I realize that I live in the third world where life is cheap and lawyers are few, but if your primary concern as a dive operator is liability, you should probably find a new career. This is not directed at anyone in particular, just a general observation. If I were a lawyer (and thank God I'm not), I could easily argue that a policy of notifying EMS every time oxygen was requested PREVENTED my client from reporting symptoms and subsequently led to his untimely demise. There is no end to these scenarios, so my feeling is you should do what your training and gut feeling says is right and forget about the lawyers. I only deal with tech divers, and my attitude is that it is insanely dangerous, much like climbing Mount Everest, and that all participants enter with full knowledge, and have no right to point fingers when something goes sideways. Your experience in your nanny state may differ.
(Lemme guess, a smoker right? Anyone who uses the phrase "nanny state" is probably so locked into a way of thinking that coversation is pointless, but lemme try.)
The funny thing about worrying about liability is that it is the same thing as worrying about safety. Insurance companies' audits make workplaces safer, though they are really only trying to reduce liability.
There is doing something long term which always involves thinking about risk and liability, and then there only doing it for a couple of years and counting on the law of averages to ensure safety. As I have said many times when parting ways with operators, dive boats, and instructors, "you are free to do what you like."
Life rarely punishes bad decisions.
People dove for years without any scuba training, and certainly without emergency O2, let alone deco O2. Paying attention to the outlying cases (or as you would say, living in a "nanny state") brought basic training into scuba, and then emergency oxygen, and then redundancy, and then tech training, and then deco o2, etc etc.
Someone running a tech training operation is in deep debt to intelligent discussion about managing risk and liability. The idea of "tech diving" simply would not exist without all the previous thoughtful people talking about things.
---------- Post added April 1st, 2015 at 04:54 AM ----------
Sounds like a sound practice. I'm just curious what you'd say in a situation I've been in.
On one dive, I was underweighted since I was diving a new suit and hadn't dialed in my weighting properly. So, not unexpectedly, halfway into the dive I had an uncontrolled ascent. Not the Polaris missile impersonation, but still uncontrolled since my boots had popped off so I lost my fins and weren't able to fin downward. After I'd tended my bruised ego for a couple of minutes, it was suggested I used some of the club's oxygen, just to be on the safe side. I declined, but if my ascent speed had been on the unhealthy side, I'd probably taken up the offer.
Would you have offered oxygen in a case like this? And would accepting oxygen grounded the diver for the rest of the day, even if they were non-symptomatic?
Look at the situation from the other side:
What kind of person risks permanent disability just to not miss the second dive of the day?
Is someone who managed to have an uncontrolled descent the best judge of best practices?
In the end, a day of diving is infinitely replaceable. Permanent disability is permanent. Asking someone to risk their livelihood so that I can engage in risky behavior that I have already shown myself to be perhaps under-qualified is asking too much.
And anyone who loses sight of those fact for the most trifling of reasons (I still want to dive!) is engaging in rather selfish behavior.
Of course, if someone is diving on their own time, with their own gear, anything is fine. Do in water recompression on 100% O2 at 60 feet. Whatever! If it's all your own gear (tanks included), and you are shore diving, and diving by yourself, and drove yourself to the dive site.
But otherwise, it's time to grow up a little.
Once a diver is not the only customer on the boat, or they are asking on operation to run support, they are not in charge of what happens. We are in charge. Don't like the rules? Don't do it in our house.
But, really, once we are adults need to be told this? What about diving makes people act like such children?
