Training Scuba Ranch TX Diving Accident

[GLOC_The Human Diver]

The point is already conceded that OW classes have restrictions on the environment in which they're conducted. The question is can and should those restrictions be more explicit when it comes to either the conditions or the qualifications or ratios required to conduct the class?

I think the answer to that is no, because the agencies will say that it attracts too much liability on them. Keeping it vague means two things:

- Instructors can use their judgment to get training activities done and make money in marginal conditions.
- Agencies can point fingers when things go wrong and say you should have better risk-assessed the situation.

Risk management in the 'training system' is all about liability transfer: agency to instructor/dive centre, instructor/dive centre to student/client/instructor, instructor/dive centre to insurance company. 'Tolerate' risk is not clearly understood by many. It means there is an irreducible level of harm that remains, and that includes someone dying or being seriously injured. There is no 'zero harm' or 'zero fatalities' in diving, unless you don't get in the water.

The more you put restrictions in place in the training system, the less you are able to deal with the uncertainties and surprises in the real world. What needs to happen is to develop the competencies and knowledge of the instructors so that they can recognise the situation and call it, and can then explain to the students/clients clearly why the dive has been cancelled. Safety science shows that to survive in a complex, hazardous environment, you need more capacity than the 'normal situations' you encounter.

Unfortunately, without a significant loss of life (emotional trigger, or a politically relevant event), things are not going to change. The industry is subject to the normalisation of deviance because the drift across many elements of risk management in diving is socially accepted... it isn't about breaking rules, it is about shifting the rules to meet organisational and societal expectations and needs.

Regards

Gareth

 

[kammel78]

My opinion isn't to add another layer of certification for divers or instructors. I would imagine that shops and instructors would be smart about reducing the class size or bringing on more professionals to help with the class.

100% against putting the burden on divers. Instructors on the other had...

I'm right there with you on shops and instructors doing the right thing. Unfortunately, if that were the case we wouldn't have to have airline safety regulations, food safety inspections, auto regulations, banking regulation...the list goes on and on.

I also love your push for wider communications, and I hate being the cynic, but that info is available and generally ignored. I know this because I've seen good instructors use those tools (including myself). Many, many moons ago my favorite GUE instructor lived in Dallas. I connected with him to do a fundies class and ended up doing quite a bit of training with him throughout the years. Running up to a class he would reach out and get conditions reports religiously and a few times we had to pivot to a different location...one time Wheeler was a no/go, so I think we switched to Blue Lagoon, for example. And he knew I was in touch with conditions at Ouachita, so if he was doing a Rec3 or similar and needed depth he would call me and check on what I knew about conditions at all the various spots around Ouachita. My last private OW I taught, we drove 7.5 hours to FL. They're never going to dive in a crappy lake and they have no business doing their OW in a crappy lake. If they get curious later, great they'll have more experience dives under their belt to be better prepared and an open invitation from me to take them there their first time and show them around at no cost to them.

I love diving these crappy lakes and I've been diving them my entire dive life, but just like I love cave diving, not all environments are suitible for all purposes.

I would love to be wrong, but I don't think the problem is a lack of information. I think there's too much of a financial motivation to ignore the information.

 

[kammel78]

I think the answer to that is no, because the agencies will say that it attracts too much liability on them. Keeping it vague means two things:

- Instructors can use their judgment to get training activities done and make money in marginal conditions.
- Agencies can point fingers when things go wrong and say you should have better risk-assessed the situation.

Gareth, agree 100% on the "can" it change part for the points you mentioned. "Should" is a different question, arguably moot if "can" is a no.

And we're back to if the industry won't change itself, then it's:

- Give up
- Find a way to force it ourselves
- Wait until someone "important" has a friend/family member die and the ensuing gov't regulation (at least in the US)

I'm becoming more like Chris, and I've only seen a fraction of the nonsense he's seen, so I'm more of a stick than carrot guy at this point.

 

[GLOC_The Human Diver]

so I'm more of a stick than carrot guy at this point.

Sticks only work if you know you are consistently going to get caught, and the main trigger for 'getting caught' is when a fatality occurs.

The carrot side of the equation is where leadership creates the change. Colleagues of mine have been working in child welfare and have managed to get state legislation changed because the learning culture has changed through the application of human factors and system safety. They recognised that more and more punishment and increasing the number of rules were just driving the problems underground, and more harm was occurring. The politically relevant event was the death of a small boy through neglect and harm.

Regards

Gareth

 

[lizardland]

You're confusing so many things here. A "go/no-go" decision is "some kind of risk assessment". Qualifying dive conditions like visibility prior to diving is a standard practice, so I'm not sure what you're arguing against here. It feels like you're making a straw man argument.

I'm arguing against cherry-picking a single factor and hanging everything on that. Low visibility is not zero visibility and is only a problem when not mitigated against and allows the situation to spiral out of control. People who are mitigating against it, and there are plenty of options, are not creating a dangerous situation which is what is being implied.

The risk is: I cannot supervise all my students.

Can I cut the student numbers to suit what I can see? Can I plant a divemaster somewhere that he can provide additional supervision? Can I move the training to another part of the site where there is nowhere for a student to drift off to or has a better bottom? Is it more appropriate to defer this to another day?

These are all perfectly reasonable mitigations. If those mitigations are appropriate in the circumstances then that does not make you a bad instructor and certainly not a dangerous one. The comparisons being made to instrument flying and skiing double black diamonds are ridiculously silly.

And I'll say it again, the conversation is specifically around an OW class, not "training" in general.

And I'll say it again. At some point a novice diver who intends to dive locally is going to have to get in the water in his or her local conditions. Advocating they go to very benign clear & warm water conditions to train if that is not what they are going to be diving in does a disservice to the student. If I recall right a basic OW cert fine print reads something along the lines of "to dive in similar or better conditions as the diver trained in" unless it's changed since I did mine.

The point is already conceded that OW classes have restrictions on the environment in which they're conducted. The question is can and should those restrictions be more explicit when it comes to either the conditions or the qualifications or ratios required to conduct the class?

The environmental conditions, at least when I was teaching, were left vague because it was accepted that there is a large amount of subjectivity in what is and isn't appropriate. What is low visibility in one situation is unusually stunning vis in another. This is exactly why the UK Diving at Work Regulations which govern commercial teaching here are subjective risk assessment based rather than giving objective prescriptive limits despite the dive industry here being very heavily government regulated.

 

[johndiver999]

Blah, blah, blah.. If you don't specify a minimum visibility for OW training, then how do you expect some instructor to make the right decision? They are trained to follow rules, many, many rules for certification dives.

If the "professional dive training" agency can't/won't specify a minimum, then how can you criticize an instructor for failing to define one; especially when a bunch of people spent a lot of time and money to be at a particular location and the shop owner (and everyone else) expects him to get the job done and over with?

 

[johndiver999]

And on an entirely different thought. Many people frown upon stress inducing (pool) training activities for OW training. They often argue that only the "necessary" and reasonably expected skills should be taught, particularly because the training time is limited.

When I read about a situation like this, my initial suspicion is that the young girl (who may have been too young to learn to scuba dive) panicked, bolted and drown - I wonder if she really had (previously) demonstrated mastery and confidence in her own abilities of some of the watermanship skills that can be enhanced by introduction of stress in the pool?

People want to learn from this incident, but if she died alone and the only two relevant witnesses say "she looked fine and was right next to me - and then she was gone", what conclusions or assumptions or insight into training will this yield?

 

[lizardland]

I think the answer to that is no, because the agencies will say that it attracts too much liability on them. Keeping it vague means two things:

- Instructors can use their judgment to get training activities done and make money in marginal conditions.
- Agencies can point fingers when things go wrong and say you should have better risk-assessed the situation.

I'm not defending agencies, but there is also the practicality side. How do you measure environmental conditions in order to judge whether or not you are within prescribed limits? In my experience from surface watersports, most people (myself included) aren't very good at estimating things like wave height. Ask a dozen divers on the same dive what the vis was and you might get a range of good, bad, ok, etc. Ask what it was in metres and you'll get a dozen answers. If you set defined hard limits on things like this then it just makes demonstrating compliance difficult and makes dishonesty a bit more likely. If your limit is 3m visibility then you're going to see a hell of a lot of dives logged at 3.05m vis.

The more you put restrictions in place in the training system, the less you are able to deal with the uncertainties and surprises in the real world. What needs to happen is to develop the competencies and knowledge of the instructors so that they can recognise the situation and call it, and can then explain to the students/clients clearly why the dive has been cancelled. Safety science shows that to survive in a complex, hazardous environment, you need more capacity than the 'normal situations' you encounter.

I totally agree. People here complain about the Diving at Works regs and the accompanying ACOP but I think they strike quite a good balance between allowing risk-assessed flexibility and ensuring safety for both the working divers and the customers.

 

[peeweediver]

I do not wish to make any recommendations for regulations in this area, because I'm just not sure what would work. I only wanted to mention that I do think safety starts and ends with the dive shop. I taught for 15 years and our OW dives were in a quarry with progressively worse viz each summer. The last two summers of my teaching the viz was 5 ft. I discussed this with the shop owner and told him I would only teach 2 students if I did not have a CA because that's all I could see 100% of the time. With a CA, it was 4 and with 2 CA's it was 6 and 6 was the max. Even then, I told my students that I would assess their buoyancy control because if they could not stay side by side I couldn't see them both. My first post skills tour would be a very simple loop where I could make sure they could stay at the same depth. If not, we'd surface and talk about what we needed to do to get better at buoyancy and try again. As much as my position cost the shop some $$$, the shop owner always replied, "safety first". Not sure what he would have said if I told him, "Sure, I can handle 8 at a time", but he relied on my judgement for my class. No pressure to add students, no reproach for being a "wimp" about the number of students. As context, I did not rely on teaching to pay the rent. It was not my career, only my passion and hobby. I get that relying on the income changes the thought process, but it should never lead to teaching when you or your CA cannot see all your students 100% of the time.
I can't even imagine what the staff on that dive have to live with for the rest of their lives. As a father who witnesses the certification of my daughter and son, each when they turned 13, I am truly heartbroken for the girl's parents.
The standard for safety has to be ingrained by the dive shop first then by each instructor. We can rail against how many instructors get certified each year with little real experience, but maybe we can also help them when we see them to think about safety as paramount.

Rob

 

[wgw04024]

I only really liked to ski double diamond runs but I didn't get there by taking beginner lessons in life threatening terrain. People do just fine learning skills gradually. Get the gist of the gear and the breathing underwater, clearing your mask, etc. and then add the low visibility part once the basics are comfortable. Besides the previously discussed normalization of deviance there is the overly task loading a person who has yet to develop an already unfamiliar and complex skill set.

This is a much better worded version of the point I was trying to make. It really baffles me how so many divers don't understand this concept that is generally common amongst all other hobbies...