles to try and glean a lesson is only natural.

The trick is that tact is required when presenting an interpretation of the article, just as tact is required when rebutting that interpretation. -- Otherwise it just turns into another internet tough guy fight, and lessons that could be learned are lost.
 
Still not much to go on. A news report indicates the dive started mid-day:

RCMP say two men went out for a recreational dive in Twin Lakes shortly after noon on Saturday

One account has the deceased failing to surface:

He was on a recreational dive with another RCMP member when he failed to surface Saturday

The tacit assumption here would be that he was not surfacing as part of a buddy pair, otherwise the wording should have been "lost contact" (or something similar).

A different account has the deceased running into trouble and being assisted in the water:

[The deceased] was scuba diving in the Twin Lakes area southwest of Edmonton when he experienced difficulties. People who were nearby attempted to assist [the deceased], and get him to the surface, but the efforts were unsuccessful

In this case there appears to have been a buddy pair (or other assistance) but attempts to raise the victim failed. This account meshes with the wording in the account below:

Preliminary indications, from what we understand, is that he was experiencing a distressful situation -- an air emergency -- likely due to an equipment issue.

where the past imperfect tense implies that the deceased was observed to have been in distress.

A news account has the deceased being recovered later on Saturday:

The search was called off Saturday afternoon after RCMP recovered a body from the water, shortly after 4:00.

while a different account has the recovery as occurring on Sunday:

Search crews were forced to stop at sundown on Saturday evening but resumed early Sunday morning. [The deceased's] body was discovered in the water later that afternoon, LeMay said.
 
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