Thank you all. Yes... It is time for Rescue Diver Training... and I hope many are paying attention to Just how easily and totally unnecessarily a person can die while scuba diving. Something I myself would NEVER had thought possible until this tragic incident. I agree... the guy obviously did not know what he was doing and clearly panicked BIG TIME! And that panic cost the life of my friend. Rescue Diver training coming up soon for me.
Hi Honus. Really tough news on your friend there, and I appreciate you joining SB and giving this report, second hand that it may be. I appreciate that this sad news is tough on your too, but wow - you actually quizzed the surviving buddy on why he didn't save your friend from his own mistakes? That's a heavy approach on the surviving buddy who surely must feel like crap.
You are new to SB & this forum, and I certainly welcome you to both - hoping we can support you somewhat in your stress here, but there are a couple of points in this forums
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/accidents-incidents/52701-special-rules-please-read.html that might need to be mentioned here...
(4) No trolling; no blamestorming. Mishap analysis does not lay blame, it finds causes.
(5) No "condolences to the family" here.
Please use our Passings Forum for these kinds of messages.
I'm a little surprised at the direction that this thread has taken and must be misinterpreting something (I'm counting on scubaboard members to scorch me if I'm out of line here.)
Is the surviving dive buddy and his response to the situation being held responsible in some way for this tragedy?
If we are to take the facts as reported in this thread (which we don't yet know to be the case), a diver ran out of air, became panicked, did not ditch their weight belt and lost their life. These are not advanced diving skills or advanced rescue skills. This diver moved on another diver who also began to panic and did not ditch their weight belt either almost costing that diver their life as well.
There are a number of people on this board who have lost friends in diving tragedies. In some cases,there may have been true negligence like CO poisoning or unsafe boat procedures. Sometimes, the diver themselves makes an unrecoverable mistake by themselves, on their own, that they are responsible for. Gas management is simply one of those things. We can build devices to watch our air supply that will beep, vibrate or light up but in the end the diver is responsible. Perhaps it is all that we can do to just keep driving the message, “Monitor your air supply.” (...like parents telling their children, "Do not smoke cigarettes".) More training is always better.
If I perish in a diving accident and it is found that I ran out of air, someone will reference this post in this forum and point out that I didn't follow my own advice. I will be forced to own my fate. Whatever I was taught in my PADI course 30 years ago won't matter. I configure and maintain my own equipment so I own any gear failure. If I'm diving with buddies, it would devastate me to think that those buddies might somehow be held responsible or endangered for my personal failures.
Yeah, I think your view is more appropriate here. It'd been good if the survivor had ditched the victim's weights when the accident happened and the victim failed to maintain buoyancy, but first & foremost it falls on the diver himself to drop those weights if he can't save himself. If I screw up and fail to achieve or maintain buoyancy when needed, it'd be nice if my buddy saves me from my shortcoming - but first & foremost I should drop them if needed. As Dr/Inst Ken has suggested on this forum, yes - best to ditch them on the surface if possible, but if you can't make it to surface air, then dumping them from below is better than never. Severe injuries are possible from an uncontrolled ascent, but we can save you better from those than we can from losing your body on the bottom.
We normally think of panic as killing the person who panics, but in this case, it sounds as though panic killed the other diver.
No, I think it was the victim's panic that caused the accident. It'd have been better if
either of them had dropped the lead, and I'd enjoy posting kudos to the surviving buddy if he had saved the victim from his failure - but it was the victim's failure, even based on this one-sided report.
Of it there was a medical problem incurred by the victim that caused the accident, we haven't seen that evidence - but even if that were the case, we can't blame that & the downstory on anyone else.
Yes, I'd like to see more rescue taught on the third day of an OW weekend, and I think it'd take a third day to cram that much into a brand new diver's initial training. The industry couldn't stand it tho, extending training time & costs for both the Instructor & students - and our overall loss rate for our sport is yet relatively low. My home bud & I drill on ditching our weights the first dive of any trip, to New Mexico's Blue Hole for practice or on a trip to Cozumel - wherever, every first dive. Glad to hear your Inst husband is drilling his students on that, and hope they continue to practice it.
I stopped by the NM Blue Hole for a looksee today and to visit with the nice lady who keeps it in operation with her little fill shack. and met a young soldier who was quizzing her for info in preparation for his first dive there. He was planning a solo dive to 84 ft, at altitude in a hole new to him - so I encouraged him to find someone else entering, and ask him if he could at least tag alone with their buddy pair. Not the best approach, but better than his plan.