I spoke to one of the rescue divers that was on the scene the first day and I asked him what the deal was with the lock/key/gate issue. I was told that there was no problem with the Vortex lock...but evidently the hinge portion of the gate had been broken at some point and another lock or couple of locks had been used to create some type of make shift "door" that would open from the opposite direction, using the Vortex locked side as the hinge side. I am told that THIS is how he gained access to the cave....by using the hinge side as the opening side ...NOT using the Vortex lock or the Vortex key.
The diver was on site the first day and saw this.....is this what everyone else is referring to?
If so....this is odd. Very Odd. It would certainly create more questions for sure.
The extra lock on the right side of the gate (hinge side) had been in place for over a month. I first noticed it on July 10. I saw a lock and went straight for it, and to my great suprise, the key that I had checked out didn't work. I checked up and then opened the correct side of the gate. I felt a bit sheepish for trying to open the wrong side, and hoped my buddy thought I was just fumbling with the key. At that point wrongly assumed that the lock had been there all along as a hinge, and I had simply not noticed it. My buddy and I discussed the issue briefly at the end of the dive, but didn't mention it to the good folks at Vortex.
My thoughts are quite different about prevention.
Yes, we agree that we can all kumbaya on the same lesson learned, which is the same "dive only within your training and experience level"; but this lesson with be "relearned" over and over again in the future. I think we should go further.
First of all, since a cave like Vortex is well known and open to the public, why not do more to insure it can be dived safely? Why not install, for example, (1) a minimal system of underwater lights and/or (2) emergency air (breathing gas) stations at key jumps and/or (3) some emergency signaling device and/or (4) highly reliable (not breakable) lines, in a highly public cave.
In other words, since some caves are well known, very public and without any workable means to insure that unqualified divers do not dive there; instead of simply blaming death on the divers, why not make some caves more safer by investing money in one or more of the "off the top of my head" bullet items above or suggest other things/mechanisms/safety devices/controls to make cave diving safer? Not all caves, of course; but there must be some public, well known, caves, perhaps like Vortex, where the owners (or a diving club or association) could invest in making the cave safer for all (trained, qualified, certified, and/or foolish), versus the current "it is an accident waiting to happen" and "dive at your own risk" and "it is always the divers fault because they are not well trained" themes (and "lessons learned") we read about repeatedly.
There are lights in the first part of the Vortex cave. Most of the time over the last couple years these have been off. During my last dive at Vortex, on August 9th there were lights on in the Piano room, that is the room where the gate is located. Frankly it is my opinion that lights in the cave make it more dangerous, not less so. It is more likely that a diver, untrained or otherwise, would rely on those lights and not the lights under their personal control and maintenance. The electricty goes out and suddenly it is dark. Very dark.
Even if cost weren't an issue, and again as with the lights, an added attractive nuisance for uncertified or otherwise illequiped divers, a series of breathing gas stations would be logistically prohibitive. You would need to have a diver place stage bottles every few feet to ensure that gas was available/accessable anytime someone failed to heed the gas rules. Or you run a whip down the cave and have locations to tap into the supply. Who is going to maintain that line. What happens to the diver who was relying on that gas supply when the surface supplied air supply is lost? And how does he use that air supply to exit the cave from a third of a mile back?
The lines used in caves are reliable, but they cannot be unbreakable. If a diver becomes hopelessly entangled, he needs to be able to cut himself free. Part of the training for cave diving is learning how to and practicing coping with a cut, broken or lost line.
The bottom line is that we can come up with all sorts of elaborate designs to make a system fool proof. But when it comes right down to it, all that will happen is the world will create a better fool in order to bypass the system.
For example, how many are killed every year by drunk driving? Would it be possible to prevent this by installing a breath test on the ignition system of every vehicle on the road? Possible yes. A viable solution, no. Some fool will come along and figure a way around the lock.
If a death is as a direct result of the breaking of one or more of the five basic rules that each and every cave and cavern diver has been taught, it hardly seems appropriate to create new rules or engineered solutions to defeat the improved fool. If the earlier posts turn out to be accurate, and I have no doubt they will, this was a methodical and calculated attempt to defeat the safety system. This was not a fool who accidentally got in over his head. It was a fool who knew he was breaking the rules and just didn't care.
I am shocked that this diver was apparently willing to spend the many hundreds or more likely thousands of dollars on SM or Tec gear, stage bottles, deco bottles and regulators, yet balked at the cost of a cave class that would have cost about the same as just one of those eight regulators he would have used on his dive last Monday.
