Need a Chamber in Florida?

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

If someone could break out the actual costs of operating a chamber, even a 1-man chamber, 24x7, it might change the tone of discussion.

I'll make a WAG that having three 2-man crews (one operator, one physician) plus a fourth crew to cover vacations and weekends means...what, four docs with specialty accredation? $120,000 each per year? And the four operators, can they be had for $60k each? So, that's a fast $720,000 per year just to staff it. Add the equipment, maintenance...wait, maybe you need to double all that to accommodate a dive buddy (divers get hurt in pairs?) or just to have one chamber up when the other is down for maintenance? And a facility, and gobs of power, and climate control and lights and all those good things...

So how many local divers need to contribute, what? ten bucks per fill, collected at the shop? Or $25 a head, collected on the boat? What's it take to fund a million and a half dollars per year, just to keep one handy local chamber open? (Maybe someone can give us the real numbers?)

It may not be convenient but all of a sudden, that occasional $50,000 helo ride doesn't seem like an entirely ridiculous way to do it.

And you can't really scold the Navy, in this day and age, from being a little reluctant to grant 24x7 open access to potentially critical equipment inside a secured base.

This is not just a diving problem. Every time you hear about a bus going off the road in Columbia or Venezuela full of US cruise line tourists, you know where they go for treatment? To the nearest Class1 emergency room. Which is usually Miami-Jackson, Ryder Trauma, back across the waters to Florida. The LifeFlights are more feasible than building local facilities.
 
Los Angeles County has been running a large 6ata capable Multi-occupant Auxiliary Lock Recompression Chamber as part of their Fire, Rescue and Lifeguard Dept emergency services -for nearly 40 years.

This is their model of how to run a combination municipal government and charity donation supported 24/7 & 365 days a year civilian EMS dive casualty only Recompression Chamber facility:
How the Chamber is Funded > USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
 
Last edited:
As their opening paragraph says, a truly unique system. Unlikely to be replicated anywhere else, even if the Chamber Fairy dropped off a spare chamber to give it a head start, and if any other state were willing to cover volunteer liability to the same extent. USC, Los Angeles...those are some deep pocket players.

A local (county+ wide?) 20% excise tax on all SCUBA sales and activities probably could fund it, but I have this feeling that idea won't go over so well.

How about a GoFundMe page?
 
@Rred while I mostly agree that the costs are very high and for ultimately little diver use, I think your financial assumptions are flawed and incomplete. The employees needed to run a full time chamber are not dedicated to only chamber visits. They do their normal hospital duties but are available or in call when needed. Most of their annual cost is absorbed by their normal work. Yes they do have and need extra training and skills and these are not free. I drive an electric car, my chevy dealer has one mechanic who is certified to work on it, it's not like he is just sitting there waiting for an electric car every day. You can bet they have him working on regular cars, just when I show up he is the guy who works on it.
 
As their opening paragraph says, a truly unique system. Unlikely to be replicated anywhere else, even if the Chamber Fairy dropped off a spare chamber to give it a head start, and if any other state were willing to cover volunteer liability to the same extent. USC, Los Angeles...those are some deep pocket players.

A local (county+ wide?) 20% excise tax on all SCUBA sales and activities probably could fund it, but I have this feeling that idea won't go over so well.

How about a GoFundMe page?
It is truly unique in the sense of how LA County, USC and the local dive community have shrewdly set up the operation -financially and legally- and have sustained it for the past forty years.

Univ of Florida/Shands Medical Center in Gainesville, a Level 1 Trauma Center, reportedly has an on-loaned NASA donated chamber lying dormant somewhere on campus or in storage since its operation was allegedly shut down due to lack of funds in 2011. At least what y'all gotta do out there is a feasibility study on resurrecting its functionality, and the applicability of the LA County/USC Recompression Chamber model.

Finally, to reduce personal malpractice liability for a Volunteer Crew, the facility has to be run by a county or state department of health (i.e. Univ of Florida Medical Center) whose employees/volunteers fall under the legal protection statute of Sovereign Immunity.
 
Last edited:
Good point, Max. I think you'd have to do some convincing for hospital administration to basically offer an "emergency room" type service without any dedicated staff, and knowing that they'd have to be willing and able to pull staff away from other functions, sometimes for a couple of days at a time, to keep that chamber going. Hospitals seem convinced that adequate staff is unaffordably expensive to begin with, i.e. they put everyone on 12-hour shifts when it is proven and documented that the error and injury rates for shift workers literally double when the shift goes from 8 hours to 12.
You'd have to run it by management to see if "Yeah, we want you to have two trained people available at all times to drop everything and spend twelve hours with the chamber" would fly. (The really great thing about being a pessimist and looking at the worst possible case, is that when you're wrong it is always a really great thing!)

Kev-
It would be really great if a "forgotten" chamber exists in Gainesville. Not an ideal "Golf" location (to use the local accent) but at least a shorter helicopter ride. If they've got a piece of equipment like that just gathering dust...maybe you can get a couple of econ students to do the feasibility study. Good administrators would have one on hand, on the shelf, to review the numbers from time to time. Unless they've quietly sold it off. (As above, pessimism can be a good thing.)
If you know anyone there...sometimes a phone call and some rabble-rousing can start a ball rolling. If it is a small chamber...they're too easy to hide. Or sneak out the back door. (Damn, that pessimist snuck in again!(G)
 
A chamber in Gainesville would be great for the cave guys but Mobile would still be closer from the Pensacola area. Obviously Pensacola is not the whole gulf diving scene and I’m not sure if Mobile would be closest for PCB or destin. It’s a shame that FL advertises the Mighth O dive site to get divers there but can’t really support them if they needed it. It is a deep wreck. This does concearn me, much of my diving is done there. I hope I never need it but my plan if I need a chamber is to go to Mobile, and then home to New Orleans for further treatment of it’s needed (Or whatever DAN tells me to do)
 
The only Florida hospital based recompression chambers that can apparently treat divers through their Emergency Dept 24/7:

Level 1 Trauma Center in West Palm Beach:
St. Mary's Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine

ER Dept and hospital in the Keys:
Emergency Services | Mariners Hospital

As of the moment, there is no comparable recompression chamber facility in North Florida with direct ER Dept/ACLS hospital support (and that sadly still includes the Level 1 Trauma Center/Shands UF School of Medicine at Gainesville).
 
Last edited:
Does a diver treatment chamber need to be FDA approved Medical device or is a ASME PVHO good? What criteria is the Catalina chamber built to?
 
Does a diver treatment chamber need to be FDA approved Medical device or is a ASME PVHO good? What criteria is the Catalina chamber built to?

Purely used for diving and the treatment of Type 1 and Type II bends, then FDA and MDD is not a requirement.
The codes you mention are known fully as PVHO-1: 2016 an accepted universal standard of build with specifuc calculations for the viewport design and the full ASME corresponding code for the pressure vessel shell design is ASME VIII Div 1. (or Division 2)

For a recreational diver position once you "magic" into being a medical patient then the medical practitioners can add whatever medical standard they deem fit mostly to extract a excessive charge to the insurance carrier and to exclude competition from the DDC and commercial transportable chambers. Hence why commercial diving chambers or DDC Deck Decompression Chambers have no problem treating their own and the military and exclusive alternative solution and why the recreational diver gets hosed so much for a simple two hour session sucking oxygen at 60 FSW for a couple of hours (not withstanding the 5 minute air breaks and TTUP accent rates for the purists among us)

From a commercial manufacturing position a two man lightweight transportable decompression chamber capable to 165 FSW 50MSW rated chamber together with comms viewports medical lock oxygen BIBS CO2 scrubber stretcher emergency 3 hour CO2 internal scrubbers and 3 hour oxygen back up, Gas skid to blow down to 165 FSW twice and ventilate throughout the treatement costs about the same as an average but decent family car.

Adding a full gas anaysis package and treatment data logging of PP02 PPCo2 Humidity depth/time log would make it up to around the cost of a BMW X3

The Catalina chamber was a "gifted chamber" Not FDA or MDD it was and is not a requirement, the design build code was ASME

Historically getting bent is an occupational hazard to all divers and treatment is the same regardless if the chamber on site/deck or in a medical hospital facility the only difference is the time taken before blowdown is critical for a quick and full resolution. From arriving on the surface to being under pressure breathing oxygen at 60 FSW and commencing treatment used to take less then 5 minutes and use $20 of oxygen. By the time you got back to port the treatment is over done and dusted and then the medical bills can begin I guess. If required
 
https://xf2.scubaboard.com/community/forums/cave-diving.45/

Back
Top Bottom