What should be done with unconcious diver at depth?

[AndrewA]

Just to echo what a lot of other posters have said. The Rescue course is well worth doing. In my opinion it is the best course PADI teach. I found it to be great fun and by the end of it I was a more confident diver. ( In ten years of diving I have never had to rescue an unconscious diver but I have used many of the other skills taught on the course)

 

[mkutyna]

My two and a half cents.

Say you are flying from NY to LA, and in the middle of the flight you find out that both pilots are unconscious and you ask in a piloting forum what steps to follow to bring the situation to good end. And when all the experienced pilots try to explain to you that it’s not as easy as to follow steps one, two and three, you get pissed and call them elitists!!!

That's absurd, rescuing an unconscious diver from depth is nowhere near as complicated as landing a commercial airliner. It can't even be compared to landing a small training plane.

There are a few simple things that a diver can do to prevent additional injuries to a injured diver as they are bringing them back up to the surface. Once on the surface, that diver stands a much higher chance of surviving than they did if they were left on the bottom. A rescue does not have to be performed perfectly in order to give a victim a better chance of surviving.

 

[japan-diver]

That's absurd, rescuing an unconscious diver from depth is nowhere near as complicated as landing a commercial airliner. It can't even be compared to landing a small training plane.

There are a few simple things that a diver can do to prevent additional injuries to a injured diver as they are bringing them back up to the surface. Once on the surface, that diver stands a much higher chance of surviving than they did if they were left on the bottom. A rescue does not have to be performed perfectly in order to give a victim a better chance of surviving.

Having taught thousands of divers to do a rescue (all my OW students need to demo this skill) and a quite a few instructors how to teach this skill, I think this is one of the easier skills to teach.

Just for fun the other day in CW I gave the briefing of my earlier post and had my new students with no further info than that try a rescue from the deep end- all of them were able to get the diver (a DM) to the surface w/o killing him or themselves. Now to make it look pretty and get more practice we then went into more detail and practice but this is a basic skill that any certified diver can and should be able to do there is no great secret and the risk to the diver is minimal to none.

 

[wreckless1]

My two and a half cents.

Say you are flying from NY to LA, and in the middle of the flight you find out that both pilots are unconscious and you ask in a piloting forum what steps to follow to bring the situation to good end. And when all the experienced pilots try to explain to you that it’s not as easy as to follow steps one, two and three, you get pissed and call them elitists!!!

As someone mentioned above, this scenario is much more complex than surfacing an unconscious diver.

Going back to the piloting situation, you realize that whatever you learn in an internet forum in and evening or two of “dedicated and serious studding” will only allow you to do, at best, a controlled crash of the plane, but it will by no mean make you a proficient pilot or be able to land a 747 in the middle of I-95 unscathed!!!!

A controlled crash is better than a pile-driver into the ground. It would be irresponsible of you not to conduct the controlled crash if there were no other alternative.

Improvising (with the one, two and three steps from an internet forum) rescuing an unconscious diver is at best a tinge better than letting him/her die, but no more. Sorry, that is the way it is with critical situations with many variables and unpredictables as the one you described. You need knowledge and training.

Similarly, this 1% chance is infinitely better than 0%. Unless someone trained in rescue is able to intervene, it would be unethical for the untrained diver to not do *something*. Although I agree that no one was being 'elitist' and that everyone should get the training, it helps to convey to the untrained diver that the principles of safe ascent and open airway are to followed.