Diver0001 once bubbled...
The OW divers thing was my mistake -- unintentional.
I apologize, I know you by another name, and forgot how many (hundereds of) times we've posted.
No apologies necessary.
I consider an unavoidable OOA something like entrapment or a massive freeflow that isn't caused by lack of alertness. Likewise I consider an avoidable OOA one that results from a lack of alertness.
So, your 30 divers a year that die, how do you divide them up between avoidable, and unavoidable?
Are you telling me that out of -millions- and -millions- of succesful dives, you see 15 0r 20 OOAs as an indication that instructors are not training students to check their SPGs?
Your logic numbs me here, and you keep totally ignoring this point.
This gets pretty close to the core of issue. I believe, like you that divers *shouldn't* be making the DM responsible for checking their air but it happens and it happens a lot. I've even heard people become quite disgruntled with the service they got from a DM because he didn't check their air or didn't check it often enough.
I've never seen this happen, again, it must be a location thing.
Since you know how vocal I am, I know that you could well imagine my response at overhearing a conversation like this.
I cannot imagine that you think this is the way these people were taught to dive in their OW class.
You could argue that this isn't strictly a standards issue because clearly everyone is supposed to be taught checking their own air--yet these divers exist and are dying at 30 per year or so. How is that possible? (and don't forget that we're only talking about the ones who were OOA and didn't make it back to the surface in time).
How many people get struck by lightning?
Have a car accident while tuning the radio?
Shoot themselves while cleaning a gun?
Rob, this number of yours is -absolutely- -insignificant- when considered against the infinite number of succesfully completed dives.
How do you interpret the accident stats? When I see 30% OOA in the deaths then I see a structural problem. That looks like evidence to me.
Of what?
Compared to what?
If you see this as evidence of a system wide failure, please explain -exactly- why the vast majority of divers never OOA.
Pleas explain -exactly- why this is a training or standards issue.
Are you alleging that these people were not taught to frequently check their SPGs?
We'll have to agree to disagree about this. But I'm curious how you read the stats then.
The feeling of course, is mutual.
Since you asked .....
The standards say that you shouldn't certify someone who can't maintain neutral buoyancy. It's in the standards yet it must happen a lot because there are a lot of divers who have trouble with this. Uncontrolled ascents, crashing to teh bottom, that sort of thing. It's all against standards; it's a "standards violation" to use your term if you certify someone who can't stay neutral and yet to the best of my knowledge the agencies make no attempt to identify the teachers whose students can't consistently maintain neutral buoyancy and to the best of my knowledge no instructor has ever been sanctioned for producing students with bad buoyancy. And 60% of the deaths involve buoyancy issues. And that's not to mention all the DCS's hits and what not that have buoyancy as a root cause.
Once again, your 60 dead divers could only be described as an abberation.
On top of that, there are several different causes of uncontrolled ascent, weight belt loss, equipment malfunction, panic, current upwelling.
Is current upwelling an agency standards problem?
I don't know how you read that but I read it as a QA problem. To me it's a clear standard that isn't being enforced and it's resulting in people dying.
Please extrapolate this.
What lack of standard do you feel evidenced by an infantismal fraction of diver injury?
How do you correlate this minute abberation against the titanic masses of sucessful dives?
And once again, I agree with you that making changes isn't going iimprove the statistics significantly because diving *is* a safe sport, but there is room for improvement and I think for the sake of the victims and their families we shouldn't be satified with "good enough".
R..
I think the majority of these families should be more insightful about the abilities and psyche of the deceased, because there's no way they can fault an agency.
