collateral damage

[BoltSnap]

I went to a mortally service a few weeks ago. A friend had died in a diving accident.

She died doing a 300 foot dive on a submarine . She had training, equipment, and gas to make this type of dive and had made similar dives before. Yet, 6 minutes into the dive she was dead.

Can you give more information on the incident: When? Where and what was the cause of death please? It is impossible to discuss what you want to discuss if one doesn't have any idea of the circumstances of the incident.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

Unresponsive diver taken to Catalina chamber - San Pedro, California

 

[Rhone Man]

I went to a mortally service a few weeks ago. A friend had died in a diving accident.

She died doing a 300 foot dive on a submarine . She had training, equipment, and gas to make this type of dive and had made similar dives before. Yet, 6 minutes into the dive she was dead.

This leaves me to wonder can TECH DIVING ever be made reasonably safe.

It doesn’t seem to be any safer now then it was when Sheck Exley and Rob Palmer both died on Tech dives. What is the Dora’s count..over 50? What’s the rebreather count up to? Look at the accident forum on The Scubaboard, it’s very sad.

No amount of training or equipment can prepare a diver for the physiological and psychological stress caused while tech diving. Tech divers survive the dives they don’t make the dives.

I know “we know the risk, and are willing to take them” but do you really or is it just hubris talking?


As I walked in the line of will wisher to give the family and close friends to give my condolences. You could see the collateral damage in the tears and grief in their eyes. Was this dive worth it?

I am very sorry for your loss. I appreciate in the aftermath of a loss like this not everyone will agree, but ultimately some people choose to live lives which involve choices and risks, and inevitably some of those risks will turn into tragedies.

Tech diving can never be completely safe. It safer now than when either Exley or Palmer (or a host of other superb divers) died - it gets safer every year through better knowledge, technology and training. But it will never be completely safe. A core concept of tech diving is that you are essentially trapped down there by physics. If something goes wrong - dive related or not - you are a lot further from help. If you have an aneurysm or stroke on the surface, that's not great. But if you have a serious medical episode under a deco ceiling, that is likely to be fatal.

The Andrea Doria has a fierce reputation, but the body count is only 16. I say "only", but of course each of them is a separate tragedy. But there are many far safer dives with far high body counts. The wreck of the Rhone (which I take my username from) has seen several dozen divers die over the years. It is not a challenging dive, but it is a popular one. And if enough tourists dive a site, some will have heart attacks and other incidents at depth, and they won't come back. In a way it is not that different from tourists who die having a heart attack climbing the step of Angkor Wat.

There is never a good way to lose a loved one. But I think we should try to respect the choices that they made. They chose pastimes which involved risk and adventure - I would hate to be the one that says they were "wrong" to do so.

 

[2airishuman]

I went to a mortally service a few weeks ago. A friend had died in a diving accident.

I am sorry for your loss.

She died doing a 300 foot dive on a submarine . She had training, equipment, and gas to make this type of dive and had made similar dives before. Yet, 6 minutes into the dive she was dead.

For clarification, I believe the dive in question was over a bottom at 195'.

This leaves me to wonder can TECH DIVING ever be made reasonably safe.

Let me count the friends, colleagues, and family members that I have lost long before their time.

1. Michael F., who died of a heart attack while in his 50s.
2. Donald T., who died of a heart attack while jogging, a few months after he retired.
3. Kirk M., who died when he was hit by a falling tree.
4. His fiance committed suicide several months later.
5. The smiley office manager guy at one of my clients, whose name I can't remember, who died in a fire after someone flew an airplane into the office building where he worked.
6. Kerry S., my former boss, who died of complications of diabetes while snorkeling in the Caribbean. I believe he was 60 or so.
7. Tony H., salesman, who died of cancer. He was in his 40s.
8. James D., high school friend, died in a car crash before he graduated. I understand that some expedient repairs to the steering had been made to the car he was in, earlier in the day he died in it.
9. The daughter of a family friend who died, tragically, after falling from a subway platform in New York just as a train arrived. I understand she may have had rather too much to drink earlier in the evening. She was 22.
10. Andy G., my cousin, died in his 40s due to liver disease. There were various complicating factors, including addiction and a genetic predisposition.
11. Rob R., colleague, I lost touch with him after he told me he was HIV-positive and starting to have early symptoms of AIDS in 1992. I am quite sure he's dead now. He contracted the virus before it was medically understood and therefore had no way to take precautions.

There have been others.

You don't have to be a tech diver to die. Life isn't safe. Tragedy touches everyone who opens their heart enough to care about those around them.

 

[kensuf]

I'm just going to copy my replies to your facebook thread in the NAUI leadership section.

https://www.facebook.com/ken.sallot?fref=gc

During the time period surrounding Sheck's death, there were scores of fatalities from deep air, pushing PO2s, bad gas switches (improper cylinder markings/gas analysis), etc. In most cases there was no, little, or outright misinformation on how to do some of these things safely. Thankfully we've moved way beyond that and through education and training the level of risk in technical diving has been reduced.

Is there risk in technical diving? Of course there is. There's always risk anytime you are in a hostile environment reliant on life support equipment to survive.

There was a time when anyone could buy scuba gear, but the accident rates and death toll started going up. The LA County scuba program was created, in part, to properly train people in as safe a manner as possible.

I'm deeply sorry for your loss, but saying "we should stop training technical divers" is the wrong answer.

I'm saying that NAUI and the main stream agencies should get out of tech. There is no amount of training that can prepare a diver for the hostile environment at 300 feet. There is not support necessary for this type of diving. There is no communication, there is no chamber, there is no tender, insufficient gas supply, on and on. We should get out, and let the so called "elite tech agencies " have it.

https://www.facebook.com/ken.sallot?fref=gc

Jim Hoffmann, I'm saying that people that are hell bent on going to 300' are going to do it anyway. Getting out of tech training takes away a path for those individuals to gain training that will reduce the risks. Burying our collective head in the sands will increase the body count, not reduce it.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

Sometimes you have to take what the OP says with a grain of salt. He keeps repeating 300 feet when the wreck in question is 180-190 feet. When I posted about my first dive there he replied
"Hey Max you just opened the pool to a bunch of toddlers, they will kill themselves on this wreck and destroy the environment(look what happened on the Hogan). I'm sure right now there's a dive boat getting a charter together (there will be charters every weekend until someone is killed ). Nice work (sharing the numbers for this wreck will be a very bad thing)."

It took seven years before anyone died there and unfortunately it was Gina Castillo. She was certainly no toddler. She had the training, skills and equipment to make nearly any dive. I haven't heard any cause of death yet, and may never know but to blame tech diving is reaching for straws.

 

[Rred]

So far, from this thread and the other URL, I see nothing that links "diving" to this death. I see that she was pulled "unresponsive" from the water, but that could equally mean a fatal stroke or heart attack simply happened to occur while she was on the dive. There's no causal relationship here.

This is like saying that if you have a stroke, fall over and hit your head in the bathroom (full of those dangerous hard tiled surfaces and corners), and you die there, that the use of indoor plumbing was the cause of death.

Is diving an additional risk, compared to walking on the grass? Sure. Is diving past the recreational depth limits an additional risk? Sure. And diving to 195 feet (not 300, let's stop the fish tales) is even more dangerous. But that's still got no bearing on what happened here, from what's been posted.

Most of America probably lives more than an hour away from a Category1 Emergency Room. Now, THAT'S risky business as well. Let's not confuse the issues, until there's something causal to be found otherwise.

 

[KevinNM]

Most of America probably lives more than an hour away from a Category1 Emergency Room. Now, THAT'S risky business as well. Let's not confuse the issues, until there's something causal to be found otherwise.

Nah, most of Americans live in urban areas where there is good EMS and hospital coverage. Now most of New Mexico lives more an hour away from the a Level 1 ED, but that's because there is only one in the state and the ones in Colorado, Arizona, and most of Texas are all too far.

 

[Rhone Man]

Sure, but there is no doubt that if a medical emergency happens to you underwater, you are considerably less likely to survive it. That's not unique to tech, but on a tech dive you are even "further" from being helped.

Even if you are two hours from an emergency room on the surface, somebody can at least administer basic assistance to help you until the EMTs arrive. No one can perform CPR during a deco stop.

 

[boulderjohn]

The big problem with this thread and the idea that agencies like NAUI should stop teaching tech is that it groups everything into one giant heading and ignores the variables. Here are just some examples:

• The most obvious is, as has been mentioned by several others, the fact that a large percentage of these fatalities involve deaths due to health issues unrelated to the dive itself. If you delete those numbers from the total statistics, the numbers will drop precipitously.
• Not all tech dives are alike. At the conclusion of the trimix course I teach, the lesson talks about the fact that the diver has essentially run out of courses to take. Extending the dives beyond the limits of the course is up to the diver's judgment. Sheck Exley was trying to set a record and was deeper than 800 feet when he died. In a recent death, the diver was beyond 600 feet when his scooter imploded from the pressure. There are dives being done well beyond what happens in tech diving training, and people who do those dives are indeed living on the edge. They should not be grouped with normal technical dives.
• In many of the cases, the people dying on technical dives were not trained for those dives. That is true of many of the cave diving fatalities. It is also true of some of the Andrea Doria fatalities. For example, one of the first and most celebrated cases was John Ormsby, who was by no means trained for the dive he did.

Finally, you have to ask why diving is different from other activities. A week or so ago a young man with no real rock climbing training climbed the first flatiron (a famous cliff) in Boulder with no equipment. He took a selfie and published it at the top. ON the descent he fell and died. Everyone celebrated his sense of adventure. No one called for a ban on training for rock climbing.