BSAC 2005 accident report released

[String]

html:

http://www.bsac.org/techserv/increp05/overview05.htm

pdf:

http://www.bsac.org/techserv/increp05/doc2005rep.pdf

---

This report isnt just bsac members, its all the incidents in the UK in a 12 month period from october 2004 to october 2005 obtained via information from the coastguard, rnli, military, incident reports and newspapers so is all divers. It also includes overseas where its known a diver was a bsac member.

Only had time to briefly look at the report so far but despite at one point this year looking really bad it seems to have been "another normal year" dropping off from last years record high fatalities.

A few points apparent from it straight away:

Total of 441 reported incidents (however minor), 17 of which ended in fatalities. Of those 17 deaths, 2 and probably 3 were the result of a medical condition that happened underwater (ie heart attack etc) and another 3 were overseas divers. 4 were deliberate solo dives.
5 of the 17 were bsac members.

Basic nature of the report:-
81 Rapid ascents
28 Missed stops
Clearly some incidents relate to both the above

Causal factors are:-
17 Delayed SMB, mask, fin problem
12 Drysuit or BCD issues
11 Weight related issues
10 During training
9 Out of air
8 Regulator free flow
Again some have a combination of the above factors

Loss of bouyancy control accounts for half of the incidents where the casual factors are removed.


---

Plenty there to digest, no real surprises in there as to the types and causes of incidents really. Just another "average" year with no obvious trends. That said im basing this on a quick 30 min read.

 

[Jamdiver]

Thank you very much for this String, this will be a good reading and learning opportunity.

 

[DandyDon]

Thanks for sharing that.

 

[DiverBuoy]

10 During training,

Nooooooo!

 

[cmalinowski]

Loss of bouyancy control accounts for half of the incidents where the casual factors are removed.

Wow, you would think that some of the training agencies would look at reports like that and figure that they really need to work on bouyancy skills from the get go. They need to drill it into divers and make sure that they understand the ramifications of bad bouyancy control. Maybe some do, but I am only familiar with PADI and GUE... one of which knows the importance.

Chris

 

[jeckyll]

Interesting link. Thank you.

Bjorn

 

[docwascuba]

i read that lots of accidents occur in drysuits..

 

[Rick Inman]

As stated above, four of the year's fatalities involved solo diving and to throw more light on these events I conducted a study of the database. The current database goes back to 1998 and it contains 138 fatal incidents (UK). 8 of these incidents involved double fatalities, giving a total of 146 deaths. Of this total, 19 relate to solo diving. This means that 13% of our fatalities were solo divers and we can be sure that this is very significantly higher than the fraction of dives that are conducted solo. People might be tempted to point at the double fatalities and argue that 8 lives would have been saved if the incidents had been solo dives. This may be true but every year we report a number of incidents where an attentive buddy has clearly saved another's life by taking the appropriate remedial actions. My guess is that these cases outnumber the double fatalities by a factor of five or more.

(emphasis added)

Oops to solo diving being safer...

 

[WarmWaterDiver]

Thanks for the info / link String. I'll digest this over the holiday season.

 

[String]

i read that lots of accidents occur in drysuits..

In the same way you can assume most accidents occur with divers who are breathing a compressed gas.
You'd have more accidents in drysuits in a british accident report purely because most of the divers wear drysuits.