Need Advice for Film, Please...

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Here's two specific situations.

The 2nd stage (the part that you breathe from) has a fitting that could be tampered with/loosened so that it released at some point during the dive. What would happen then is the heroine might choke temporarily as she sucked in water before changing to her octo and ascending - it's not something you try to fix underwater.

Less obvious is to loosen the other end of the hose at the regulator. Many divers use hose protectors - it would completely hide if that had been done.

Less likely to fail because as you power up a regulator - typically the hoses stiffen in place.
Any basic pre-dive check would catch it.
okay, cool-- I wanted her to choke and be surprised...but, she's an experienced diver so she won't panic and she'll know what to do in a bad situation...this is great! Love this board and how helpful you guys have been...it's helping me write the scene and sound accurate and realistic...
 
You have some good ideas there. Here's an off-topic story.

I was listening to an interview with John Chatterton, of "Shadow Divers" fame. He has great respect for Robert Kurson, a journalist and the author of "Shadow Divers", a book that made John even more famous, outside of diving circles. The book is about the identification of a sunken U-boat of the NJ shore, which is widely considered an extremely challenging dive, even for very experienced technical divers.

Robert (who was not a diver, or even much of a swimmer) decided that to write the book, he needed to dive the wreck, so he signed up for an introductory diving class, telling the instructor that he only wanted to do one dive (the U-869). It's a pretty funny story, and Chatterton tells it well..

So you are following a great tradition, of getting to know your subject matter before starting to write!
 
You have some good ideas there. Here's an off-topic story.

I was listening to an interview with John Chatterton, of "Shadow Divers" fame. He has great respect for Robert Kurson, a journalist and the author of "Shadow Divers", a book that made John even more famous, outside of diving circles. The book is about the identification of a sunken U-boat of the NJ shore, which is widely considered an extremely challenging dive, even for very experienced technical divers.

Robert (who was not a diver, or even much of a swimmer) decided that to write the book, he needed to dive the wreck, so he signed up for an introductory diving class, telling the instructor that he only wanted to do one dive (the U-869). It's a pretty funny story, and Chatterton tells it well..

So you are following a great tradition, of getting to know your subject matter before starting to write!
Interesting...I'll have to check out both of his books...Thanks for letting me know-- after all of this research, it seems only right that I actually get in the water and do it! And, hands-on experience will help clarify any lingering questions, I think...
 
Interesting...I'll have to check out both of his books...Thanks for letting me know-- after all of this research, it seems only right that I actually get in the water and do it! And, hands-on experience will help clarify any lingering questions, I think...

Yeah, Shadow Divers is awesome (never read the other one). It's a great introduction to what it's like to dive in our area. And if you REALLY get into diving, you can train with him someday... :)
 
Yeah, Shadow Divers is awesome (never read the other one). It's a great introduction to what it's like to dive in our area. And if you REALLY get into diving, you can train with him someday... :)
Okay, I'll check Shadow Divers out...
Wouldn't that be crazy to train with him?! Last week I was calling a regulator a respirator, so one step at a time : )
 
Okay, so you want a dive accident.... a couple of possibilities... easiest to make happen would be for the villain to open up an air gauge and set the needle to look like it reads 1000 psi when empty. Next they bleed off air in the tank so that looks like it is a full tank. When your heroine is mid dive her tank runs dry and she has to do a free ascent. Modern regulators perform really well right up to the end.

Another convenient accident would to saw partway through her airline and use a rubber hose guard to hide the cut. In reality this doesn’t work well because you can’t control whe the hose will fail, but it will look dramatic.

Another cinematic trope to kill divers is to mess with their gas mix. Pure oxygen will cause seizures at depth as shallow as 30’. A person could damage the exhaust of a gas powered compressor and contaminate it with carbon monoxide. A diver using Nitrox (a common term for mixed gas) normally would check the O2 concentration before use.

Regulators can be tampered with, but it would be hard to not notice right from the start and smacks of bad 1980s Charlie’s Angels episodes. The TV show full of dive accidents was Sea Hunt.
 
The problem with sabotaging the regulators is that you most likely will discover this on the surface before the dive.

I believe you should sabotage the tank valve so it closes at half the normal tank pressure.
In the old days before a pressure gauge was standard you would have a reserve valve which you would have to open when the pressure dropped down to 50 bar (sorry, I use metric).
I had a friend where it didn't open, because the valve hadn't been serviced for years.
So you can adjust the spring to close before and then remove the option to release it :)
So when you reach the pressure the valve starts to close and then you have very few breath of air left before you are out.
 
Back home again in Indiana....
And it seems that I can see
The gleaming candlelight still shinning bright
Through the sycamores for me

I always liked the song-- especially when Jim Nabors use to sing it at the Indy 500

A Hoosier from the corn fields of Indiana writing a book about some thing she has absolutely no knowledge ?
Interesting ! I have written a number of articles - had four dedicated columns in national dive magazines and the first diving news paper column- even so I always well versed but verified my facts prior to publication

I wish you well and success in this and all your future writings

There are numerous ways to have a diving accident - many have been previously described.

One that was common in the very early days of recreational diving that just might be adapted to a modern accident was
the introduction of carbon monoxide into the SCUBA tank...Diver just goes to sleep

I also live in CenCal...if you would like to discuss this and other methods in detail PM me'

Sam Miller, 111
 
How about having the octo “free flow”? This would be a dramatic rapid outpouring of air bubbles, draining the tank in a few minutes. It would look great in the film. The question is how would the bad guy tamper with it so that the free flow only happened mid- dive. Perhaps a small amount of weak acid dripped into the octo just before dive? The acid would slowly eat through the diaphragm and spring mechanism.The trip to the surface would wash out the evidence and an investigation would show badly worn/ corroded parts.

Not that you have done this, but pet peeve: non-divers often refer to “oxygen” tanks. It’s really compressed air tanks. Only in very specific circumstances do we breath pure oxygen. Sometimes we dive enriched air. But it’s best to call them “air” tanks.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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