3 unaccounted for after a flooded magnesite mine 'Maria Concordia' dive in Poland

[Celt]

Mines and wrecks are made by humans, thus have logical designs that can be understood.

And caves are formed naturally and can be understood by geologists. Caves are stable and formed over millions of years whereas wrecks and abandoned mines are collapsing and changing. Unexplored caves may be difficult but who is cave training or diving for that matter in unexplored caves.

 

[ginti]

@mac64 , wrecks present totally different characteristics, and deep wreck penetration is usually more challenging (deep=you need to use the reel and are far from any natural light).

Regarding mine-diving, although unstable mines exist, this is not necessarily the case; furthermore, unstable caves exist too. But these places are generally not for novices; therefore, they are not even considered in the course standards (no mentally stable instructor would ever bring the students into an unstable environment). To be clear, by unstable, I mean that if you touch something wrong, the environment change (for instance, a wall could collapse).

Regarding the differences between caves and mines, the critical aspect is that mine navigation is generally more straightforward than cave one. This is why, according to most standards, cave divers can go into mines, but not the other way around.

EDIT: there are obviously some other differences between mines and caves, but they are less critical than navigation.

 

[Celt]

@mac64 , wrecks present totally different characteristics, and deep wreck penetration is usually more challenging (deep=you need to use the reel and are far from any natural light).

Regarding mine-diving, although unstable mines exist, this is not necessarily the case; furthermore, unstable caves exist too. But these places are generally not for novices; therefore, they are not even considered in the course standards (no mentally stable instructor would ever bring the students into an unstable environment). To be clear, by unstable, I mean that if you touch something wrong, the environment change (for instance, a wall could collapse).

Regarding the differences between caves and mines, the critical aspect is that mine navigation is generally more straightforward than cave one. This is why, according to most standards, cave divers can go into mines, but not the other way around.

EDIT: there are obviously some other differences between mines and caves, but they are less critical than navigation.

Thank you. There's some very dangerous flooded coal and anthracite mines in Ireland. But of course cave exploration is dangerous and both need careful planning and training.

 

[ginti]

Thank you. There's some very dangerous flooded coal and anthracite mines in Ireland. But of course cave exploration is dangerous and both need careful planning and training.

Yes! That's the point

Novices go only into "easy" caves and/or mines, where the major difference is navigation. But advanced dives are a different beast - at that level, experience is the queen, and the certification issued by any agency is just a piece of plastic (maybe necessary only to do some paperwork).

 

[Hiszpan]

3. The instructor may or may not report to us that he will be performing a course dive. Not every place in the mine has a risk of dust / sediment build-up (and the instructor knew it well).

The above excerpt is contraindicated by your own words:

You need to know what the MC Mine booking process looks like (and frankly speaking, I don't think we apply any different rules than people running a similar business). The interested person sends us an e-mail inquiry about a free date and indicates that he wants to come with, for example, 3 divers. He receives an email from us with a preliminary booking confirmation, details for the advance payment and various documents to read, including the mine's regulations. After the advance payment is made, the reservation is confirmed. I do not follow or find out if the person who made the reservation (and is from some diving center, for example) announces it on their website. The mine regulations clearly indicate what qualifications we, as a mine, require for diving. It also indicates that it is possible to dive without the required qualifications as long as the diver is under the supervision of an instructor and the dive is a training dive. The regulations clearly state that you can only dive where there are lines (as you know, there were no lines in the side corridor).

If you require either qualifications or the supervision of an instructor from those who do not possess qualifications, then you must know that course dives are happening, as those divers do not have the qualifications (unless you require them but you do not check them - that is a possibility albeit not necessarily exonerating one.) The above also points to an opposite direction as your earlier words below:

5. The instructor was NOT working as an employee or a representative of the mine during the accident. He was teaching as an independent instructor. As the administration of the mine, we do not run courses (at least not yet) - we simply provide external instructors / diving schools with a place to dive - we "rent" the mine (but basically there are no courses in the mine - most often we have cave / mine divers for „normal” diving, ie for visiting the mine).

As the report found out (and the ADDdiving calendar seemed to suggest too,) the courses were happening at your site, and you must have known about them as you require qualifications from the participants (or an instructor supervising the course.)

I do not question the existence of standards, but another aspect of such standards can be considered - they do not constitute (at least in Poland) applicable law. They are certain rules established by PRIVATE companies - diving federations.
I will say more, in Poland you can currently dive without any diving qualifications (until 2010, diving required having appropriate qualifications confirmed by an appropriate document).

So for now, a OWD, Cave or similar certificate is a document issued by a private company that only certifies that you have completed a course with that private company. These are not documents such as, for example, a driving license - because you must have a state "license" to drive a car.

The above arguments, in my opinion, are moot twofold:
1) Hardly any country (if none, but I stand to be corrected) has specific statutes requiring a variety of qualifications for a variety of diving types.
2) Yet your site requires qualifications because there is something called negligence that you can be charged with as a commercial entity (and in Polish law, it is called 'szkoda deliktowa' in the Civil Code,) if you allowed someone unqualified to dive in your mine.


I know that there are probably no caves in Poland where one can conduct a cave course, and the market pressure of many divers wanting to obtain such a qualification is very appealing. I suspect that is why mine operators allowed those courses to happen, either with or without knowledge that they should not happen there and qualifications obtained like that would not prepare a diver to dive in caves. But if going forward nothing changes then what is the point of having a) regulations and b) reports from fatalities like we have here? The community is yearning for reports after dive incidents, and yet when we have a comprehensive report of a triple fatality in the overhead environment, what I hear is a normalization of deviance instead of a discussion of how and what to change. My final point is here:

4. You can ask the students of the unfortunate course (or actually only the one survivor) whether the choice of the place for the cave course (in the mine) raised their doubts. You cannot forget (see the report) that it was an advanced course for advanced divers (one of the divers even had Full Tmx qualifications).

Students trust their instructor and anyone involved that they are in safe hands. They do not know, what they do not know. They do not know that a mine can have silt out of the worst kind as there is no flow and the composition of silt could be greatly different than a cave, rendering seeing their own compass impossible. They do not know that their instructor should not conduct their course in a mine for the reasons outlined above. That was not the only cause of their demise, but questions by someone with authority might have uncovered that there is more wrong with this instructor. Swiss cheese paradigm.

 

[iwona_76]

I'm afraid you are drawing the wrong conclusions from what I have written. Basically, I don't know after the mine booking if the diving will be a course diving or not. Pursuant to another point of the regulations, only the person making the booking is responsible for allowing diving only by persons who have the required qualifications. It is sort of a diving organizer. Of course, it may happen that the person making the reservation informs us that the people with whom they will come are students. Most often, this topic is clarified when signing the required declarations just before diving.

Due to my profession, I know whether there is "szkoda deliktowa" in Polish law. However, it cannot be limited to the statement that if you let divers in without apropriate certificates, you always bear civil responsibility for it. It is not as you write that we require certain certificates in order not to be accused of "negligence". We require these certificates because we are overhead divers ourselves and we are aware of the dangers that overhead dives may result from people without proper skills. As I understand it, you come from Poland and you know the Polish reality. Have you ever considered if the administrators of popular diving sites in Poland, such as Koparki or Zakrzówek (and others), check any divers certifikates? This is open water, but why should we differentiate the responsibilities of a dive site administration depending on whether it is open water dives or overhead dives? Is the only difference that overhead diving is more dangerous?

At the moment, there are no courses taking place in the mine and I don't know if they will be held. In your opinion, only Mine diver courses can take place there. Of course, we can allow only such courses. Will such courses be less risky? Do we have a guarantee that such an accident will not happen again? I will repeat again - the accident did not happen because the "cave" course was held in the mine, and not the "Mine Diver" course. If the instructor informed us that a Mine diver course would be held, this accident would have happened anyway (because the course of the exercises would be identical). Accidents may also occur in the case of people with appropriate qualifications, if they act under the water against the learned rules or against the rules set out in the regulations of our mine (for example diving outside the lines).

It is clear that students do not know what they do not know. But in your opinion, we as an administration should have known the training standards of the instructor training organization. The instructor who claimed that everything is ok with this training.

I have an overwhelming impression that you are stubbornly trying to hold us as the mine administration responsible for the accident. Everything I had to say on this topic, I have already said, and I don't think a further exchange of arguments will get anywhere.

However, I would like to exchange opinions on the report itself, i.e. is there anything that has been missed and whether, based on what the rescuers found in the mine, do you have any thoughts, ideas that we did not come up with?

 

[jborg]

I know that there are probably no caves in Poland where one can conduct a cave course, and the market pressure of many divers wanting to obtain such a qualification is very appealing. I suspect that is why mine operators allowed those courses to happen, either with or without knowledge that they should not happen there and qualifications obtained like that would not prepare a diver to dive in caves. But if going forward nothing changes then what is the point of having a) regulations and b) reports from fatalities like we have here? The community is yearning for reports after dive incidents, and yet when we have a comprehensive report of a triple fatality in the overhead environment, what I hear is a normalization of deviance instead of a discussion of how and what to change.

Wasn't the point about not allowing mines for cave courses that mines are so much more logical and simple compared to caves that it leaves the student unprepared for real caves? Much like doing cave training in a cavern, or in a non-overhead environment?

It seems silly to want the mine owner to enforce this distinction then, much like expecting some beach to enforce a "no cave courses here" rule and somehow be extra responsible if someone somehow conducts a cave course on the beach and dies...

 

[Manatee Diver]

It seems silly to want the mine owner to enforce this distinction then, much like expecting some beach to enforce a "no cave courses here" rule and somehow be extra responsible if someone somehow conducts a cave course on the beach and dies...

I agree, Ginnie or any of the other privately owned caves, have no clue what certs are being issued by instructors. They just check that the instructors are in good standing, trusting the agencies to police their instructors. Nor should this really be left up to the land owners, it is a responsibility they are likely unsuitable to do and would drive them away from allowing divers on their land.

 

[BlueTrin]

@Hiszpan maybe the solution would be for the agency to get the students to fill a questionnaire to get their cards? Maybe a small % of them could be interviewed to see if there were a high number of violations of the standards?

Not sure here, unless something is law, you’d probably need to find positive incentives to change a behaviour.

 

[ginti]

@Hiszpan maybe the solution would be for the agency to get the students to fill a questionnaire to get their cards? Maybe a small % of them could be interviewed to see if there were a high number of violations of the standards?

Not sure here, unless something is law, you’d probably need to find positive incentives to change a behaviour.

I believe this already exists; it is a standard for GUE.