BP Oil Spill, Scuba diving and Risk Assessment

[Jeff Toorish]

This thread is not about the BP Oil Spill, there are other threads dealing with that issue. This is about risk assessment and our over reliance on technology and safety systems which may actually make us more unsafe.

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times. In a piece he wrote on Friday, May 28th, 2010, Brooks suggests we are so dependent on safety systems, many of them wildly complicated, that we have begun to lose the ability to effectively assess risks. That may be at least part of the cause of the BP Oil Spill.

You can read Brooks entire article here: Op-Ed Columnist - Drilling for Certainty - NYTimes.com

This is an issue I have been studying for many years, from my days as a daily reporter. Long ago I came to the conclusion that, especially in western culture, we are so preoccupied with safety systems that we may be ultimately putting ourselves in greater danger, especially in larger contexts. (For example, we spend billions in an attempt to prevent terrorist attacks, while tens of thousands of people die on highways because we have an inadquate guard rail system)

The example Brooks gives is crosswalks, where more people die than jay walking because jay walkers actually look both ways before stepping into the street. I have used this example myself for years.

I open this discussion as it relates to scuba diving in general. In basic open warm water diving, I see divers who seem to have a very heavy reliance on technology for safety, even at the expense of basic skills. I recently witnessed exactly that on a boat dive --where a diver had so many pieces of safety gear he actually put himself in greater danger.

My idea here is to begin a discussion of how we may be over-relying on safety systems while making ourselves less safe --and perhaps what we can do to correct this.

Your thoughts?

Jeff

 

[drbill]

I try to reduce risk as much as humanly possible by buying gear that has a high reliability factor. As a long-time solo diver, redundancy is important to me... the one time I really needed it, I was too lazy to affix my pony to my primary tank and nearly lost it. I do not use equipment I don't need, but I do use a fair bit of redundant equipment (for example, I dive with four second stages including the one on my pony).

I do take risks that others might consider foolish, such as diving solo on air to 200 ft. They may be right. I only do so for a reason... to film deep ecology. I mentally prepare myself to act in the case of an equipment failure. However, the risks are significant enough that I may fail to survive should something serious develop. I have not done these deep dives in about two years and have become a rather shallow fellow since I have no immediate need for more footage from such depths.

I have informed my family that should something happen on these dives (were I to resume them), the responsibility is entirely mine. They are not to initiate legal action against any operator that allows me to do them.

I just read on another board that the family of a diver who died using rental gear from my favorite shop has won a reversal from an appeals court allowing them to re-open the case. The deceased diver rented gear, ran out of air at depth, ascended with his buddy but succumbed to cardiac arrest. The case was re-opened based on a technicality in the release form which strikes me as another nuisance suit. A diver is responsible for their actions. There was a claim that the SPG he rented may have been reading higher than actual (are any of these gauges 100% reliable? was it reading a few hundred psi higher? if so, why did he suck the tank down that low in the first place without ascending?). When will people accept responsibility for their own behavior?

 

[Herk_Man]

I just read an article about accidents increasing at intersections where they've installed "red light cameras." These are cameras that issue tickets to cars that run red lights. So people are now slamming on their brakes if the light turns yellow and they are having a lot of rear end accidents.

As a pilot I'm big on safety but I am also big on risk assessment. It's an interesting idea that an over reliance on safety is driving more accidents. I would be interested to see how this applies in the diving world.

 

[captain]

This should be good.

 

[seaducer]

Safety smafety. Everybody dies from something. It is getting to the point where I am going to need safety glasses and a helmet to watch TV.

 

[skydiver30960]

OK, here comes a long one:

A couple years ago, on a similar website for another sport I frequent (again, you get three guesses and the first two don't count) an article detailed the theory (term loosely used) of "risk homeostasis".

The theory goes something like this: every person has a certain baseline of risk at which they prefer to live. Every person has a different amount of acceptable risk, some have more and some have less. The majority of the research has been done on peoples' behavior while driving: obviously, this is an area where the money is. People who drive X mph over the speed limit and pass the rest of us at breakneck speed may slow down to Y mph when it gets foggy, but will still tend to be riskier than the rest of us. If it gets dark and the roads are empty, they will drive even faster in light of the perceived reduction of risk offered by the empty road. These are the people that as a paramedic I scrape up off the road and as an ICU nurse I try to put together like one of the king's horses or men.

The part of the theory I enjoy most is that there are those that say the theory holds beyond just one activity, and can be applied to a person's entire life as a whole. For example, this might explain why a seemingly well-adjusted guy with a wife and 2.5 kids and a house with picket fences would lope off to the city and foolishly take part in high-risk sexual encounters. Or, why someone with a very risky job may prefer less risky pastimes when they're not on the job.

My personal experience: when I was younger and started skydiving, it was pretty much the only thing I did other than work. I became a tandem instructor, a part of the skydiving community that carries a significantly increased level of moral and legal risk. Later in my life (a couple years ago) I found myself skydiving, scuba diving, a paramedic, a nurse, a firefighter... hell, EVERYTHING I did had moral and legal risk attached to it. I started to lose my taste for tandem skydiving: I became more and more obsessed with the liability associated with it, and it stopped being fun. So, I gave up tandem instruction, while I do still sport skydive and plan to continue to do so as long as these ever-aging bones allow. I feel my change in attitude regarding tandem instructing was a manifestation of risk homeostasis: my life as a whole had become too risky, and I needed to dial down the risk to my acceptable level.

Another skydiving reference: back in the 80's a very important piece of safety equipment (automated activation devices) didn't exist, and the majority of deaths occurred because of "low pull" or "no pull" incidents. Once AADs came on the scene, the number of people dying of low/no pulls decreased, but people just found other ways of killing themselves skydiving by finding more and more risky ways of jumping out of airplanes (as if it wasn't risky enough), i.e. the emerging discipline of "swooping" and things like wingsuits. The number of deaths and jumps to deaths ratio hasn't changed much. Skydivers have adjusted the way they jump to maintain their level of risk homeostasis.

So, maybe the same thing is happening in SCUBA. Every time a "safer" bell or whistle comes out, people buy it and because of the perception of reduced risk, unintentionally they feel the need to push the envelope in other ways to maintain their risk homeostasis. So, even as the sport becomes safer, people keep dying.

Phew! :coolingoff: Waddaya think?

Ike aka "my computer just ran out of screen ink"

 

[Jeff Toorish]

Interesting and useful posts on this so far, and I appreciate what everyone has written.

If I may guide this a bit; my concern is that as we progress as a culture, a society, we are mitigating so many risks that we are actually creating a more risky overall environment because so many people have lost the ability to assess risks.

Let me put it like this, it's something I call the "high five syndrome." As an amusement park, I see people getting off roller coasters giving each other high fives, or some equivelant. But we all know roller coasters don't really present much of a risk, they are simply thrill machines. Those same people don't seem to realize that driving on the highway to the amusement park was actually much more dangerous --hell, walking through the parking lot was probably statistically more dangerous.

I'm not talking about enjoying risky adventures, or thrill seaking behavior, or even the self-destructive activities of people like Mark Sanford of South Carolina --I am talking about not even understanding there is a danger, let alone trying to mitigate it.

Jeff

 

[seaducer]

I'm not talking about enjoying risky adventures, or thrill seaking behavior, or even the self-destructive activities of people like Mark Sanford of South Carolina --I am talking about not even understanding there is a danger, let alone trying to mitigate it.

I think there is a point when people who are focused on reducing risk get so narrowminded that they lose sight of other, perhaps more risky conditions.

How many people who advocate airshare drills on every dive forget to buckle up or text their buddies while doing 75MPH on the way to the dive site? How many eat fast food 4 times a week?

There are clear and present dangers that many of us face every single day. Because we face them every day we tend to forget they are dangerous. People have lost all respect for what cars can do at speed when we forget to pay attention.

I think many people believe that their lives are totally safe, and then are surprised and angry when they learn that living is dangerous.

edit in..

So, maybe the same thing is happening in SCUBA. Every time a "safer" bell or whistle comes out, people buy it and because of the perception of reduced risk, unintentionally they feel the need to push the envelope in other ways to maintain their risk homeostasis. So, even as the sport becomes safer, people keep dying.

How many people on this board think EAN is safer than air? They still find ways to get close to the NDL, and have the same chances of getting bent, it just took more time on the bottom and less time in the boat to reach the same level of risk. But hey, its Nitrox, so I must be safer...right?

 

[spectrum]

The Undo button is the ultimate safety net in much of what we do. As time goes on we get more and more conditioned that if we make a bad choice or careless error we can just click Undo and all will be good.

I have had several occasions where I made errors that proved to be irreversible and found myself at a loss not being able to simply undo my error. Some of these were NOT at the computer but the undo expectation had been projected to that activity. Based on this experience I have taken to reminding my daughters that life does not have an undo button, so make good choices.

Pete

 

[scubaflier]

I think it has got to a point that some people think that even if they were wrong it will be OK.
a person who smiles when things go wrong found someone else to blame it on.