Bahamas: Missing Female Diver

[deepstops]

To be fair, CDNN rarely make stuff up out of the blue (other than their advertisements). What they do is embellish and spin stories in a fairly gratuitious way. Nobody who knows them likes them (except maybe their mothers), but I don't think anyone has ever accused them of flat making stuff up.

Agreed, and whatever news search engine they use, it kicks the Google and Yahoo news search engines collective butts. It's very rare that I can't find one their stories in some online newspaper but it's often that Google/Yahoo fails to find the result.

 

[deepstops]

Your post is amazing to me. You are a dive professional and you have not gone through numerous mental exercises of rescues? Isn't THAT one of the prmary reasons you are WORKING?

The question is not what a dive operator is expecting of you, the question is what are you expecting of yourself? If you are not willing to act like a professional and sacrifice your own safety in an attempt to rescue an individual, then seriously, what are you doing the job for?

I have to agree here. I hope it's not because it's cool and a great conversation starter when picking up chicks in the bar

 

[Rhone Man]

Not to hijack the thread, but I was reading a book about diving accidents the other day, and it was saying how dive professionals can go for years without seeing an accident, and so when the time comes their skills are often very rusty and they can get flustered (generalising here, of course).

I remember thinking to myself, if I am an insurance underwriter for a dive company, I think I want to write into their contract that they take all staff out "on maneuvres" at least once a year to practice rescue drills and really have the DMs put through their paces. When the time comes, somebody's life (lives?) are on the line, so let's prepare like that is what is at stake.

I wonder if many dive ops do things like that? It would be hard given the shoe-string budget that many operations are forced to run on.

 

[fisheyeview]

Not to hijack the thread, but I was reading a book about diving accidents the other day, and it was saying how dive professionals can go for years without seeing an accident, and so when the time comes their skills are often very rusty and they can get flustered (generalising here, of course).

I remember thinking to myself, if I am an insurance underwriter for a dive company, I think I want to write into their contract that they take all staff out "on maneuvres" at least once a year to practice rescue drills and really have the DMs put through their paces. When the time comes, somebody's life (lives?) are on the line, so let's prepare like that is what is at stake.

I wonder if many dive ops do things like that? It would be hard given the shoe-string budget that many operations are forced to run on.

When I used to DM through a shop we did this all the time. They probably taught 6 - 10 rescue classes a year. Believe me. Every DM worked those classes. That's where all the fun was for us.

 

[khacken]

Your post is amazing to me. You are a dive professional and you have not gone through numerous mental exercises of rescues? Isn't THAT one of the prmary reasons you are WORKING?

The question is not what a dive operator is expecting of you, the question is what are you expecting of yourself? If you are not willing to act like a professional and sacrifice your own safety in an attempt to rescue an individual, then seriously, what are you doing the job for?

Obviously this doesn't mean to engage in suicidal behavoir or diving to 450 feet looking for some bubbles, but you MUST be willing to stick your neck out a little to do your job. If you haven't gone over this stuff a bunch of times, how can you be confident that your reaction time will be short enough and your actions be effective enough to help?

You seriously don't think that chasing the victim to 170 was not risky and that the instructor did not stick his/her neck out? IMHO performing a rescue at 170 on air on a single tank is extremely risky. I am glad the DM and the instructor back ok.

I want to hear all the details, but from what we have so far, the DM and the instructor went beyond the call of duty and should be applauded, not nit picked. I don't care if the DM was hired specifically for the victim or not.

 

[mikemath]

I remember thinking to myself, if I am an insurance underwriter for a dive company, I think I want to write into their contract that they take all staff out "on maneuvres" at least once a year to practice rescue drills and really have the DMs put through their paces. When the time comes, somebody's life (lives?) are on the line, so let's prepare like that is what is at stake.

I wonder if many dive ops do things like that? It would be hard given the shoe-string budget that many operations are forced to run on.

To make our PADI Rescue class more fun, my LDS conducts bi-annual Rescue Days, where all Rescue students, DMCs, DMs, and Instructors head to a remote beach to run scenarios (remote so that passers-by don't call 911 when they see us dragging someone out of the water). It ends up being a good get-together and brushes everyone up on basic rescue skills. It may not be as thorough as instructor-level risk management procedures, but the Rescue class is the foundation for those skills.

 

[Splash-X]

Your post is amazing to me. You are a dive professional and you have not gone through numerous mental exercises of rescues? Isn't THAT one of the prmary reasons you are WORKING?

The question is not what a dive operator is expecting of you, the question is what are you expecting of yourself? If you are not willing to act like a professional and sacrifice your own safety in an attempt to rescue an individual, then seriously, what are you doing the job for?

Obviously this doesn't mean to engage in suicidal behavoir or diving to 450 feet looking for some bubbles, but you MUST be willing to stick your neck out a little to do your job. If you haven't gone over this stuff a bunch of times, how can you be confident that your reaction time will be short enough and your actions be effective enough to help?

I no longer teach scuba diving because I am unwilling to accept the responsibility for random divers. If you continue to work as a professional then you need to be confident in your response to a relatively simple situation like a diver falling down a wall.

And what do you define as "sticking your neck out a little"? Does a leader diving to a depth of 170ft not classify itself as a "sticking your neck out"?

My exact reasoning for asking that question and bringing the topic up is to discuss what is reasonable to one may not be reasonable to another. If the person went missing half way through a dive and trailed off in to the abyss how long would half their air supply (half a dive, roughly 1/2 the air left) last at say 150ft? How long did it take the instructor to get to 170ft and how much reasonable time would have been left to rescue rather than recover the person.

My training tells me that I should not cause another victim to attempt to rescue someone. At 170ft, if all I see are bubble trails and thats it, I'm calling off my rescue.

I'm not talking about the initial DM / diver interaction where the DM was unable to prevent the diver from descending I'm talking about having reached XXX depth and having no chance of rescue.

 

[LeadTurn_SD]

.....

It's been alleged before here in Accidents and Incidents that some vacation areas may have a tendency to not want to publicize problems that may scare tourists. This may be a common societal attitude and the local news media may not have any interest in publicising accidents, or may just not consider it news-worthy by local standards. The comment has also been made more than once that the rest of the world wouldn't even know about these fatalities if it weren't for family and fellow-diver/tourist witnesses and the Internet....

Having lived most of my life in a "vacation area", I agree that incidents that might scare away tourists are often not given a lot of news coverage. I'd guess that tendancy could be worse in areas where the press is not as "free" as in the United States.

Best wishes.

 

[LeadTurn_SD]

....My training tells me that I should not cause another victim to attempt to rescue someone. At 170ft, if all I see are bubble trails and thats it, I'm calling off my rescue.

I'm not talking about the initial DM / diver interaction where the DM was unable to prevent the diver from descending I'm talking about having reached XXX depth and having no chance of rescue.

And that sounds perfectly reasonable. The depth could be 150, 130.... I think what Dumpsterdiver was getting at was this needs to be decided by the dive pro well in advance. It is a likely scenario, and one that should be decided in advance. In detail.

As in, at a given point in the dive, with "x" amount of air remaining in my tank, how deep can I reasonably expect to be able to go and bring up a non-responsive diver?

How deep am I willing to go for a rescue under perfect conditions (early in the dive, lots of air, minimal nitrogen load)?

How deep have I ever gone on air? This gives me some perspective on what I know I can do based on past experience.

Those things are considerations (and I'm not implying that you have not gone through those scenarios personally, this is just for general discussion).

Best wishes.

 

[Splash-X]

And that sounds perfectly reasonable. The depth could be 150, 130.... I think what Dumpsterdiver was getting at was this needs to be decided by the dive pro well in advance. It is a likely scenario, and one that should be decided in advance. In detail.

That was my intent, to bring the question to all of the instructors/DMs at my LDS so they have food for thought.

dumpsterDiver is ripping me a new one and questioning why I DM for bringing the question up. What do I, my fellow DMs/Instructors and my LDS deem as reasonable and unreasonable?

If these things are not talked about BEFORE an accident the only time it will be addressed is after in a thread like this. The purpose of this part of the forum is to learn from this accident and I intend to push the topic with my LDS for their input.