Accident at Vortex Springs 8-20-10

[ZenDiver.3D]

OH I am sorry but I Have to reply to you. These things that are said about him at this point are childish and ridiculous. Speak all of your technical talk, but stop trashing Ben. You don't even know that the dive took place or that he has died. Obviously you know more than his parents about what is going on and the sheriff's office! I respect your hobby or career choice (if diving) but you are showing ignorance in your continued trashing of this man. I agree with cave diver - leave it alone until you know the truth!

While I am truly sorry for this untenable position that you are in, I think no one is attempting to trash this man. We are, however, trying to make sense of the events as they have unfolded. We Do know certain things as have been reported. John has updated and posted them here:

Recap of known facts:
Male diver reported missing on Friday at Vortex
Possibly missing as early as Wed.
Diver was a Dive Con/DM working towards Open Water SCUBA Instructor (OWSI).
Diver was not certified in cave or decompression diving
Got beyond the gate without a key
Had deco bottle inside the cave
Evidence of the divers passage has been found
Body has not been recovered as of 8-24
FBI has been called in to assist. Not sure in what capacity.
Dogs have been requested to check the surrounding area


I think everything humanly possible is being done to find Ben. We, as the diving community, have volunteered and stepped up in the most dangerous of ways to help your friend/relative. You may not like all of what we say and speculate, but never doubt the sincerity of concern. If he went in that cave, he acted in arrogance and foolishness. But no matter, because he Is one of us. He is a diver. We are brutally honest with each other. And, we watch out for each other as best we can, as witnessed by the brave men who dropped their lives and rushed to find Ben, to the point of endangering themselves for him. We will do what we can to make sense of this, but we also see our mortality in his. We do care. We absolutely are not meaning harm, but to make sense of, learn from, and understand this tragedy.

Hang in there as best you can. We would dearly Love to be wrong about this.

 

[ScubaNurse758]

All of the "attacks" on the deceased that you speak of have all been attacks of the decisions he made. No one on this board has said anything ill of him concerning his character as a social being or anywhere outside of the realm of diving as no one knew him that way. Again, this is why family and friends are encouraged to stay off this thread.

 

[Divedoggie]

Ben's story is eerily familiar to me, and drives me to continue asking stupid questions.
Here is the background:

Last year a good friend and employee of mine went snowboarding under dangerous and unstable conditions in the backcountry. He was incredibly bright, quick witted, charming, and a joy to be around. He had been one of my best employees for over 8 years.
He was in his early thirties, was an excellent backcountry snowboarder, but had very informal backcountry training. It didn't take much training to know that avalanche danger was extremely high. He knew the risk. Instead he made a series of bad decisions, rationalizing that nothing would happen to him.

When he didn't show up for work, we started searching. We couldn't believe that he would have made the decision to go out that day, but evidence, like his bike sitting at the trailhead and freshish tracks up toward the ridge, let us know otherwise.

We were able to follow his footprints to a ridge, but by the time we established that there may have been an avalanche, it was midnight and a huge blizzard had blown in. Conditions were extremely hazardous, so the search was called off until the next day. The blizzard continued, but rescuers and searchers established there had been an avalanche and with great personal risk and exposure to additional avalanches, they continued to search and to probe.

Eventually the storm broke and a hundred searchers began looking to no avail. The search was called off. All of the expert search and rescue people assumed that he was swept away and buried in the meat of the avalanche. They are trained to assume worst case scenario. As far as recovery searches go, its often difficult even under relatively straight forward conditions.
When they didn't find him they decided to wait until spring and let the snow melt.

A small group of his friends continued to look though. The debris field was approx 500 yards across by 200 yards, with depths of 20 feet.

5 days after he disappeared my friend's avalanche dog found him in very shallow snow, with his foot actually slightly sticking up out of the snow. He was not anywhere near the concentration of the search, and was in fact on the very edge of the debris field. 20 feet to his left was the trail that led back to his bike.

The final evidence shows that he actually made it down the chute and was on his way out when the avalanche(most likely delay triggered by his descent down the chute) barely caught him and buried him.

To this day we all miss him so much, but are angered by his decisions. He hurt his family and loved ones, he put all of the searchers at risk, he put access to the backcountry chutes at risk, and so on, all because he just had to go for one ride before work that night.

In the case of Ben's final dive, because of the parallels to the above story, I just can't help thinking that he was on his way out and is in an unlikely area fairly close to the entrance.

 

[god1head]

OH I am sorry but I Have to reply to you. These things that are said about him at this point are childish and ridiculous. Speak all of your technical talk, but stop trashing Ben. You don't even know that the dive took place or that he has died. Obviously you know more than his parents about what is going on and the sheriff's office! I respect your hobby or career choice (if diving) but you are showing ignorance in your continued trashing of this man. I agree with cave diver - leave it alone until you know the truth!

Whether or not Ben made this dive, he has a demonstrated history of making bad deecisions with respect to diving in overhead environments. If by some chance he did not make the dive on Wednesday, or if he survived that dive, and some other event intervened to create his absence, the fact of the matter is that the cavalier attitude that he demonstrated has caused a tremendous amount of time, effort, expertise, worry and anger to be spent. If he did not die on this dive, and if he were to continue diving by the same internally generated rules, it would only be a matter of time before this episode replayed. If he survived, that fact would in no way mitigate the foolishness he had previously demonstrated.

It was for people like him that the reaper signs were installed. It was for people like him that the gate was installed at Vortex. It is for people like him that many caves located on private property are not accessible even to certified, experienced cave divers. Is he the only one who as ever broken the rules? Certainly not. Is he the only one who has caused recovery teams to search for a body. Not even close. But being like others does not make one less responsible for their own actions.

 

[Cave Diver]

One more time:

.





olice:

Guys - Lets not turn this into a pissing match about the actions. No one wins. People are coming from two different camps on this and will never see things eye to eye. Lets keep this about the analysis of the accident and try to leave as much analysis of the person out of it.​

 

[diverdoug1]

Yes, we do. The only way for him to not be narced is for him to stay at a shallower depth. Empirical testing has show that everyone is susceptible to narcosis and that narcosis can only be managed with training and experience. The fact that your friend didn't feel narced was because he wasn't trying to do anything that required a steady thought process.

Source: IANTD Technical Diving Encyclopedia, T.Mount



Without a doubt this statement is FACT.

I am not sure if this is the correct forum for my reply (I think it is because it evaluates the statements that have been made about nitrogen narcosis - which MAY have played a role in this case) as well as can educate some of the posters about nitrogen narcosis. If this is the wrong place for this post I respectfuly ask the moderator to delete it.

It is very possible that the diver in question was suffering some degree of nitrogen narcosis if breathing air at 170 ffw, BUT you can not state it as a fact. The studies of nitrogen narcosis while breathing compressed air at 30, 61,91,and 122 msw have emphasized the severity of narcosis at pressures exceeding 91 msw (Adolfson 1964, 1965, Adolfson & Muren 1965) using tests of manual dexterity, attention, visual discrimination, reaction time, and arithmetic. Of the 30 test subjects, 4 had no degredation in their scores at 30 and 61 msw. At 91 msw all subjects had degredation in there performance scoring. Arithmetical efficiency and manual dexterity were studied (Case & Haldane 1941) on divers breathing compressed air at 150, 250, and 300 fsw. In 6 of 42 subjects had unaffected scores at 150 fsw. At 250 fsw mean manual skill scores were virtualy unaffected, but errors in arithmetic increased from six on the surface to 22 at pressure. At 300 fsw the narcosis was severe, apppearing in all subjects during compression, reaching a maximum in 2 min., with marked impairment of practical ability and judjment. As might be expected, there is a wide individual susceptibility. Whereas one diver is not narcotic at pressures of 165 fsw, another will be quite severely affected at 100fsw. In this connection, emotionally stable individuals are usually affected to a smaller extent than less stable subjects (Cousteau 1953). There are also some studies in which all subjects showed at least minimal deterioration in performance at greater than 100 fsw (Bennett 1967) and (Poulton 1964). So....when perusing the halmark studies on compressed air narcosis, we can see some studies which dispute the above claims that everyone breathing compressed air at 150 ffw is experiencing nitrogen narcosis (it is likely they are, but it is NOT A FACT).

 

[Hetland]

OH I am sorry but I Have to reply to you. These things that are said about him at this point are childish and ridiculous. Speak all of your technical talk, but stop trashing Ben. You don't even know that the dive took place or that he has died. Obviously you know more than his parents about what is going on and the sheriff's office! I respect your hobby or career choice (if diving) but you are showing ignorance in your continued trashing of this man. I agree with cave diver - leave it alone until you know the truth!

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1. Ben (or someone posting on facebook pretending to be Ben) planned this dive.

2. There is evidence that Ben took actions in the past to facilitate this particular dive (modifying the gate)

3. People don't typically abandon hundreds (or thousands depending on the brands) of dollars worth of equipment underwater.

4. People don't typically abandon their only known means of conveyance.
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When you consider the above, you can only come to a few conclusions. The most obvious and logical is that Ben executed a dive and got lost in a very complex and dangerous cave system. The next most logical conclusion is that Ben is perpetrating a fraud. If this was FraudBoard, or HoaxBoard, then we would be discussing the other possibilities, but this is scubaboard.

Some of the people you are whining about are the ones that risked their lives to recover the dead body of your friend. They didn't get a paycheck, and they didn't do it to get their names in the paper, they did it for his family, so that they could have closure, and so that the diving community could learn from the incident, and hopefully prevent the next person from getting killed. The recovery effort has cost these people money out of their own pockets. Time out of their own lives. If they want to post their opinions about what happened, then they have earned that right.

If it turns out that Ben is alive, then we will all be happy for his friends and family. He will owe a debt that will be hard to repay, but we will still be happy he is alive. In the meantime, there is value in discussing the most likely chain of events.

That value is not in the trashing of Ben personally (which very few here have done) but in the trashing of an untrained person going into a very dangerous situation, and getting himself killed.

We'd all likely drink a beer with the guy, and appreciate what he has done to help others in his life, but his alleged ACTIONS must be dissected, condemned and ridiculed. Otherwise his loss will be truly meaningless.

 

[Kevin Carlisle]

I agree with Docc. This finger pointing is useless. If the family want to know the how's and why's of this type dive that is fine. They did nothing wrong and deserve to know what we can tell them. The continual bashing needs to stop.

 

[alohagal]

What Is Wrong With You People? We don't even know at this point if Ben has expired! IT IS NOW CONSIDERED A CRIME SCENE! Not to say a crime has taken place but for goodness sake can't you divers stop saying these things about him until we know? They are fine , wonderful people - All of them! If he went down, something strange happened to him, but they are obviously looking at other possibilities! Oh I have to get out of this and not go back to it. Why am I here - it is only making me angry and I am getting no sleep anyway.

Your feelings are valid. Most dive incidents, where someone is lost, never have a clear answer...and never will. This is especially true in open water diving where a person can sink to infinity and beyond and never be recovered. A reasonable mind, based on what IS known...and there are known facts here...is that Ben went too far in the cave, without proper training, and could not get out. It has happened to people trained to the highest level with many dives under their belt. Good people, respected people, trained people have died in caves.

Which is why so many people here...not knowing your friend...want answers. The cave community is small. People KNOW each other. It is a small world compared to Open water diving. When a cave incident happens and a Florida cave at that...news travels fast. And, most people in the beginning of this "event" were wondering was this an accident of a well trained cave diver that they know personally or certainly have heard tell of. Because if they are a well trained cave divers they will be KNOWN around those parts. These forums are part of that small, and if you will "elite" community of divers.
Most of them are no longer posting to this thread. Not everyone posting here is a cave diver. But the ones who are continue to post vital information to this forum and its original intent.


I am just telling it like it is.

 

[ScubaSteve]

The continual bashing needs to stop.

Bashing of Ben or the family/friends? I do not really see much of either overall. I think for the most part people have kept their cool. What has happened is typical and nothing different than any thread IMO.

I do agree that a couple of posts were uncalled for but that is absolutely not uncommon in threads like this.