Well, I’ve been a Sat Diver for the best part of 15 years (that’s exclusively Sat diving, averaging around 120 days in sat a year) and a Diver for 25 years and I don’t have any detrimental health issues.
Deep Air, Surface oriented mixed gas dives, bell bounce, surface 02 with tight tables....these are all going to be ‘bad’ for you.....sat tables from the 70s to the 90s were basically experimental, and were fine tuned to get the balance between productivity and number of divers ‘damaged’. This was addressed in Norway in the last few years by ‘Pioneer Divers’ who took the government to court over experimental diving in the 70’s and won compensation from the Norwegian government.
Plenty of regions in the world still cut corners on safe diving practices because of economics and divers still get hurt. But they don’t have to be...
And yes, there will always be an increasing workload for ROV’s but they will never take over completely while there are still shallow installations in poor viz and tide, built before ROVs (and even after- there’s a reason why a lot of our work is on wellheads behind an ROV panel...
The Norwegians were confident they would cease manned diving by the year 2000. They were wrong then, and the workload is increasing. Like I said, anyone who has watched an ROV take 4 hours to disconnect a shackle, from a vessel costing £150k a day will realise that, whilst you can get an ROV tooled up to do many things subsea, they aren’t necessarily the cheapest or most efficient way..
And of course, just look at ‘Big Red’ at UDS who has been investing heavily in updated research on Hydreliox diving to 6-700m, mainly due to the massive number of installations in SE Asia which will require maintenance/decommissioning in the future, which could be done by divers quickly and efficiently...
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