I was thumbing through a magazine recently and ran across an article about the sinking of the Titanic. It immediately struck me that several of the points made in the article apply equally well to SCUBA diving, so I thought I'd tweak them a bit and include them here.
1. No disaster (or incident) is a single event.
This has been talked about before numerous times but it bears repeating. Some people refer to each contributing event as links in the incident chain, while others refer to it as slices of pie. Regardless of what you call it the premise is the same. Each event that occurs adds another link, or slice of pie. If you fail to control those contributing factors, you start a cascade of events that becomes unmanageable. Panic may start to set in and lead you to taking unnecessary risks, or worse taking no action at all. The sooner you can isolate and eliminate those individual events the more likely you are to avoid a disaster.
2. Success breeds complacency.
Every time people have a successful dive and nothing goes wrong, they have a tendency to become a bit more complacent. This can lead to skipping things like buddy checks, S-drills, or ignoring established rules and protocols. The "It will never happen to me" syndrome starts to take effect. Planning for a worst case scenario on every single dive may be a bit overkill, but stopping to at least consider the possibilities of what might go wrong will go a long way to keeping it from ever happening, or at least to help make sure that you're prepared for it.
3. Technology outpaces judgment.
In the "old days" there were no octos, no pressure gauges, no dive computers and no ready access to thousands of dive sites. It's hard to get into too much trouble doing a shore dive with a limited gas supply. Now, any OW diver with minimal training can strap on a 100cf tank and do a wall dive while relying on their computer to keep them safe. Doubles, rebreathers, and all manner of equipment is available to people with minimal amounts of training. Popular technical dive sites such as caves and wrecks are widely publicized and easily accessible to the foolhardy. I speak from experience here, because I've personally outpaced my judgment numerous times early in my diving career. Looking back and knowing now what I didn't know then, I'm probably lucky to have survived some of those escapades.
4. People fail to plan for the worst.
Having a plan for what to do when the fecal matter hits the rotating air mover doesn't mean that you have to live in fear. It just means that you've weighed the risks and come to a decision about what you consider an acceptable level. It could mean that you carry a signalling device in case you get separated from the boat, or it could mean that you carry 3, plus a waterproof radio. Regardless of what you decide, the important part is to make a decision. Analyze what could go wrong, and decide what you can do to mitigate it, then follow through with your approach. There is a reason why bad things always seem to happen to the unprepared - it's because they're unprepared to deal with it!
I'm sure there are many more points that can be made, and I feel confident that our knowledgeable user base will have no problem adding to this list. Hopefully it will give someone reason to pause and give some consideration to their own diving, and how it might apply or could improve it.
1. No disaster (or incident) is a single event.
This has been talked about before numerous times but it bears repeating. Some people refer to each contributing event as links in the incident chain, while others refer to it as slices of pie. Regardless of what you call it the premise is the same. Each event that occurs adds another link, or slice of pie. If you fail to control those contributing factors, you start a cascade of events that becomes unmanageable. Panic may start to set in and lead you to taking unnecessary risks, or worse taking no action at all. The sooner you can isolate and eliminate those individual events the more likely you are to avoid a disaster.
2. Success breeds complacency.
Every time people have a successful dive and nothing goes wrong, they have a tendency to become a bit more complacent. This can lead to skipping things like buddy checks, S-drills, or ignoring established rules and protocols. The "It will never happen to me" syndrome starts to take effect. Planning for a worst case scenario on every single dive may be a bit overkill, but stopping to at least consider the possibilities of what might go wrong will go a long way to keeping it from ever happening, or at least to help make sure that you're prepared for it.
3. Technology outpaces judgment.
In the "old days" there were no octos, no pressure gauges, no dive computers and no ready access to thousands of dive sites. It's hard to get into too much trouble doing a shore dive with a limited gas supply. Now, any OW diver with minimal training can strap on a 100cf tank and do a wall dive while relying on their computer to keep them safe. Doubles, rebreathers, and all manner of equipment is available to people with minimal amounts of training. Popular technical dive sites such as caves and wrecks are widely publicized and easily accessible to the foolhardy. I speak from experience here, because I've personally outpaced my judgment numerous times early in my diving career. Looking back and knowing now what I didn't know then, I'm probably lucky to have survived some of those escapades.
4. People fail to plan for the worst.
Having a plan for what to do when the fecal matter hits the rotating air mover doesn't mean that you have to live in fear. It just means that you've weighed the risks and come to a decision about what you consider an acceptable level. It could mean that you carry a signalling device in case you get separated from the boat, or it could mean that you carry 3, plus a waterproof radio. Regardless of what you decide, the important part is to make a decision. Analyze what could go wrong, and decide what you can do to mitigate it, then follow through with your approach. There is a reason why bad things always seem to happen to the unprepared - it's because they're unprepared to deal with it!
I'm sure there are many more points that can be made, and I feel confident that our knowledgeable user base will have no problem adding to this list. Hopefully it will give someone reason to pause and give some consideration to their own diving, and how it might apply or could improve it.
