Catalina Island fatality - California

[rongoodman]

In the first case, the diver wanted to save money on replacing 9V batteries that ran the unit so he turned off the controlling devices after the first dive. He forgot to turn them back on so on his second dive, the CO2 scrubbers would not have been working and he essentially fell asleep underwater and drowned. Diver error.

The scrubber would have nothing to do with the controller being on or off, but without the controller, there would have been no O2 injected into the loop by the solenoid, so he would have died due to hypoxia. How he could have ignored the O2 in the loop dropping to nothing is an interested question though.

 

[mathauck0814]

Patric (and many of his dive partners) dived a rEvo III. His particular unit has a solenoid and controller. I won't comment on the incident but since the specifics of his unit were called into question I figured I'd at least say something factual.

 

[Ken Kurtis]

I won't comment on the incident but since the specifics of his unit were called into question I figured I'd at least say something factual.

I haven't seen that. if you're referring to anything I posted, I'm talking about a 2006 incident as an example in talking about some overall stats. There should be no inference or implication in anything I've written that I'm suggesting that it refers to anything about Patric's accident.

- Ken

 

[Hunter151]

Patric was my instructor for open water scuba. Very tragic to see something like this happen to someone you know - and especially scary to see it happen to someone with as much training and commitment to safety as Patric.

I am still curious as to what happened - does anyone have updates, or perhaps a resolution to the investigation?

 

[billt4sf]

Hello Ken,

Interesting numbers of deaths annually in LA County. Average 5 per year. Any idea what the number of dives done in LA County per year are?

Thanks,

- Bill


"You are correct that we average about 5 fatalities a year in LA County (which si the jurisdiction of the LA County Coroner/Department of Medical Examiner.) Overall in SoCal (Point Conception to the Mexican border - add in SB, Ventura, Orange, & SD counties), it's probably closer to 12-15/year. So far in 2015 (LA County), I think we're at 4, and that includes the two recent ones in December.

In the last five years, here are the numbers:
2010 - 7
2011 - 7
2012 - 10 (worst year on record - and we went the first half of the year with 0)
2013 - 4
2014 - 3

Since 1994, we've recorded (again these are only LA County stats from the "Why Divers Die" seminar we give each year at the Scuba Show) 98 fatalities. broken down in 5-year increments:
1995-1999 - 16
2000-2004 - 22
2005-2009 - 24
2010-2014 - 31 (but this also includes the year with 10, 5 higher than "average" - underscores your point of a small sample size and the numbers being easily skewed)"