Bad Planning.... could kill you.

[cerich]

So there was another death at Ginnie this week. Which sucks. Given what I've heard from some of the recovery team, it appears to me that this was a case of poor planning. But that's just rumor. Rumor or not, I've seen a lot of poor planning when it comes to cave diving. Unfortunately, my dive buddy and someone I consider a close friend is probably the worst I've seen.


In planning a dive to the end of the line at manatee last week, I was told that my buddy only plans for one catastrophic emergency. So I gotta ask. What do you plan for? I've heard Jim Wyatt state that if you are going to plan for EVERY emergency, then you might as well not even get out of bed. But where do you draw the line? One catastrophic event, 2, 10?


Here's what I do... Let's use the dive at Manatee as an example.
Assume I'm diving to 10,000' for easy math. At max penetration my rebreather dies. ONE CATASTROPHIC EVENT. At 150 feet per minute on the scooter it should take me 67 minutes to reach open water. That's if I can stay on the trigger the whole time, there's no delays due to lost visibility or other issues like tangled lines, restrictions, etc. I'd guess that the average depth is 3.5ata. So, if my resting SAC rate is .5cfm, can we safely assume that when the crap has hit the fan, it might be elevated to .75 or .80. Let's be conservative at .75. 67 minutes at .75cfm x 3.5ata = 175 cubic feet of gas. Now, bear in mind. That's the gas you need to exit the cave with just ONE CATASTROPHIC ISSUE. So, what's it say about my buddy that wanted to do this dive with just 2 LP46 bottles for bailout. If you pumped them up to 4000psi, you'd have 139cu' of gas. Remember that if everything went right, we'd need 175cu' of gas.


But, that's for one emergency. Any idea why people carry 3 lights into a cave? Because two lights have been known to fail in a dive. Hell, 3 lights have been known to fail. In the event that your primary light failed, could you still maintain 150fpm exit speed. Could you still maintain .75 SAC. I hope so, because if you carried 175cu' of gas, you'd get to live if nothing else changed.


But what happens if the scooter fails. You're not going to exit the cave at 150fpm. You might be able to exit at half that. But for argument sake, let's say you could swim out consistently at 100fpm without increasing your SAC rate above .75. What do you need to get out?
10,000' / 100fpm = 100 minutes x .75 sac x 3.5ata = 262cu' of gas. And you want to bring 139cu'?


Guys, do you understand that when you plan so skinny on bailout gas, that all it takes is a SECOND issue to equal your death? Just one more issue, no matter how minor, and you're dead. Two things in a row happen all the time. Ever had two tires blow in the same week? A tire shouldn't ever blow. But they do.


Are you really going to risk your life just to save the hassle of carrying a couple of extra bailout bottles?


So, to answer the questions I asked earlier... How many events do I plan for? I plan on my rebreather dying, my scooter breaking, my dive buddy not noticing and scootering away from me, and I have to swim myself out.


10,000 feet back in a cave. I'm taking 100 minutes x .6 x 3.5 = 210cu' x 1.5 = 315cu' of gas. And it's not just me. Talk to the big names pushing long lines like Bret, Andy, Beckner, Draker, etc, and ask them if they're planning skinny bailout. I promise you they are not. And neither should you be.

To me it's about managing a snowball.

Look at the incident this weekend. It is predicable that scootering there will silt the place out, you do that and you can easily get lost off the line and buddy separated, especially because you were the type to plan something like that, you are most likely not orientated to the line all the time either...anyhow... So, then you are in the dark alone off line and trying to get your crap together, breathing goes up, it takes some time and you let go of your scooter (what happened to a leash anyway...but I digress). Now, even if you get the line and direction home sorted out, you went thru more gas than planned and have the trip home.... swimming (which should always be planned for...but I guess not by everybody) Now, you start the swim, trying to control breathing, knowing you most likely don't have enough...what a crap way to die.

But all predicable. Scooter in low silty spots, expect to blow it out and have issues, solution...don't. Scooter? Plan gas to swim out, don't trust scooter or buddy to do a tow when it comes to gas planned.

so freaking stupid...

like the deaths in Europe where they wrote "nobody could have predicted..." yet it was all predicable

 

[JonTNY]

It's very rare that I take anyone cave diving. I'm not the baby sitter. Do I feel bad? No, I'm not their daddy. Does it piss me off that they are too oblivious to notice I'm gone? Yes, and that just goes back to poor instruction/awareness.

I tried the self policing thing. I beat that drum with fervor. I was mocked, ridiculed, lied about. Evidence was made to disappear. I was threatened to rescind statements, etc etc etc. Today, I don't care what you do. Kill yourself if you want. Keep planning poorly. But there are probably people who were trained improperly on gas management, scooter calculations, bailout calculations, etc. This thread may alleviate some of that bad or missing instruction.

---------- Post added April 28th, 2015 at 12:44 PM ----------



Accidental or Intentional?
We dive differently than you do. In 19 years, accidental 3 times maybe. In 19 years, intentional....(which I know you guys would never do) too many to count. But, I've haven't had an issue while solo'ing YET.

---------- Post added April 28th, 2015 at 12:45 PM ----------



On CCR, that's hardly any deco gas imo.

---------- Post added April 28th, 2015 at 12:47 PM ----------



He and a few others believed that if an instructor was not good enough to get himself to and from say, they Henkle, solo on their own then they weren't ready to teach others. I agree completely.

As of late many of your posts seem to imply that instructors are the problem, unfortunately that just isn't the case, instructors give students a set of rules and procedures to follow...........THATS IT.........proficiency comes from practice over time that builds experience.

In order for an instructor to be successful they need GOOD STUDENTS that follow the rules and PRACTICE what they learn.

If anyone was to give a newly licensed driver a supercar and said complete a course in record time, thing parent going to end well for that driver yet none blames the drivers ed instructor for that.....so why is diving so different?

Is your recent bias the result of the personal issues you have with someone that was a year ago your "best friend" and now is a "scumbag" in your words?

 

[Superlyte27]

As of late many of your posts seem to imply that instructors are the problem, unfortunately that just isn't the case, instructors give students a set of rules and procedures to follow...........THATS IT.........proficiency comes from practice over time that builds experience.

In order for an instructor to be successful they need GOOD STUDENTS that follow the rules and PRACTICE what they learn.

If anyone was to give a newly licensed driver a supercar and said complete a course in record time, thing parent going to end well for that driver yet none blames the drivers ed instructor for that.....so why is diving so different?

Is your recent bias the result of the personal issues you have with someone that was a year ago your "best friend" and now is a "scumbag" in your words?

I'm not sure what bias you're referring to. This thread was about better planning. I've kept the same best friend for 7 years. That person is not a cave diver. But if we were talking about cave diving... I have three very close friends. They are Chris R. Tim B. and Marc B. I talk to them almost daily. They are my brothers. I'd do anything for them (like cancel class and drive to a Virginian ICU because no flight was available) or them for me with too many examples to list.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "recent". I've been beating the same drum about safety for 5+ years. I understand two or three of you got nothing better to do than stir the pot. So I know it's hard to not get sidetracked. The intent of this thread is to shed some light on practices that are not conducive to safe cave diving. Everything else is just noise. So, contribute or shut up.

 

[Carl_F]

A newbie cave diver but I've got experience in risk analysis. I enjoyed seeing how the risk analysis in cave diving closely resembled my day job (nuclear power.) The way I was recently trained, I would plan for two catastrophic failures (loss of primary and alternate regulators/gasses.) My team member is the third backup for gas. I do feel that additional margin is needed beyond thirds because of the potential unknowns of the situations that could end up needing to take advantage of the last third.

Two light failures would also be planned for. In some respects the light failures are not catastrophic except for the potential human error of losing situational awareness of the line. My teammate is an additional backup here, too.

Has anyone heard of a probabilistic failure analysis being done for a specific OC or CCR configuration?

 

[TSandM]

This is something we have talked about a lot, and in fact, we were talking about it at dinner. You cannot plan for every conceivable failure, but you must plan for some, and where you draw the line is something only you can decide. A great deal of my training had to do with planning for one major failure, and then demonstrating that you had the skills to keep that one failure from snowballing into a cascade of disaster. You had to show your ability to share gas without silting out or losing the line or the third teammate. You had to deal with zero viz and stay in contact with the line and the team, and make the same speed out you had made in (which is why, if you ever cave dive with me, you'll gnash your teeth over my slow entry speed).

I've dived to thirds, which I think is very aggressive, but usually in a team of three. I don't scooter, in part because where I dive, there are so many caves you can keep seeing new passage forever without doing so, if you don't live there, and I haven't wanted to add that degree of complexity to my diving. I've turned dives on geometry and navigation and just not feeling it. My goal is not not to die in a cave; my goal is never to be frightened in a cave, and still have a lot of fun cave diving.

I just don't understand cutting corners, especially on gas. I don't understand planning a dive where you don't care if you get separated. I learned a bunch of gas rules for searching, and I'd push gas to try to find a lost buddy. I can't imagine abandoning a friend in a cave and learning they had died.

Why? There is nothing in a cave worth dying for. There are no medals for "badass dives". If you can't do the dive comfortably on the amount of gas and other resources you have available, the answer is simple: Don't do that dive.

And btw, my SAC swimming at 50 fpm is in the .3's, so getting down in the .2's on deco is conceivable. And I did some deco with my head wedged into the Ginnie log, and came VERY close to falling asleep.

 

[karstdvr]

Wow a potentially good thread on dive planning which often times tends to be the weakest link in most cave diving has gotten derailed. The recent accident may prove this was a factor, who knows,but since so few do adequate planning, be it newbie or veteran, a good discussion could come forth, maybe.

---------- Post added April 29th, 2015 at 06:09 AM ----------

I just don't understand cutting corners, especially on gas. I don't understand planning a dive where you don't care if you get separated. I learned a bunch of gas rules for searching, and I'd push gas to try to find a lost buddy. I can't imagine abandoning a friend in a cave and learning they had died.

.

Nobody died from having too much gas that I am aware of.
The so called tourist caves suffer from diver complacency. Lets buddy up and do a dive. But the elements of a dive are left out-gas planning, S drills, emergency procedures etc etc. A dive from P1 to Olsen can reach and grab you and leave you dead,but nobody gives it any thought and blows it off as an easy dive. Murphy is a bad dude, have met him in the worst way several times, and survived the CTJ moment-can't be complacent.

 

[The Chairman]

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A ScubaBoard Staff Message...

I had to edit this thread due to the chest banging of a few.

Unfortunately, a lot of good went out with the bad, and for that I apologize.

Betting on one's life will never be tolerated here on ScubaBoard, even if in jest.

If I have missed any posts, please report them. I or other mods will deal with them as we can.

---

 

[kensuf]

The so called tourist caves suffer from diver complacency. Lets buddy up and do a dive. But the elements of a dive are left out-gas planning, S drills, emergency procedures etc etc. A dive from P1 to Olsen can reach and grab you and leave you dead,but nobody gives it any thought and blows it off as an easy dive. Murphy is a bad dude, have met him in the worst way several times, and survived the CTJ moment-can't be complacent.

Here's the contents of an email I sent a number of friends, and former students, that are budding cave divers on Monday afternoon.

Some of you may have heard that a cave diver died in Devil’s Ear yesterday. I’m old friends with one of the divers (the one that lived), and need to ramble for a bit on my soapbox.

I won’t go into details of their dive plan here, because right now I only know a small chunk of the story. But I will say that from what I do know, their dive plan was ill formed, and ill executed, and it resulted in one diver running out of gas no more than 300’ from the exit.

I have two friends that are going to recover the remains of the gear this morning. I feel sorry for them, this is never a pleasant task.

Here is what I can tell you. Both divers were fully cave trained, and had years of experience. They were just on a leisurely fun dive, but they got complacent and decided to be lazy on their pre-dive planning.

I recently helped with a dive that was supposed to run over 24 hours. Brett Hemphill and Matt Vinzant were planning a 3 hour exploration dive at 320’, but due to an equipment malfunction the dive was aborted. Ted McCoy and I wound up pulling out of all the safety and deco bottles at 1AM, and in the process of swimming out with 8 safety bottles (four each), we silted the hell out of the place and had no more than six inches of visibility.

In all honesty, while I was 500’ in the cave at 1AM with tanks all over me, stuck in zero visibility, I realized that I was safer there than I could be on a leisurely fun dive on a Wednesday night. The reason for that was because of the safety precautions we had taken given the seriousness of the dive plans for the day. I also broke out in laughter because of the absurdity of my situation.

Here is my point — on a weeknight dive, I may have been willing to skip over that one safety check because it was “a simple fun dive” and not very serious, or been willing to be slack on gas planning. The two divers that went into Mainland yesterday were complacent and they let their hubris get the better of them, they essentially broke any common sense in gas planning.

Remember, any one of us can die underwater — depth makes no difference, 10’, 100’, or 300’ deep you still can’t breathe the wet stuff.

 

[ericfine50]

Excellent post Ken

 

[Doppler]

From what I've read here, most issues have been covered... well covered. Just one thought keeps coming back to me: specifically a thought about this last fatality at Ginnie.

On their way in, the two folks involved in this incident passed several interesting waypoints: two of them known and named for being excellent spots to drop a stage bottle. When you deviate from best practice, the result will sooner or later be a predictable surprise.

The number of failures one plans for is directly proportional to the length of time one's team will be exposed to risk, and the size of the team.