Originally posted by Iguana Don
Jon,
In your earlier post you said that if you are the most qualified diver you have a legal responsibility to the other divers, no matter what.
So, if you are on a boat with 6 other divers and you are the most experienced, you are liable for all? If you are AOW and they are all OW?
ID
That pretty much sums it up.
Provided you act within your training you are pretty safe, but in your situation of 1 AOW and several other OW there would probably be repercussions from the lack of any rescue training. It works in that the most qualified person has an implicit duty of care to make sure that people aren't messing things up. Simply because they are the most qualified.
So, if I was an AOW person, and took a load of cash off a group of (OW) friends to cover the cost of diving for a day, then as part of my duty of care is the provision of an acceptable standard of safety. If nothing happened, then nobody knows, and there is no problem. However, if, as a result of what we do, someone dies, as we have no O2 / Rescue divers whatever, I am looking at a charge of manslaughter. Now, as a DM, if I tried to rescue them etc.. then it is just a tragic accident, provided I act within my training.
Clubs get round this by ensuring on their boats they have suitably qualified people, usually someone qualified to handle to boat (the cox), and someone to run the diving (the dive marshal) onboard.
This pretty much sums up one of the mpain differences between Europe and the US as I see it. The US idea is that people are pretty much responsible for themselves (hence you have 'good samaritan' laws to protect people that actually help others), whereas, in europe, the general idea is that upto the level of your qualification in whatever field of study, you have a responsibility to society in general. A good example of this is that we don't have the good samaritan laws to protect people, we have the legal duty of care. Provided you act within your training, then you are discharging your duty of care, and even if the result is non optimal (eg someone dies) you are safe from any sort of prosecution (crown, or civil).
This is a gross generalisation, and apologies to those people that don't agree
Jon T