Wingtip once bubbled...
Because you'll never get full access to the investigation.
Feel free to stick your head into the sand and pity the no-fault death. It's tragic to lose any diver, but what is truly sad is those that can't get past the touchy-feely issues of blame and remorse to learn lessons from tragedy and then apply those lessons to their own diving.
I agree.
We never have all the facts and there often aren't witnesses. So? If we take what little we know and theorize to fill in the blanks what would we come up with? What are the risks in doing so? I say none. At worst we could improve in an area that wasn't the cause of this accident. That doesn't sound so bad. As long as we don't put any one in jail without the facts, I don't see a down side. Besides, in many of these accident there's more than enough to convince a jury that our story is correct. Maybe that's part of the problem too.
According to the article which could be bs....
1, We have A diver who according to her buddy like to stay above and behind which is the single worst place to be because it's your buddies blind spot.
2, We have a 77 year old in tough conditions. I would say that there is a pretty good chance that contributed.
3, We have yet another buddy seperation. Maybe hanging in the blind spot had something to do with that.
4, we apparantly have a standing plan to surface in the case of a seperation. Sometimes that's a goos plan and sometimes not. In a strong current you could end up in cuba or China that way
5, we have divers doing trust-me dives. It sounds like that's what the victim did most...follow the DM. That's not bad if you know what they're getting you into.
What don't we know?
Alot but we don't know when they were seperated. We don't know when or why the victim went to the surface. We don't know if the conditions were the problem or how big of a contributing factor.
I do know that buddy seperation is the MO and that panic is usually the last straw. Also the panic is usually over something that's anything but life threatening.
So if we took this PURE speculation that seems to fit the information presented in the article and decided to do a better job of teaching team diving like teaching them to use a side by side or a single file formation so they could more easily see each other... If we had some meaningful team diving performance requirements in training...If we more strongly discouraged these trust-me dives...could we really mess anything up?
I think not. As long as we don't use speculation to punish or prosecute, we can't get in any trouble fixing the wrong thing. At least we would have fixed something. As it is, and as usual we will address nothing and fix nothing because we don't have absolute proof of anything except that something may need to be fixed.
Sorry...just thinking on the keyboard.