Beaver Lake: Officials seek answers in scuba diving death
BY ANDY DAVIS -ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
GARFIELD -- Sri Lestari's jobs in the oil industry took her from her homeland of Jakarta, Indonesia, to Scotland, Egypt and Australia. She had been snorkeling in the Bahamas, whitewater rafting in Colorado and hiking on the Ozark Highlands Trail.
The Tulsa engineer's latest adventure, scuba diving, turned tragic Saturday when she drowned during a class in the Indian Bow area of Beaver Lake.
Benton County sheriff's deputies and officials with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, which certified the diving school, are investigating the accident.
Lestari's boyfriend, Jonathan Stewart, still doesn't know exactly what happened, but he assigns some of the blame to cold, murky water and poor supervision by her instructors with Poseidon Adventures in Tulsa.
Poseidon owner Randy Piper referred questions about the accident to the diving instructor's association. Representatives of the association didn't return calls Monday.
Piper said it was his first fatal accident in the 20 years he's run a diving school.
"This was a terrible, unfortunate circumstance," he said. "The only way to avoid it is to hold somebody's hand."
Members of the Benton County dive team found Lestari, 33, in about 35 feet of water on Saturday afternoon. She had been in the water for about an hour, police said.
Her body was sent to the state Crime Laboratory for an autopsy. Her scuba equipment also will be tested at the Crime Laboratory, Brewster said.
Scuba diving drownings are rare, especially during training courses, said Joel Dobenbarger, a researcher with the Divers Action Network, a Durham, N.C., nonprofit organization that collects data on diving accidents.
Eighty to 100 people die in scuba accidents each year, he said. Of those, only a half-dozen die during certification courses, he said. Most deaths occur when tanks run out of air, he said.
Benton County's last scuba diving death was about seven years ago, Brewster said. He didn't recall whether it involved a class.
They had spent eight hours diving in a pool and had completed eight hours of classwork as part of the course. Saturday was their first day of open-water diving in a lake. They would have finished the course Sunday.
Stewart said he had misgivings about the class. The water was murky, with visibility of 9 to 10 feet, and chilly at 62 degrees. One of the 14 students refused to get back in the water after the first dive, he said. Another student remarked that she couldn't see any of the instructor's underwater signals.
Stewart said he remembers telling the student, " 'Yeah, we're not getting anything out of this, and in fact it might even be dangerous.'
"I don't think anyone wanted to be out there. No one seemed to be enjoying it."
Stewart said he and Lestari became tangled in branches at the bottom of the lake. He gave her a thumbs up signal, meaning that they should surface. She gave the same signal, meaning she understood, he said.
When Stewart surfaced, he said, he couldn't find Lestari. No instructors were in sight, so he had to search for about five minutes to tell one of them what had happened.
Teri Johnson, who owns Island Quest dive shop in Tulsa, said she's puzzled by the accident. The mouthpiece of a regulator doesn't fall out easily, and students are trained early in diving courses to put it back in when it does. Divers also have a backup regulator that uses a separate hose, she said.
It's easy to become disoriented in murky water, but divers are trained to follow their bubbles to the surface, she said. When divers become separated, they're trained to look for each other for one minute, then surface, she said.
"It's horrible," Johnson said. "This doesn't happen every day."
Professional Association of Diving Instructors guidelines call for one instructor and two assistant instructors to be present during a dive with 12 students, Johnson said. The Poseidon group had 14 students, an instructor, and an assistant instructor, Stewart said.
Johnson said instructors with her school usually keep an eye -- and often a hand -- on their students during each dive. The instructors only take one or two students at a time, depending on the water' visibility, she said.
"We definitely invade their personal space," she said. "We're never too far away."
But she added, "There's no requirement that says you have to do that."
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1. IMHO, looks like a bad situation to be holding OW class certification dives...low vis, students uneasy about the dive, etc...recipe for disaster
2. Seems like a brand-new, not highly-trained, OW student would be too task loaded, stressed-out, and now panicked by entanglement to be able to recover her reg or switch to her backup in that type of scenario...probably explains the half empty tanks - I bet reg was found out of mouth..
3. Buddy should have stuck around.
4. Where the hell were the instructor(s)?
