MikeFerrara:
I hate to break the news but there are already lots of PADI instructors who teach PSD courses as PADI distinctive specialties. There are also quite a few dive teams who use this training.
This is not "new" news to this forum member and your statement helps prove the point I tried to make with my original post.
An extraordinarily high number of PSD fatalities take place in the "training" mode and 50% of those fatalities have been under the direct supervision of "recreational" SCUBA instructors!
It is a fact too that
ALL of the PSDs killed in the line of duty have been trained by "recreational" SCUBA instructors!
Mike, I agree with you. There are a lot of PSDs trained by well-intentioned "recreational" SCUBA instructors
AND I think you will agree, there are too many line-of-duty deaths. As pointed out, oftentimes the instructors pass out certification cards like PEZ dispensers without understanding that the lives of these divers (and the citizens they protect) depend on PERFECTION.
If there were statistics available, I believe the point could be proven that statistically, PSDs trained by recreational instructors were more likely to die than the recreational students trained by the same recreational SCUBA instructors.
Before getting on my department I worked at one dive store and opened/managed another. A very small percentage of divers trained through my store worked for a public safety agency. I would guess the ratio to be about 1 per 1,000. Using that
estimate, I am going to may a wild GUESS that for every PSD that is trained by recreational agencies, there are about 1,000 recreational divers trained through the same agency.
It is a fact that on an average, two to three public safety divers are killed each year (right now we are overdue!).
Using the estimates stated above, (1:1,000), it is very unlikely that 2,000 to 3,000 recreational divers are being killed annually. So this is the basis for my opinion.
I have a profound respect for good SCUBA instructors. I taught the PADI programs for a number of years and like Mike and Randy, I felt my students were pretty squared away. I even trained members of my own department under the PADI umbrella until I learned first hand there was a better way.
I attended my first DRI program in 1987 and was a pretty cocky "know-it-all" diver since I was an instructor, a former dive store manager, a commercial diving harvester, had been on the department for a number of years, etc.
(I had been around the block more than once)
In the first two hours of my class, I realized I didn't know squat about real PSD!
Since that time in 1987, I have made it my goal to
NEVER quit learning. And one of the things I have learned is there are
some similarities between recreational and PSD but there are also
HUGE differences between the two!
Mike, I am appreciative of the good things you do for the PSD team in your area and I appreciate you bringing this issue up.
Blades Robinson