A grizzly question

[LiteHedded]

generally very quickly,..... aboot 3mins will do it



i would has a guess that most divers that die will be found to have some air in their tanks..... panic usually would set in first, unless its the standard "drowning" death attributed to heart attack or some other medical reason

i update my local forums on dive news so cover alot of diver deaths, was at a funeral only 2 days ago for Sven..... please be careful out there guys!

cheers

doesn't sound that quick to me
*shudder*

 

[noladiver]

Another argument for Spair Aire.

Another argument for watching your gauges

 

[Doc]

Quote:
Originally Posted by RoatanMan
Another argument for Spair Aire.

not quite seeing the :joke:

Another argument for watching your gauges

 

[Lead_carrier]

generally very quickly,..... aboot 3mins will do it

When you're not breathing, I don't consider 3 mins quick.

 

[Nick_W]

When you're not breathing, I don't consider 3 mins quick.

Keep in mind that a person isn't usually concious for long after that first "breath" of water.

So, how do people die when out of air? Do they eventually find themselves unable to draw more gas and make the fatal decision to spit out the reg and gulp down sea water?

Taking that breath isn't really a matter of choice. The desire to breath is not voluntary. You can supress the desire, but only for so long. Eventually you are going to take a breath whether you like it or not.

When you do take a breath under water and water enters your airway, the path to the lungs is sealed off by the larynx. This prevents the water (and air) from entering the lungs sending the aspirated water into the stomach. In a small number of people laryngospasm lasts until death, in others it relaxes once they lose conciousness. You may have heard of wet and dry drownings. Dry means the larynx did not relax and no water entered the lungs, wet means it did. Either way, the lack of oxygen to the lungs leads to the same end result of cardiac arrest. At this point there is a chance of recovery, but shortly after cardiac arrest (roughly six minutes after the supply of oxygen is depleted) you will experience brain death which is, with the exception of vary rare cases, unrecoverable.

The whole proccess from the initial aspiration of water to cardiac arrest takes, on average, roughly three minutes. But a person loses conciousness fairly quickly into this proccess. The amount of time varies depending upon age, water temp, and other variables.

That, in a very small nutshell, is how drowning happens.

 

[mudhole]

Please remember, if you run completely out of air at any depth, as you ascend the air in your lungs and the air in your regulator will expand.

How to tell if the person is dead? Don't listen to a vote of the bystanders. An unconscious diver was brought to the surface, the partner called for HELP, and about 10 divers swam out to them. I arrived soon after with a boat, All of the "rescuers" agreed the girl was dead. . . Her face was blue and she was making "funny" noises. I pulled her aboard my boat and opened her airway and she was breathing quite well. Please don't vote someone dead . . . perform CPR and then if later the victim is pronounced dead. . . you'll know you tried.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

AN easier way to get the out of air feeling is just turn off the tank valve, works the same way and saves you the time in the parking lot

Have you ever breathed a tank down to empty? It is most definately different than turning the valve off, even in a parking lot. Now consider different size tanks; when they reach a low enough pressure to cause the second stage to not work properly they have different amounts of air left (same pressure). Next consider depth; the deeper you are the quicker the laborious breaths empty the tank.

Until you have breathed your usual tank down to empty, at depth(s), with your usual gear, you do not know what it feels like! One of my dad's driving lessons was to run my car out of gas a few times while driving around (take a full gas can). Going around corners, stopping and starting, watching the gauge needle. With my current car I can tell by feel when I'm ~5 miles from out of gas. Similarly, I can tell by feel when I am below 100psi on a 100 or 80cft tank (10-30fsw).

When I have been down below 100psi I already knew it; below 700psi I am monitoring my gauge often. But if my admittedly ancient spg breaks I am better prepared than divers who have only had the valve turned off in the pool or sucked a tank dry in the parking lot.

 

[EastEndDiver]

One thing I have seen in a diver drowning death is they will usually rip their masks off ,it may be a last ditch effort to breath not sure.I have seen this in two diver drownings ,due to entrapment,when the bodies were found and recovered from wrecks.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

CO2 is the trigger that creates the urge to breathe and wanting to breathe and knowing you can't is the uncomfortable part.

Once you actually spasm and attempt to inhale, you are probably so low on O2 that you will not be aware for long before the lights go out.

Another thing to conisder is the interplay of partial pressure in this scenario. Free divers are prone to shallow water black out in situations where the partial pressure continues to drop on ascent to the point where they pass out before reaching the surface. This condition is aggravated by excessive hyperventilation before the dive where CO2 levels are reduced to the point that free divers feel able to stay at depth longer than is really prudent.

But the same thing would occur during ascent with higher CO2 levels. Once the partial pressure of oxygen falls to the point where O2 is no longer passing from the lungs into the blood stream, you only have a few seconds of conciousness left - maybe 15 seconds at the outside. So in essence if you are asceding the odds are good the lights will just go out before you reach the CO2 induced point of feeling the uncontrollable need to inhale.

If you are potentially in that situation, be sure you are positively bouyant as on the surface you will at least be visible and may have some chance of being rescued and revived if you have in fact reached the point where you will no longer spontaneously breathe on the surface. This is also a situation where breathing whatever you have is appropriate even if it is high O2 deco mix or the gas in your BC.

Knowing all that, if it were me and if I were in a hard overhead environment and knew beyond all shadow of any doubt that there was no possible way to reach the surface (inside a wreck, cave, etc) I'd probably consider using the last few hundred PSI to hyperventilate before holding my breathe, taking the reg out and waiting to peacefully lose conciousness. Which would of course confuse the accident analysis folks since there would still be air in the tank, a reg floating free, no signs of a struggle, etc. and they would probably misinterpret the situation as oxtox or something else equally incorrect.

 

[dkatchalov]

CO2 is the trigger that creates the urge to breathe and wanting to breathe and knowing you can't is the uncomfortable part.

Once you actually spasm and attempt to inhale, you are probably so low on O2 that you will not be aware for long before the lights go out.

Another thing to conisder is the interplay of partial pressure in this scenario. Free divers are prone to shallow water black out in situations where the partial pressure continues to drop on ascent to the point where they pass out before reaching the surface. This condition is aggravated by excessive hyperventilation before the dive where CO2 levels are reduced to the point that free divers feel able to stay at depth longer than is really prudent.

But the same thing would occur during ascent with higher CO2 levels. Once the partial pressure of oxygen falls to the point where O2 is no longer passing from the lungs into the blood stream, you only have a few seconds of conciousness left - maybe 15 seconds at the outside. So in essence if you are asceding the odds are good the lights will just go out before you reach the CO2 induced point of feeling the uncontrollable need to inhale.

If you are potentially in that situation, be sure you are positively bouyant as on the surface you will at least be visible and may have some chance of being rescued and revived if you have in fact reached the point where you will no longer spontaneously breathe on the surface. This is also a situation where breathing whatever you have is appropriate even if it is high O2 deco mix or the gas in your BC.

Knowing all that, if it were me and if I were in a hard overhead environment and knew beyond all shadow of any doubt that there was no possible way to reach the surface (inside a wreck, cave, etc) I'd probably consider using the last few hundred PSI to hyperventilate before holding my breathe, taking the reg out and waiting to peacefully lose conciousness. Which would of course confuse the accident analysis folks since there would still be air in the tank, a reg floating free, no signs of a struggle, etc. and they would probably misinterpret the situation as oxtox or something else equally incorrect.

Good post DA, especially the last part. I often think about underwater emergencies and how those risks can be mitigated. I also wonder whether there is a gracious way to die if you know with 110% certainty that you will in fact die. It makes me more comfortable knowing that there is a way you can spend your last moments in peace instead of wildly thrashing around.

I don't know whether others think about this? To me, the risks of dying while diving are fairly real and I try to consider all the various angles before I go in the water.

DK.