I need some advice on what you would do if you were in this situation. I recently worked for a dive operation that disregards safety and the environment. This operation takes people out to a reef and shallow wreck and then the customers drive these little underwater vehicles around the reef, guided by the divemasters. These vehicles are about 200+ LBS and travel at about 3 knots. The tour is through a canyon of coral and when a current picks up, it is very hard to keep the vehicles from smashing into the coral. The place looks terrible. There are pieces of broken coral all over the place where the vehicles have run into the coral and broken pieces off. There is a brain coral there about twice as big as a computer monitor that has a huge cut in it's side from being constantly rammed by the vehicles. Brain coral takes hundreds of years to get that big and it's dead now. Somebody coming out on this operation for one day wouldn't notice these things but I was there almost everyday and the place is really getting quite ugly now. As far as safety, the owner employs two people that he calls surface support to snorkel on the surface and keep a bird's eye view of everything while the dive is going on. These surface support are not trained or certified in anything, not even trained in CPR or First Aid. The surface support are allowed to take these people down in the vehicles and they know absolutely nothing about the effects of pressure or coming up too fast. One time one of the guys took someone down so fast that the person couldn't equalize quick enough and his nose started bleeding. When they bring the people up they shoot them to the surface and the customers don't know any better because they aren't trained divers. These vehicles actually keep you dry inside, your head is in a bubble so you aren't on SCUBA. The owner also has this dive boat ride out to the site, sometimes at high speed, with tanks not secured and ready to fall over at any time. I have actually picked up tanks that had fallen over on their side. The shed where the tanks are filled is downwind of the cruise ship dock so the air smells and tastes horrible. These all combine to make it very hard to work for such an operation and so I had to leave for fear of something happening to someone. Not to mention that the medical forms on that boat are a joke. If somebody has a contraindication to diving, he has us tear up the form and the customer signs a new one. Now I feel very strongly that I should expose this to the proper people and get out that this operation is not very safe first of all...and it's also very very damaging to the reef and sealife there. My question I guess is....would you expose this operation to the proper organizations or people? What would you do?
