collateral damage

[Rhone Man]

Back in the old days when I paid more attention to such things, you could glean two things very quickly from dive fatality statistics - almost all of them came from two big groups: rookies (in terms of diving experience) and seniors (in terms of chronological age). Ultimately, seniors have more health issues, and a dive complicates anything health related. Plus in many cases it can involve a more exertion than some seniors otherwise normally get.

 

[Tribes]

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.

 

[Diver0001]

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

My sincere condolences.

I would like to address your question (quoted above).

In my opinion, technical diving can never be made as safe as recreational diving. When you're deep and well over the NDL's, perhaps in a literal overhead, and something goes wrong then

a) it goes wrong fast
and
b) is has a better than average chance of ending badly

These days with technical diving becoming "main stream" we try to mitigate the risks with training and equipment (the same approach applied to recreational diving). In the days of Exley, Turner, Palmer and Bennett, to name a few, there was training but experience and procedures were more relatively more important than they are today. Ideally, you would want to have it all... training, experience, gear, procedures..... Don't fool yourself, in particular the aspect of experience has become neglected and if you ask me, I think it's getting worse as technical specialties gain traction.

I see a trend that I personally don't like much. I see a lot of "technical" trainers who are basically recreational instructors who are selling tech training..... I now expect a bunch of people to jump on my neck and try to spin this, but this is what's happening. Most of the time it goes ok because most of the time nothing bad happens. I looked through my computer log recently and I've done 482 staged decompression dives... actually 483 as of last night...

The shop where I work recently asked me if I would certify to teach tec-rec courses because they see a market for that which includes divers who want to buy a lot of gear.... I told him i wouldn't say no but I didn't feel qualified. He laughed so i looked it up. You know what you need to teach tec-rec courses... or more accurately, to call yourself a "tech instructor"? 100 dives... 20 staged decompression dives and MSDT. Someone with those qualifications wouldn't even ping on my radar as a qualified buddy for most of the dives I do..... If they dove with us they would seriously need supervision!

This is the lowest common denominator in technical training at the moment. Some who barely qualifies to be MSDT (actually, I don't think someone with 100 dives could qualify for that) and has barely enough experience to make a technical dive as long as they have supervision.... Some of these are the the people TEACHING technical diving..... and they can ONLY teach skills and equipment because they are far too inexperienced themselves to even hope to transfer any of that experience to their students. Moreover, even if they do understand the "best practices" of procedure, they don't have enough experience to understand why they are best practices.

None of this probably applies to your friend but it does apply to your question. Can technical diving be made "safe" ... perhaps *reasonably* safe if there are instructors out there who have the whole package (skills, equipment, experience, procedures) but given where this trend is going I'm going to say that things are likely to get much worse before they get any better.

R..

 

[DevonDiver]

No amount of training or equipment can prepare a diver for the physiological and psychological stress caused while tech diving.

I'd disagree. That's a very sweeping statement.

Training... and selection... can go a long way towards ensuring high survivability.

Where accidents happen, it's generally when divers are pushing hard at their competency and comfort boundaries. That's as true for elite tech divers as it is the beginners.

Decreasing training... and selection... standards will empower divers to more readily push boundaries.

 

[ajduplessis]

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.

Sorry to hear about your friend. Which sub did she dive?

 

[Michael Guerrero]

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?

Tribes, I'm sorry for the loss of a friend.

However, I've read all the subsequent posts, something I don't normally do.

Is your intent here just to smear technical diving? Or was it just you lashing out because you hurt and are angry?

Of course things are safer than in the 60s. To suggest anything else is ridiculous. Redundancy, training, and experience, make technical diving safer than it's ever been.

Dying 6 minutes into the dive connotes some medical (or gas) issue. Please don't besmirch your friend's good name by trying to smear technical diving.