Hatul:
The Zeagle rip-cord system is considered fool-proof. Until now. . . . Perhaps it's time for us Zeagle rip-cord owners to test the system.
When I saw the first post, I was concerned. I have a Ranger, have never 'tested' the weight release system (because I didn't want to have to rethread it), and was concerned that I was possibly 'at risk'. Having now read the thread comments in detail, and looked at the video of the news conference, I cannot conclude that the accident had anything to do with the particular system design. Yes, there was equipment failure. But, the root cause was human error, at multiple levels. The changes the Chief outlined seem very appropriate. And, as presented, it is not clear that the particular 'type' of equipment is being changed, only that the particular equipment the dive team uses is being replaced.
There are a lot of things that went wrong on that dive.
That is probably the most important take-away lesson for me. The outcome had less to do with equipment failure and more to do with individual and group human failure.
Dive Right In Scuba:
That being said, there are many other things that went wrong, and should have been identified way before these guys got in the water. It is truly a shame Officer Schock lost his life!! This type of thing is so preventable
A fundamental truth. Based on the available data, this was an entirely avoidable accident, and there was a considerable amount of pre-dive negligence at work.
Dive Right In Scuba:
12 BCD failures means someone royally Effed up. No doubt about it. They were most likely threaded completely wrong or rigged up custom for some dumb reason.
I suspect this is a critical consideration. If someone 'serviced' them, even with the best of intentions, and rethreaded the lines incorrectly, it is posisble for them to all fail. Otherwise, for 12/12 units to fail to release weights seems highly improbable.
In addition, the amount of weight the diver reportedly carried raises a concern, not because of potential overweighting, but because of the mechanics of the system. Diving my Ranger, in a drysuit with thick undergarments, with a single AL 80, I found I need over 30 lbs of lead, in fresh water. And, getting 32 lbs of lead into the Ranger weight pockets was so difficult - irrespective of what they supposedly will hold - that I went to a DUI Weight and Trim Harness to supplement the weight system on the Ranger. If the diver was actually carrying 40 lbs in the weight pockets, it had to be so tightly packed in that I would not be altogether surprised that it failed to release, if in fact it did. On the other hand, if (as Gene suggested in an earlier post) some of that weight was put in the outer BCD pockets, there is no 'release' available (other than ditching the rig altogether).
In general aviation accidents, the family of the deceased not infrequently ends up suing everyone even remotely connected with the accident, including the manufacturer of the aircraft, even when it is apparent that human error - most often pilot error - was the proximate cause of the accident (some low time, high testosterone VFR-only pilot flies into clouds, in mountains, at night, and dies in a 'controlled flight into terrain' event, and somehow the company that manufactured the plane 30 years before is responsible). I hope this does not happen here. But, the leadership of the dive team, the person(s) responsble for managing this training exercise, and the police department administration overall, would certainly appear to be vulnerable to legitimate charges of contributory negligence in this case.
