Another Eagles Nest fatality

[KevinNM]

Are you suggesting we need to call for government licensing and harsh penalties for failure to fo!low the law?

Maybe if you want to keep EN open.

 

[bamafan]

So the guy was taught trimix by an IANTD instructor at Eagle's Nest. I am betting that IANTD will not even blink an eye at this. In the lastfew weeks it seemsto me that IANTD has had some serious issues with negligent instructors. First there was the girl who died in Grand Cenote after an IANTD full cave instructor pulled all the jump spools and left her in the cave. There is the Polish diver in Italy in an IANTD cave class who was with an IT and an instructor candidate who managed to loose a student in the class. Supposedly he became stuck and they couldn't get him out. And now we have a fatality in Eagle's Nest from a cavern diver who had been taken there with an IANTD instructor.

I see a pattern here as I don't know of any other agency having this many issues. Thr silence and inaction by IANTD on y hese incidents as well as others in the past speaks volumes.

 

[CuzzA]

I doubt there are many people like that. NAUI started offering certifications in 1960 or 1961--not sure which. Before that there was Los Angeles and the YMCA.

Here is a story about the need to be OW certified. The diver in question was on a special dive trip in Australia in 1967. When the boat captain insisted that no one could dive without a certification card, he was in trouble. He explained that his father had taught him to use scuba when he was only 7 years old, and now, 20 years later, he had completed thousands of dives but never been certified, since certification did not exist when he learned. The captain would not allow it. Eventually the crew talked the captain into allowing Jean-Michelle Cousteau to dive on that trip, and when he returned home, he went immediately to PADI to get his certification so he would not have to go through that again.

Jean-Michelle Cousteau was the second human being to breathe off of the Gagnon-Cousteau regulator, and he had to get certified while still quite young. How many people have you met that started before he did?

Ok, yeah, the math doesn't work. Good story. I wasn't born yet so my dive history is still a work in progress.

 

[CuzzA]

So the guy was taught trimix by an IANTD instructor at Eagle's Nest. I am betting that IANTD will not even blink an eye at this. In the lastfew weeks it seemsto me that IANTD has had some serious issues with negligent instructors. First there was the girl who died in Grand Cenote after an IANTD full cave instructor pulled all the jump spools and left her in the cave. There is the Polish diver in Italy in an IANTD cave class who was with an IT and an instructor candidate who managed to loose a student in the class. Supposedly he became stuck and they couldn't get him out. And now we have a fatality in Eagle's Nest from a cavern diver who had been taken there with an IANTD instructor.

I see a pattern here as I don't know of any other agency having this many issues. Thr silence and inaction by IANTD on y hese incidents as well as others in the past speaks volumes.

So we're moving on from shop blaming to agency blaming for a likely medical incident?

My dive history may not be polished but there's some pretty prominent members among the sport on the board of IANTD. Many who contribute here.

IANTD Board

 

[KevinNM]

Apparently they only respond to complaints from students. When their instructors kill their students they don't complain. So no action is taken. Or so it seems.

 

[Pinecube]

Wow this board moves fast sometimes... I know the discussion is leaning more to the certification and experience side of things, which is a good discussion to have, but I have a question or two about the medical side.

So what do you want to talk about that we can learn from this incident? Immersion Pulmonary Edema? I know little about the risks for this. Can anyone thoroughly elaborate?

I had a couple of other links on my old computer, unfortunately they didn't make the transfer over to this one. I know it's not much but I do have a couple of links:

Of course, DAN has an article: Immersion Pulmonary Edema | The Heart & Diving - DAN Health & Diving

There's a thread here on Scubaboard as well, with links to other threads about SIPE/IPE in the first post: Cave diver critical after Blue Springs incident - Florida At least one of the links is an accident thread where a diver survived and explain what happened.



On that note I was thinking: I know *of* the 'caustic cocktail' that @TotDoc suggested but not much about it. Could the fluid from the lungs (due to SIPE/IPE for example), if exhaled into the rebreather, create a caustic cocktail? Or would you need a full flood?

While we're speculating about IPE, choking sounds can also be indicative of the "chokes" or "Cardiorespiratory Decompression Sickness", which usually starts deeper than IPE. The choking sounds were apparently heard somewhere between 200 feet and the first deco stop.

I've heard of the 'chokes' before but not in too much detail. Is there any easy to read (I mean, I don't need a picture-book but I'm hoping not to have to read through scientific studies) that you could recommend to learn more about it?

 

[bamafan]

So we're moving on from shop blaming to agency blaming for a likely medical incident?

My dive history may not be polished but there's some pretty prominent members among the sport on the board of IANTD. Many who contribute here.

IANTD Board

What other agency is having these issues? IANTD has known about this instructor and the shop for years. The shop use to have directions to Eagle's Nest and Buford Sink on their website. They could have stopped this instructor from teaching mix to non full cave students at Eagle's Nest years ago. The inaction with the instructor in Mexico is beyond comprehension. I was told that the teacher candidate who was on the faithful dive in Italy where the cave student died under his care actually passed the class. Just think about that. You are an instructor candidate under an IT so essentially you are teaching the class. A student in your class supposedly gets wedged in the cave and neither you or the IT can get him out and he dies and you are made an instructor after that. What would you have to do to actually fail? There have been numerous complaints in the Dominican Republic of IANTD cave instructors guiding open water divers way past the cavern zone. They were actually video taped doing this and the footage was given to IANTD. The response from IANTD was you can't film people without their consent. I will be glad to listen to anyone explain IANTD's actions as well as to what they are going to change to improve but sadly I don't think they will change anything as it might cost them a $$$. In my opinion instructors who know that these things are occurring with an agency they teach for and are ignoring it are part of the problem. If the good instructors stood up and said we will not be part of this they would change but until that time nothing will change as long as the money keeps flowing in.

 

[Bob DBF]

I doubt there are many people like that. NAUI started offering certifications in 1960 or 1961--not sure which. Before that there was Los Angeles and the YMCA.

It wasn't that there were not certs, but in '62 instructors and shops were few and far between. Informal training, mentoring and self training, was widespread. I got fills at a local compressed gas supplier (oxy, acetelyne, HP air) and I was one of the few divers he ever saw, and he serviced several counties. No one asked to see c-cards. In '80 I took OW because I was doing more traveling and shops were asking for cards, fewer shops were run by x-Navy divers and old timers that I could talk into filling my tanks.

And you should have seen DYI deco training well before "tech diving". It, and the gear we were diving, are probably why, over the years, the number diving fatalities remain about the same while the number of divers increase.



Bob

 

[CuzzA]

The shop use to have directions to Eagle's Nest and Buford Sink on their website.

C'mon. Do you think it's some secret place? Do you think that was out of malicious intent to drive the masses of wannabe cave divers to the site? I guess we should send Google Maps divison a nasty letter. They probably used their phone to navigate to the site. https://www.google.com/maps/@28.5553755,-82.6094108,15z

According to a post in CDF they took it down after the father/son incident which again they had nothing to do with.

Maybe your complaints about IANTD are warranted, but we can say that about a bunch of victims across all of the agencies.

You know, there has to be some personal responsibility and self reflection as a diver. Why am I diving? Should I do this dive? Am I qualified? Do I have the mindset? Am I fit and/or young enough to handle the stress a deep rebreather dive will put on my body? All of these things are taught by IANTD published materials (from what I've personally seen). Hell, they even start TekLite with different workout techniques and recommendations. For a second I thought I was reading a fitness magazine. It's up to the individual diver to follow his training, which sometimes it doesn't matter. Do everything right and have a medical incident.

 

[bamafan]

C'mon. Do you think it's some secret place? Do you think that was out of malicious intent to drive the masses of wannabe cave divers to the site? I guess we should send Google Maps divison a nasty letter. They probably used their phone to navigate to the site. https://www.google.com/maps/@28.5553755,-82.6094108,15z

According to a post in CDF they took it down after the father/son incident which again they had nothing to do with.

Maybe your complaints about IANTD are warranted, but we can say that about a bunch of victims across all of the agencies.

You know, there has to be some personal responsibility and self reflection as a diver. Why am I diving? Should I do this dive? Am I qualified? Do I have the mindset? Am I fit and/or young enough to handle the stress a deep rebreather dive will put on my body? All of these things are taught by IANTD published materials (from what I've personally seen). Hell, they even start TekLite with different workout techniques and recommendations. For a second I thought I was reading a fitness magazine. It's up to the individual diver to follow his training, which sometimes it doesn't matter. Do everything right and have a medical incident.

The agencies bear part of the blame. Sure people have some personal responsibility but the agencies and instructors have more. They are the professionals in a self regulated industry. The rumor is the guy failed intro to cave. I don't know if this is true but if a diver can not pass intro to cave with the minimal amount of task loading that is required for that class there is no way they should be diving mix. What should be done to correct the issue of agencies churning out instructors and students who aren't qualified? The students generally don't know that they suck. I have seen it time and again. You can try and talk to most of them but they generally believe they got good instruction even when they suck. There are cave instructors and members of the CDS BoD who can't even frog kick and actually think they are good divers. Just look at some of the statements from the CDS. The training director for the CDS publicly stated after the last incident at Eagle's Nest that there were no gold line T's in North Florida. This is so far from the truth and in my opinion just shows how clueless they are. The CDS is promoting the reg mount Gopro camera mount on their 2017 CDS Conference Facebook page. Anyone who believes that is safe for technical diving really is clueless.

The only agency that I don't see as having these issues is GUE and I am not GUE trained or have anything else to do with them. They are the only agency that I can at least say their students can frog kick upon completing a cave class. If the agencies don't like the bad reputation they need to do something about it but sadly I don't see that happening as it would cut into the cash flow.