1 in 14 Cave divers die???????

[ajames54]

I'm sure I'm not the first to say...

99.9999% of all cave divers die.

(the 1/10,000% is a statistical thing since no sample size can guarantee perfect accuracy)

 

[Dive-aholic]

Depth rule??? If anything, it would of been the AIR rule IIRC.

Well, considering it took him and his team 2 days to stage bottles for the dive, including travel gas, I think he was okay with his air.

 

[octgal]

yes i am well aware how i phrased that thanks for the reminder Anyway, yes i think it was wrong for him to break his rules as he's dead is he not?! But if it weren't for guys like him we wouldn't know what the rules are or where the limits are. Thank God for us, we can learn from his death. Personally, i don't want to be breaking any records or pushing any human limits

 

[JeffG]

Well, considering it took him and his team 2 days to stage bottles for the dive, including travel gas, I think he was okay with his air.

Did you read the account? Its covered in "Caverns Measureless to Man". IIRC, he breathed down his backgas and stages too fast and couldn't make it to any of the staged deco bottles before running out of gas. He wrapped his leg around the line so that his body would not be lost.

 

[H2Andy]

Didn't Sheck Exley, the guy who wrote the blueprint for survival, himself die while attemping to break his own deep cave record at something close to 1000 ft while solo?

yes...but

this really wasn't a "cave diving" death. basically, it was just a shaft going
down for ever. it wasn't so much a cave as a deep hole.

the challenges were in the gas mixing. sheck was diving with above 2.0 ppo2
on purpose.

sadly, he paid the price. no one really knows what happened, but the most
likely sequence of events is that Exley got behind on his gas management, ran low
on the gas mixture he was breathing, and had difficulties trying to ascend; he then
stabilized himself by wrapping his descent line around his arms, was forced to switch
to a gas mixture unsuitable for that depth, and was incapacitated as a result. His
body was brought up when his crew retrieved his descent line.

 

[Meng_Tze]

A very sad event (immagine you know you are about to die, and prepare for the team to find you by wrapping line around your limbs) and just wait.......................


But this was by no means a 'cave death', it was basically a sink hole, VERY deep, but not an overhead environment. So to get back on track,

Do 1 in 14 cave divers die? And lets take the gesture of this comment as it is intended, not get bogged down into statements like 'we all die, 99.99999% die etc. I think the jist was to examine if out of every 14 cave divers actively diving caves, one does not return.

???????

 

[H2Andy]

Do 1 in 14 cave divers die?

no. this is much, much too high.

in florida, there have been 4 or 5 cave deaths per year for the past two
years or so (averages here). not the "slaughter" you would expect if
1 in 14 were dying.

 

[devolution365]

As stated before: 500 deaths since 1960 and 25,000 people certified means that your 1 out of 14 statistic is false.

Also stated before: The 25,000 number isn't really the number of people cave diving. Some get certified, but don't actively dive caves, others cave dive without certification. Unless we have some global law that any scuba diver that enters a cave must report it to a centralized agency who tracks such things -we'll never have the statistic you are looking for because we don't know how many "cave divers" there are to compare to the number of deaths.

500/25,000 = 0.02% chance
0.02% chance = 1 in 50 chance

But that assumes no one's diving in caves without being certified.

 

[Meng_Tze]

I guess we can put this one to rest....................................

 

[DiveMonkeys]

As stated before: 500 deaths since 1960 and 25,000 people certified means that your 1 out of 14 statistic is false.

500/25,000 = 0.02% chance
0.02% chance = 1 in 50 chance

But that assumes no one's diving in caves without being certified.

One in 50 = 2% As opposed to the previously stated 0.02% Kinda like the difference between being struck by lightning or running into a lightning bug. Speaking of lightning--we average 82 deaths per year in the US--so the risks of dying in a cave are significantly greater than being struck by lightning.

You're right, though, until we know average frequency of diving for a sample population, we can't begin to estimate the risk of death based on certifications.