ABC Primetime Deep, Deep Diver Story

[Walter]

brutus_scuba, thanks for the kind words. To me, body recovery is not heroic. It's a difficult and unpleasant job. To me heroic means risking your life to save the life of another person. I know lots of public safety divers. They are heroic people, but not because of the bodies they recover. They are heroic because of their willingness to put themselves at risk to save lives and not just when they are diving. Most of these folks are LEOs or firefighters. Those are two professions that can require one to be heroic.

As I watched the special, it was obvious to me that Dave Shaw intended to search for the body on his first descent to the bottom. I believe I do understand what drove him. I could be wrong, but it appeared to be a desire to set records. I wasn't there, but everything aired the other night pointed toward ego. Don Shirley was heroic in his attempt to save Dave Shaw. IMO, there was nothing heroic in Dave Shaw's attempt to recover the body.

Yes, they made bad decisions. The first bad decision was the decision to recover the body. The second bad decision was to attempt a new task with a gear configuration that was not second nature, especially at extreme depth. The third bad decision was to attempt a complicated task on his second ever descent to such a depth. A team should have practiced dives to that depth prior to ever attempting a recovery. That was not a one man job.

 

[PerroneFord]

......that says J or others do this EVERY other weekend as you pointed out.

"It had been almost 6 years since the team supported a 24 hour operation and my compliments to the entire support and surface management team for an outstanding job. The October, 2005 dive at Chip's Hole came close to 24 hours"

you were there? why?

No, but if you looked at the link, you'd see that they did similar dives again and again. It had been some time since the visibility allowed them to make such dives, hence the gap in time (6 years) since they had done a dive that long.

I was there because I knew some of the divers, and I wanted to see how the operation worked, and to wish them luck. It was the first big dive of the season.

 

[brutus_scuba]

brutus_scuba, thanks for the kind words. To me, body recovery is not heroic. It's a difficult and unpleasant job. To me heroic means risking your life to save the life of another person. I know lots of public safety divers. They are heroic people, but not because of the bodies they recover. They are heroic because of their willingness to put themselves at risk to save lives and not just when they are diving. Most of these folks are LEOs or firefighters. Those are two professions that can require one to be heroic.

As I watched the special, it was obvious to me that Dave Shaw intended to search for the body on his first descent to the bottom. I believe I do understand what drove him. I could be wrong, but it appeared to be a desire to set records. I wasn't there, but everything aired the other night pointed toward ego. Don Shirley was heroic in his attempt to save Dave Shaw. IMO, there was nothing heroic in Dave Shaw's attempt to recover the body.

Yes, they made bad decisions. The first bad decision was the decision to recover the body. The second bad decision was to attempt a new task with a gear configuration that was not second nature, especially at extreme depth. The third bad decision was to attempt a complicated task on his second ever descent to such a depth. A team should have practiced dives to that depth prior to ever attempting a recovery. That was not a one man job.

I do not believe the reward has to be saving a human life in order for something to be heroic. There were some teachers who put their jobs on the line enorder to fight for a higher quality education at my high school and I would consider those actions heroic b/c they laid somethign on the line for something that benefitted someone other than themselves. It's been commented on here that the family was happy and at peace with the body being on the bottom, but I do believe that it was stated that the father would have asked Dave to recover the body if he had not offered, and that the mother had not accepted that her son was dead yet, and still 10 years later pretended in her head that her son was alive b/c she could not see the body.

I agree with you about the changing gear configurations especially at extreme depths. My only question for you, and for anyone is are we sure that this was only Dave's second dive to such depths? I dont' mean 867' or whatever the exact depth of the body was? But how many dives did he have below say below 250 meters (820 feet). I imagine that they had a number of dives below this depth and that's why he decided he wanted to set a record where he explored the bottom of the cave.

It is impossible for us to know weather or not Dave was looking for the body as he made his first decent to the bottom of the cave. His original statement was just that he wanted to explore and not just drop to the bottom and come right back up which is something I understand.

I am not sure how PSD's deal with bagging a body, but I do know that a lot of the work they do is solo, usually b/c of black water or current, but none the less it is not unheard of for solo dives from rescue dives.

 

[ReefGuy]

I am not sure how PSD's deal with bagging a body, but I do know that a lot of the work they do is solo, usually b/c of black water or current, but none the less it is not unheard of for solo dives from rescue dives.

Sorry, but not correct. We require a minimum of 4 divers to make any type of recovery (two in the water, one tender, one safety). Even in Black water, or current, we are in constant communication (diver to diver and diver to shore) and constantly work as a team. The divers are also tethered to the shore and tender. This is a pretty standard configuration for any recovery team.

In your last sentence you're mixing things up a bit. I can believe a solo dive for a rescue, but a recovery dive is completely different. A successful recovery dive does not involve bringing back more bodies than you started with.

 

[brutus_scuba]

Sorry, but not correct. We require a minimum of 4 divers to make any type of recovery (two in the water, one tender, one safety). Even in Black water, or current, we are in constant communication (diver to diver and diver to shore) and constantly work as a team. The divers are also tethered to the shore and tender. This is a pretty standard configuration for any recovery team.

In your last sentence you're mixing things up a bit. I can believe a solo dive for a rescue, but a recovery dive is completely different. A successful recovery dive does not involve bringing back more bodies than you started with.

By solo I did not mean with out any support I know that suface support and tenders are always there and back up divers ready, what I meant was there are not two traditional dive buddies in the water sticking two feet away from eachother. Dave Shaw did have a support team around him with surface support and what not.

 

[ReefGuy]

By solo I did not mean with out any support I know that suface support and tenders are always there and back up divers ready, what I meant was there are not two traditional dive buddies in the water sticking two feet away from eachother. Dave Shaw did have a support team around him with surface support and what not.

To clarify, the two divers in the water are both tethered and within arm's reach of each other. In fact, we function better as buddy teams than rec buddies do, after all, we're tied to each other and in voice communication and have signals worked out in case the voice comms fail.

You don't have to be able to see a person to be their buddy. It's all in the communications.

 

[all4scuba05]

What are the specifics about what killed him? It's been said that the light getting caught on a line was what did it. In what way? He had a cutting device in his hand. Was it panic that killed him? Did he overreact and therefore hyperventilated and then died because of his breathing? It was planned that he would have 6 minutes to bag the body and ascend. If he cut himself loose in 2 minutes,(This isn't the line to follow up) the body should've stayed and nothing would've killed him? It seems like he passed out. I wouldn't say that the light and line killed him. Could someone elaborate on what they seen happened?

 

[Walter]

It appeared that he passed out while attempting to cut himself free from an entanglement.

 

[PerroneFord]

Some of the CCR guys can chime in, but overbreathing on a rebreather is bad news. I am not certain if it is because the scrubber breaks through, because the exhaled breath doesn't clear the mushroom valve thus making you rebreathe a mixture high in CO2, or if the oxygen injection system can't keep up forcing you to go hypoxic.

Whatever it is, you don't want it...

 

[Warren_L]

There can be the issue of going hypoxic if you overbreathe the RB, particularly at the surface when PO2 can drop quickly (versus being a depth when it takes longer). Being at depth, especially at such extreme depths, it would take quite a long time for the PO2 to drop, even if he was breathing really hard since the concentration of oxygen molecules at that pressure will be really high. The body metabolizes O2 based on workload, which is independent of pressure, so all else being equal, you will use the same amount of oxygen at any depth (provided your workload is the same). The difference is the denser concentration of ambient oxygen at depth means it takes much longer to reduce the level of oxygen in the breathing loop. The other issue is a lack of dwell time in the scrubber - this makes scrubbing CO2 less efficient and could result in elevated CO2 levels and potentially leading to hypercapnia. Breakthrough shouldn't really be much of an issue due to overbreathing as far as I know.