Do get a co analyzer or not?

[suprane]

A diver buying contaminated air any where is bull **** and you should not have to test your air for CO any more than you have to test your food for arsenic.

If you folks really believe this is an issue, we should petition our worthless dive agencies demanding proper self regulation or threatening govt oversite.

If it is not really a problem and some are just suffering from OCD, that is another issue.

Sadly, friend, you are totally wrong! CO poisoning does happen! And far more often than the general diving public is aware of! If you think not then you are sadly misinformed!

As for petitioning anyone, good luck with that project! What American agency would you think might have juristiction or signifificant influence over a privately owned gas fill operation like Meridiano or Lyn Mar in Mexico? Or a live-aboard operation in the south Pacific? Or a dive operation at some remote location in Belize?.... That is a pipe dream!

There are, however, many countries (most notably in Europe) that have established maximum permissible levels of CO in compressed breathing gas and do require periodic testing. This is not the case in most places including Mexico and the US.

So feel free to blissfully suck the contents of whatever is in the bottle offered to you by some foreign dive operator! That is without doubt your right to choose! But, if like me, you have had a close friend that you had known for years die from CO poisoning at a resort you had visited and felt very comfortable with.... Well then, it just might change your whole perspective on the issue!

 

[suprane]

Oxygen content is a completely different matter and O2 testers are widely available. Oxygen is a required contaminant and its measurement is exactly opposite. We measure to verify sufficent contamination, not to verify minimization. FO2 testing is not (as someone intimated) a justification for CO testing.

Well?!?.... Not exactly properly stated as I read it!

I see that on your profile you do not list Nitrox as one of your certifications. If that is the case then perhaps you don't fully understand the full implications of the oxygen concentration in an EAN mix.

You see, as important (or perhaps much more so!) as measuring to see that there is "sufficient contamination" (make that read FiO2) in the tank, you should concern yourself that there is not too high an FiO2 level! (And I personally have seen this happen!) You see that is more likely to kill you at depth. Excessive oxygen concentration at depth is more insidious and potentially more quickly toxic than not having quite as much O2 in the bottle as you had planned for!

One instance where this has occurred is divers carrying deco tanks with high O2 concentrations (80%-100%) to aid off-gassing in the deco process at appropriately shallow depths. There have been divers inadvertantly switch to the "green bottle" at depth during a gas switch. The results of this are often swift and usually catastrophic!

 

[theduckguru]

Lets assume your position is correct, and I am not suggesting it isn't. Why is the dive community accepting being poisoned? You do the math on the number of divers each buying their own CO tester vs the air retailer installing the proper equpment. It an economic no brainer if this is truely a problem. If you have data on this issue I'd be glad to review it.

Don't think a liveaboard or dive op in remote location will install monitors, let the dive agencies mandate monitors for their franchises and include in their training classes a hard warning to never use air from unmonitored sources. Tourist $ can be a powerful motivator.

Sadly, friend, you are totally wrong! CO poisoning does happen! And far more often than the general diving public is aware of! If you think not then you are sadly misinformed!

As for petitioning anyone, good luck with that project! What American agency would you think might have juristiction or signifificant influence over a privately owned gas fill operation like Meridiano or Lyn Mar in Mexico? Or a live-aboard operation in the south Pacific? Or a dive operation at some remote location in Belize?.... That is a pipe dream!

There are, however, many countries (most notably in Europe) that have established maximum permissible levels of CO in compressed breathing gas and do require periodic testing. This is not the case in most places including Mexico and the US.

So feel free to blissfully suck the contents of whatever is in the bottle offered to you by some foreign dive operator! That is without doubt your right to choose! But, if like me, you have had a close friend that you had known for years die from CO poisoning at a resort you had visited and felt very comfortable with.... Well then, it just might change your whole perspective on the issue!

 

[RubberDucky]

bullshark,

You started out by offering the opinion that the OP absolutely should not be concerned with personal CO monitoring, while your 5th and your final paragraphs support monitoring for operators/fill stations. Your solution was that people should only dive with operators they trust. I'd be willing to bet that almost everyone who has been sick, injured, or died from bad air did trust their dive shop (who depended on their fill station) to provide them with quality air. (Well, most of them had likely never heard of bad/contaminated air I'd wager).

Am I saying there are a large number of incidents involving CO in Cozumel? In the entire scuba community? Nope. I don't know the numbers. I have only my own experiences, those of a family member who went unconscious while diving which was chalked up to bad air (tanks filled near a running vehicle, cliche but a well known problem), and those who I've read about.

stevep4444,

If we're ever on the same boat together a tank is consistently found to have an average of 25 ppm after repeated tests, possibly up to 40+, while every other tank tested ok, would you be willing to dive it? Our DM did and he was fine. Would I as a once a year vacation diver been fine? Why was the DM fine? Did the married father of 2 who was on vacation whose tank it was avoid disaster by the DM taking the "bad" tank? Could diving deeper on that tank have made any difference? Longer bottom time? Would a difference in physiology of the person diving the tank have a different outcome?

Who knows the answer to any of those questions? I certainly do not.

I don't think anyone is grunting "COZ AIR BAD!". Personal experiences and opinions based on those experiences are being shared. Obviously most folks haven't had any issues (obvious answer to your rhetorical question). You're more than welcome to dive any 25+ ppm tanks I come across so we can start answering some of these questions, as there does seem to be an unusual lack of volunteers for gathering data on the matter (joke, I mean no ill will, of course).

 

[suprane]

Lets assume your position is correct, and I am not suggesting it isn't. Why is the dive community accepting being poisoned? You do the math on the number of divers each buying their own CO tester vs the air retailer installing the proper equpment. It an economic no brainer if this is truely a problem. If you have data on this issue I'd be glad to review it.

Don't think a liveaboard or dive op in remote location will install monitors, let the dive agencies mandate monitors for their franchises and include in their training classes a hard warning to never use air from unmonitored sources. Tourist $ can be a powerful motivator.

I contacted DAN (DAN: Divers Alert Network - Scuba Diving and Dive Safety Association) earlier this afternoon. I was connected with a Dr. Denoble who is with the Medical Reseach Section of DAN. I asked him if there were any reliable statistics available for CO related dive fatalities. He readily offerred that there was not. He went on to explain that when they receive fatality analasis reports that they seldom include gas analysis information or the results of blood analysis to detect CO poisoning (carboxyhemoglobin levels). This may be in part because those doing the autopsies are generally not "dive-oriented" physicians and don't know to look for this or have the facilities to do so. They may simply chalk the death up to drowning for all I know. He then offerred the opinion that fatalities related to CO poisoning were probably higher than generally recognized.

As for individual divers testing their own tanks. He highly encourages it. He said that in facilities that do perform annual gas testing, this is almost always done right after they have serviced their compressors and installed fresh lubricants and filters. So of course they will have "clean" annual certificates! But what about the condition of that air the day before that servicing?! He also opined that air quality was subject to degradation on a day-by-day, if not an hour-by-hour basis. Even if they do have in-line monitoring there is no guaranty that it is in proper working order or hasn't even been taken out of service.

Again he stressed that divers were ultimately responsible for insuring their own safety!

DAN feels strongly enough about the carbon monoxide issue that they recently joined with Analox to donate ten (10) in-line monitoring systems to dive operations in Cozumel. See: DAN_Donates_Ten_Gas_Analyzers_In_Cozumel . They also often have articles in their magazine, Alert Diver, addressing this issue. See: When_Gas_Goes_Bad or Emergency_Oxygen_Units. In fact, if you go to the DAN home page and in their search box type "carbon monoxide" you will come up with many pages referencing CO!

So duckguru I urge you to do whatever you are comfortable with! I have no knowledge of what your first hand experience or training is in the area carbon monoxide poisoning in divers. I, however, will continue to follow the recomendations of DAN and their Medical Research section and continue to check my tanks! And, I will encourage others to do so as well!

 

[cruiser]

Why are dm's who dive everyday in Cozumel not getting affected by this apparent bad air?

Who says they're not affected? If they got bad air, they wouldn't mention it in front of customers.

 

[eingersoll]

Very enlightening, Thank You!

 

[Brules]

What if any dive ops in Coz check their own tanks for CO regularly? I have seen the ones I use check the Nitrox tanks always, but can't recall seeing them check CO.

I would think, as an OP owner, I sure as heck would do it.....

 

[Mike]

Dive operators in Cozumel and the world over don't check for CO because they see no reason to. If you own a dive business and have been running it for lets say 10 years and never had a CO poisoning issue, if there is no corroboration or consensus through your peers in the dive industry that CO poisoning is a problem, if no official agencies are saying CO poisoning isn't a problem being reported to them, why would you do anything different then you've done for all the years you've been in operation? I think if you were a fly on the wall at a private dive shop owner get together over a few beers that they'd pretty much be looking at all this recent interest by a few divers at individual tank testing of CO as a joke, just a passing faze with no grounds to give it any real attention, other than for the benefits of marketing but certainly not for safety.

Dive shops might not be saying anything publicly one way or the other, but their inactions certainly speak volumes to what their private feelings are on the subject. I don't think we should paint their inaction as uncaring to an important issue, but as their perception of ambivalence to something they don't feel is really a problem that deserves all this attention.

Who says they're not affected? If they got bad air, they wouldn't mention it in front of customers.

Maybe not, but a few would be dying from it wouldn't they?

 

[cruiser]

Maybe not, but a few would be dying from it wouldn't they?

If they got a lethal dose of CO in their air, yes they would be dead. Can't put much of a spin on that one unless it's reported as death from another cause, if reported to the dive community at all.