Are Scuba fatalities being hidden ?

[Hillmorton Scubie]

I would like your opinion if this is something that is happening in foreign vacation destinations around the world. Are fatalities being kept quiet, and statistics not posted on the net, for the protection / benefit of a healthy local scuba industry.
I would like to read the scubaboard expertise on this report.

http://www.****************/forums/safety/safety_13.html

 

[cudachaser]

If there is a diving fatality anywhere in the world...it will show up on Scubaboard

Joe

 

[Hillmorton Scubie]

The dive industry is covering up accidents...

Mike B - Rescue Diver/Consultant
October 15, 2007 at 21:07:57

There seems to be a concious effort from Egypt to suppress fatalities that occur. Two weeks ago around Monday 1st Oct, moored at Beacon Rock - aka Dunraven - myself and club members saw a diver being lifted back aboard the MY Juliet from its tender. it was confirmed later from our skipper (talking to Juliet) that she had died. This seen with our own eyes brought a sobering moment as to the fact that scuba diving as a sport has an elevated risk.
Two days later our guide said someone had taken a hit and died down at the Brothers aboard Typhoon - whether this was accurate is something i cannot vouch for. scouring the news for information on the Juliet event has brought up nothing, whilst i understand there are coroner's duties to be performed and of course the families - the lack of even a acknowledgement that these events took place begs the question what else is not being reported.

 

[PhilEllis]

I would like your opinion if this is something that is happening in foreign vacation destinations around the world. Are fatalities being kept quiet, and statistics not posted on the net, for the protection / benefit of a healthy local scuba industry.
I would like to read the scubaboard expertise on this report.

http://www.****************/forums/safety/safety_13.html

The ability to collect statistical data on private events that occur all over the world is a daunting task. Even in the best of circumstances, all such events are most likely to be "under reported" or missing from any such data base. That is simply the difficulty of collecting data outside of a controlled scientific experiment or study.

I would also not be surprised if there is an ATTEMPT to supress information about diving accidents in some locations. After all, such things do hurt local business. Another issue that is missed by many people from the highly developed nations is the lack of any organized effort to track such things in many locations. DAN attempts to do a good job, but they obviously have the obstacle of entities or nations choosing not to cooperate.

In my opinion, deaths while scuba diving are still amazingly low......even if current data represents under reporting by 50% to 75%. That is a good thing.

Phil Ellis

 

[philmayer]

Depending on your point of view, they are being covered up or they're not being publicized. Either way, people die scuba diving.

If you want the unvarnished truth, check out the geographical forums here on SB. When someone dies, much of the time it gets reported and discussed there.

 

[Hoosier]

Yes, it is true in some countries.

Don't expect that all divers in the world can speak and write English and have their own regional forum like Scubaboard (SB is only English based). Many countries didn't have a clear liability distinction by law as well. So, many LDS and resorts do NOT want to be hurt due to a diving incident. They mostly named it as a personal health issue. Scuba industry is a relatively small in many countries so that they are covering up each other.

 

[Garrobo]

Whatever the answer to your question I have decided that when I go diving in Florida or the Keys I have to drive 45 miles to the my local airport, fly to Ft. Lauderdale, rent a car and drive on down to where I will be diving. In my estimation the most hazardous part is driving 100 miles on the Florida Turnpike and across to the Keys, followed by the drive to the airport on Sunday morning and then the flight. The diving is the safest part.

 

[cruiser]

I think diving death are kept quiet in Cozumel, at any rate.

This year while diving there I noticed a shiny memorial plaque that had been placed on the sand on one of the reefs with a guy's name and birth/death dates (can't remember who it was).

When we got back on the boat, I asked the dive master who it was and what happened. He shrugged his shoulder and said that so many people die diving there every year he couldn't remember the details.

 

[Colliam7]

Are fatalities being kept quiet, and statistics not posted on the net, for the protection / benefit of a healthy local scuba industry.

I cannot imagine why any resort area would make a proactive effort to publicize accidents and deaths associated with diving in their area. So, I think the answer to your question, in terms of not being posted on the net, is 'Yes.' But, I don't think that means they are being hidden, or somehow covered up, or that there is a conspiracy involved. As several have noted, information (and mis-information) about diving-related accidents will quickly find its way to SB, and elsewhere. We actually still suffer from too little information, though. Learning from accidents is an important part of safety assurance and risk management (a desire to know what happened is not simply morbid curiosity or an excuse for jumping to conclusions), and aside from the annual DAN summaries, there is a limited amount of consistently organized information available. In contrast, in general aviation the magazine, Flying, features a regular section 'On the Record', which presents excerpts from National Transportation Safety Board investigations of general aviation accidents (which are also available on the NTSB website, anyway). There are entire publications (Aviation Safety) devoted to aviation risk management and accident prevention, which also publish summaries from NTSB investigations. But, flying is far more regulated (for better or worse) than diving. In the less regulated endeavor of climbing, several publications (e.g. Climbing, Rock and Ice) include summaries of climbing and mountaineering accidents as information becomes available, and the American Alpine Club annually publishes Accidents in North American Mountaineering. Because, there is seldom a thorough 'investigation' of those accidents, though, the reports may be incomplete because no one witnessed the event, inaccurate or unintentionally misleading, or entirely based on a single eyewitness count. It may be that aviation accidents, and climbing accidents for that matter, necessarily affect a broader spectrum of people (NTSB, rescue teams, etc, not just local law enforcement authorities) because of their nature, and more information becomes available, or at least they are more widely publicized. One thing is clear across all three endeavors - press reports seldom provide complete, accurate, factual, or even reasonably plausible information about accidents and incidents.

 

[DBailey]

Also remember that there are many deaths that happen during scuba diving that are not scuba diving deaths.

A death by heart attack is still a heart attack no matter if it happened scuba diving, rock climbing, or watching TV. So while people might hear or know of a diver that passed away on another boat, it might have had nothing to do with scuba diving.