Death by Diving

[TSandM]

Thal, you need to go work in a big city ER for a few consecutive weekends.

People who go to college are a selected group. People who go to HIGH SCHOOL are a selected group.

The people who get mentioned in Darwin awards aren't Phi Beta Kappa. And the people who say, "Look, ma, no hands!" are everywhere.

The young man who died here in Puget Sound a couple of years ago, doing a 200 foot bounce dive on a single Al80, knew better. The guy who swam into Vortex knew better. The woman who died in Peacock doing visual jumps absolutely knew better.

I don't care how good a class you teach, and I don't care how hard you try to find all the dingbats and weed them out, there will be people who will dive without taking your class, or there will be people who will nod in all the right places, and once you aren't looking over their shoulder, they'll do as they please.

Does this mean that I don't think better education is a good thing? Of course not! I have spent probably hundreds of hours of my time, typing answers to questions and sending people to quality links, and help folks find good diving classes and good instructors where they are. But the people I'm helping are people who want to be helped. For everyone I've interacted with who has wanted any of what I have to offer, there's someone else on this board who has defended solo diving with 20 dives, or deep diving on small tanks, or some other type of behavior that the vast majority of us immediately jump on and try to talk them out of.

Human beings come in a spectrum, and some are smart and some are careful and some are not very bright and some are wildly irresponsible. I'm sorry, but nothing done with the scuba educational establishment is going to change that fact.

 

[Thalassamania]

Lynne, I don't doubt that there is some truth in what you say, but I think it is tinged by seeing man at his worst (I know, my Dad's an MD and was the Director of a big city ER for many years ... I heard all the stories and slogans, "prep this man for rectal surgery, and be careful ... sometimes the CIA boobytraps those transmitters;" or "buy your son a Honda ... for his last birthday." Come to think of it, I did work for quite a while at the ultimate receiver of all of the candidates for a Darwin Award ... the county morgue. And I've had my share of difficult students, but only one of those (and he was a serious alcoholic) turned out to be "untrainable." Maybe that's because most of my students have been university students, staff and faculty with just a smattering of high school students and members of the general community, I'll grant you that. But I really did not see the sort of lunatic behaviors you allude to even when I dropped in on LDS classes that were being taught by students that had taken my ITCs. Did that young man really know better or did he figure that if his instructor was there he would not get hurt? Did the guy who went into Vortex really know better? Or did he lack the executive function to actually make the connection? I don't know why people screw up like that, I just seem to have a knack for teaching folks how not to.

 

[Cave Diver]

I don't know why people screw up like that, I just seem to have a knack for teaching folks how not to.

Well, until you personally teach every person who straps on a tank and jumps in the water, I think we're going to continue to have the problem.

 

[Thalassamania]

John, fixing everyone is not, as I said, my problem. But there are good methodologies out there, that if they were more widely adopted, might go a long way.

 

[Kingpatzer]

I already do my part.

Which seems to consist largely of being insulting to divers who take what training is available to them rather than just jumping in the water with none at all (like you did according to your bio.) Your students must thrive on condescension.

 

[Thalassamania]

I started diving diving in 1956, that was the only way to do it then, but I have spent my life seeking out the best, I went to the two best high schools in the country, I went to the best university in the world (at least at that time), I took courses from the most acclaimed divers that I could find, I shipped my gear and rode my motorcycle (Dunstall Norton - second best, only to a Vincent) 2,000 miles to attend the best ITC in the country. That's the way I do things. I guess you're happy to take whatever is available to you, good, bad or indifferent ... down the street, because it too inconvenient, or too afraid, to try and do better.

 

[k ellis]

I give back by volunteering to dive with new divers, and help them sort out their equipment and their skills, and where I can, pass on a little information and a lot of accessible resources. I think there are a lot of us who do things like that. Every little bit helps.

This is the same reason I prefer diving with newbies. most tend to be more open minded and willing to listen then veteran divers

 

[k ellis]

We have a saying in the ER: You can't cure stupid. In almost any realm of life, you can find stories of people getting hurt doing things that are so obviously ridiculous that the majority of us would never think of doing them. Diving is no exception. I believe it was gcbryan who started a thread some time ago about whether accident reports do us any good at all, because the vast majority of them either give us no information about what happened, or tell a story which has so many egregious mistakes in it that none of the rest of us would ever go there.

Hey the E.R. I get called to all the time has the exact same things here. There is always someone who comes in from doing something so stupid that when you tell people about it later they slap their heads and laugh saying no one could possibly be that stupid.

Our E.R. gets more alcahol related injuries and drunks passed out then anything else though

 

[lamont]

for the most part you just need to teach recreational divers:

- how to manage their gas (including making sure they don't jump in with it off)

- how to manage their buoyancy

- how to stick together, avoid separation and be useful to each other

- how to donate gas

i'd also add:

- how kick to not silt up the dive site

coincidentally, that's basically what a fundamentals course focuses on, but it doesn't necessarily need to be.

to really teach all of these, though, you need more ongoing mentoring than you get out of the typical recreational OW courses.

 

[TSandM]

Thal, I really believe that, when it comes right down to it, you and I are far more in agreement than otherwise.

But I also believe that a) not everybody has any interest in better education and b) education can only do so much to shape behavior.

When Peter flew, we got the NTSB reporter. Now, flying light aircraft IS heavily regulated, and the class you have to pass to do it is long and extensive, and I think there are far fewer really bad flying instructors out there than there are really bad diving instructors. But every issue reported a fatality due to running out of gas, or flying VFR into IFR conditions. Both of those things are avoidable. We were ALL taught checklists and walkarounds and how to check weather (I took flying lessons years ago, and I remember those things). But once people are finished with their classes, they do as they please, and what they please depends on their personality. Are they careful? Are they careLESS? Are they daredevils? Is their behavior driven by something other than what they were taught? (In the flying example, the desire to get home despite the weather; in the diving example, perhaps the desire to make a dive they've paid a lot of money for, despite the fact that conditions are not ideal for diving.)

The fact that most rebreather deaths are due to human error should be a cautionary example . . . humans are intrinsically fallible, and no amount of training or education is going to change that basic fact. A system like the one I dive in is designed to minimize the component of human error, by standardizing as much as possible, and incorporating many group checks. Yet I have made errors that could have caused safety problems, and I try to be very careful. The person who has no particular motivation to be careful will make more.