I'm wondering if there were safety divers, surface support (other than his wife) etc. WCB will likely release info like that...
Diver dies on Hamilton horror movie shoot
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So far the coroner has been unable to determine cause of death for certain. Toxicology results will not be available for another month or so. Equipment malfunction (rebreather)seems more likely at this point. No mention of a heart attack from the coroner so far although there was speculation at first.
As for the victim being in great physical shape, I can't tell you how many times I've seen apparently healthy patients with normal physicals and EKGs drop dead within a month or two of being given a "clean bill of health".
Most people have no idea that an EKG is only about 25% sensitive, meaning 75% of the time it will miss the problem.
Is it just me or does it seeem like heart attack is frequently mentioned when a diver dies/drowns?
Jay
As for the victim being in great physical shape, I can't tell you how many times I've seen apparently healthy patients with normal physicals and EKGs drop dead within a month or two of being given a "clean bill of health".
Most people have no idea that an EKG is only about 25% sensitive, meaning 75% of the time it will miss the problem.
Is it just me or does it seeem like heart attack is frequently mentioned when a diver dies/drowns?
Jay
From the Burlington Post Aug 22nd
Diver had 'big heart', says grieving family
Coroner continues to investigate drowning
Jason Misner
Aug 24, 2005
Sitting on the porch in a white Adirondack chair, Maralyn Walsh is searching for the words to describe her wonderful son-in-law, Gerry Tychansky, who died in a scuba diving accident in the murky waters of Hamilton Harbour on Sunday.
The shock of losing Tychansky is evident on Walsh's face as her eyes scour the front yard of the Burlington home of her daughter, Darlene, Tychansky's wife of a dozen years. There are so many memories to recall.
Tychansky, a Central High School graduate, was in the middle of completing training with the Toronto Fire Services to fulfill his life-long dream of becoming a firefighter.
"His heart was big," Walsh said, in between tears, about Tychansky, who was born and raised in the city. "If you needed help, Gerry was there to help.
"We're all in shock at this point."
Tychansky, 43, a 20-year scuba diver, died in the dark waters of Hamilton Harbour while helping film a horror movie. He was pulled lifeless from the shallow waters near the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club where he was working underwater with his wife Darlene.
The two were in about four metres (13 feet) of water filming a routine scene at 11 a.m. They had been towing a prop, shaped like a shark, about four metres from the dock when the woman surfaced alone. Minutes later, the shark could be seen floating freely.
Tychansky and Darlene -- who didn't have children -- were working on a low-budget horror movie called Marina Monster. The film's plot is of a shark wreaking havoc in the harbour, with subplots of the competition between two yacht clubs and the romance between the children of the rival commodores.
At press time film director Christine Whitlock declined to comment on the accident.
Hamilton forensic pathologists, among the best in the country, are investigating to determine the cause of Tychansky's death. An initial autopsy was inconclusive, said Hamilton coroner Dr. Jack Stanborough.
Darlene was too distraught to speak to the Post. Walsh said the loss of Tychansky would be difficult to get over. He has been a fixture the family since he was 15, when he was a friend of Darlene's brother, she said. It was through this friendship that he got to know and eventually fall in love with Darlene. The two got married in 1993.
The couple had started diving together in 1985.
Walsh said she thinks Tychansky knew somebody associated with the film and was helping out, noting he and Darlene usually dove in Florida waters.
"His two passions were firefighting and diving," Walsh said, noting Darlene has lots of support.
Tychansky was a healthy individual, she said.
"He'd have to be healthy to get into the fire department."
The coroner hopes microscopic tissue sampling and toxicology tests -- which could come back as early as the end of September or early October -- will determine the cause of death.
Stanborough said the case has been "puzzling."
"We have an exceptionally well-trained diver," he said, noting Tychansky had done 150 dives. "He wasn't in terribly deep water. We don't have someone who was unhealthy."
Stanborough, a scuba diver himself, noted the kind of equipment Tychansky used is designed not to emit air bubbles. The manufacturer will be contacted for more information.
Stoney Creek resident Jurgen Punko -- who called Tychansky his best friend, who was the best man at Punko's wedding -- said his buddy for nearly two decades would do anything for anybody. An emotional Punko recalled a time when he had broken his collar bone and Tychansky helped around the house.
"You could always count on him," he said, noting he saw Tychansky last week.
He got a phone call from Tychansky's brother Sunday about the accident. At first Punko, 47, thought his friend was having car trouble.
"Sadly that wasn't the case," he said. "He was a great, great friend. He's going to be missed by a lot of people."
In an August, 1997 newspaper article, Tychansky talked about exploring an obscure and murky underwater cave system at the edge of the Ozarks plateau in Missouri's Rock Bridge Memorial State Park to help state officials map some missing areas.
Tychansky swam through, unaware his wife's light had failed and she and another diver had lost the safety line. The two were forced to turn back.
Tychansky then felt part of the wall give way and began swimming upwards to investigate. He stood alone on a shallow ledge in the cave.
The exhilaration was something else, he said.
"It's like the guys who walked on the moon. They've been somewhere no one else has been. It made it all worth it," he was quoted as saying.
Cave diving is a more technical and dangerous form of scuba diving, often requiring longer dives with no margins for error.
According to the Web site of the Florida-based National Association for Cave Diving, a "safe cave dive is totally dependent upon sensible dive planning based on common sense and good judgment."
Funeral services for Tychansky will be held Friday at 1 p.m. at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, located on the corner of Blairholm Avenue and Brant Street.
Reporter Jason Misner can be reached at jmisner@burlingtonpost.com.
-- with files from Torstar News Service
Diver had 'big heart', says grieving family
Coroner continues to investigate drowning
Jason Misner
Aug 24, 2005
Sitting on the porch in a white Adirondack chair, Maralyn Walsh is searching for the words to describe her wonderful son-in-law, Gerry Tychansky, who died in a scuba diving accident in the murky waters of Hamilton Harbour on Sunday.
The shock of losing Tychansky is evident on Walsh's face as her eyes scour the front yard of the Burlington home of her daughter, Darlene, Tychansky's wife of a dozen years. There are so many memories to recall.
Tychansky, a Central High School graduate, was in the middle of completing training with the Toronto Fire Services to fulfill his life-long dream of becoming a firefighter.
"His heart was big," Walsh said, in between tears, about Tychansky, who was born and raised in the city. "If you needed help, Gerry was there to help.
"We're all in shock at this point."
Tychansky, 43, a 20-year scuba diver, died in the dark waters of Hamilton Harbour while helping film a horror movie. He was pulled lifeless from the shallow waters near the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club where he was working underwater with his wife Darlene.
The two were in about four metres (13 feet) of water filming a routine scene at 11 a.m. They had been towing a prop, shaped like a shark, about four metres from the dock when the woman surfaced alone. Minutes later, the shark could be seen floating freely.
Tychansky and Darlene -- who didn't have children -- were working on a low-budget horror movie called Marina Monster. The film's plot is of a shark wreaking havoc in the harbour, with subplots of the competition between two yacht clubs and the romance between the children of the rival commodores.
At press time film director Christine Whitlock declined to comment on the accident.
Hamilton forensic pathologists, among the best in the country, are investigating to determine the cause of Tychansky's death. An initial autopsy was inconclusive, said Hamilton coroner Dr. Jack Stanborough.
Darlene was too distraught to speak to the Post. Walsh said the loss of Tychansky would be difficult to get over. He has been a fixture the family since he was 15, when he was a friend of Darlene's brother, she said. It was through this friendship that he got to know and eventually fall in love with Darlene. The two got married in 1993.
The couple had started diving together in 1985.
Walsh said she thinks Tychansky knew somebody associated with the film and was helping out, noting he and Darlene usually dove in Florida waters.
"His two passions were firefighting and diving," Walsh said, noting Darlene has lots of support.
Tychansky was a healthy individual, she said.
"He'd have to be healthy to get into the fire department."
The coroner hopes microscopic tissue sampling and toxicology tests -- which could come back as early as the end of September or early October -- will determine the cause of death.
Stanborough said the case has been "puzzling."
"We have an exceptionally well-trained diver," he said, noting Tychansky had done 150 dives. "He wasn't in terribly deep water. We don't have someone who was unhealthy."
Stanborough, a scuba diver himself, noted the kind of equipment Tychansky used is designed not to emit air bubbles. The manufacturer will be contacted for more information.
Stoney Creek resident Jurgen Punko -- who called Tychansky his best friend, who was the best man at Punko's wedding -- said his buddy for nearly two decades would do anything for anybody. An emotional Punko recalled a time when he had broken his collar bone and Tychansky helped around the house.
"You could always count on him," he said, noting he saw Tychansky last week.
He got a phone call from Tychansky's brother Sunday about the accident. At first Punko, 47, thought his friend was having car trouble.
"Sadly that wasn't the case," he said. "He was a great, great friend. He's going to be missed by a lot of people."
In an August, 1997 newspaper article, Tychansky talked about exploring an obscure and murky underwater cave system at the edge of the Ozarks plateau in Missouri's Rock Bridge Memorial State Park to help state officials map some missing areas.
Tychansky swam through, unaware his wife's light had failed and she and another diver had lost the safety line. The two were forced to turn back.
Tychansky then felt part of the wall give way and began swimming upwards to investigate. He stood alone on a shallow ledge in the cave.
The exhilaration was something else, he said.
"It's like the guys who walked on the moon. They've been somewhere no one else has been. It made it all worth it," he was quoted as saying.
Cave diving is a more technical and dangerous form of scuba diving, often requiring longer dives with no margins for error.
According to the Web site of the Florida-based National Association for Cave Diving, a "safe cave dive is totally dependent upon sensible dive planning based on common sense and good judgment."
Funeral services for Tychansky will be held Friday at 1 p.m. at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, located on the corner of Blairholm Avenue and Brant Street.
Reporter Jason Misner can be reached at jmisner@burlingtonpost.com.
-- with files from Torstar News Service
docjay:
I would be very careful about that accusation. 99+% of all rebreather accidents can be attributed to user error and the unit involved (megaladon) is a very well engineered rebreather. It is far too easy to blame the rebreather but is almost never the actual cause
docjay - thanks for that article.
It breaks my heart to read an avid diver die. Prayers, sympathy and positive thoughts for his family. (Although sometimes I just wish there was more we could say or do.)
It breaks my heart to read an avid diver die. Prayers, sympathy and positive thoughts for his family. (Although sometimes I just wish there was more we could say or do.)
mrobinson:
well said michelle. Thanks for the article. I am curious to learn the reason behind the incident.
So for the people reading this thread: is 4 meters deep really that deep to you?
I know there's a lot of factors involved, but I'm just asking cause if the assumption that the diver was fit (as most of us would think we are) wouldn't you just ascend to the surface if you felt something was wrong (equipment failure or not)? Then this would mean the cause of the incident would be an abrupt infarct of some sort? Am I travelling on a one track thinking process? Thanks for any feedback or lecture.
caveseeker7
Contributor
Chip, 4 msw is certainly not deep, but it's still 4 msw away from being able to breathe without any UBA.
A few pointers for those of you not familiar with closed circuit rebreathers.
They are fed from two tanks, diluent and oxygen. Diluent is air usually to 40 or 50 msw, trimix or heliox on deeper dives. The diver inhales from and exhales into the loop consisting of a DSV (mouthpiece), counterlungs, scrubber and hoses to connect it all.
Diluent is used to keep the gas inside the loop breathable past 6 msw and to compensate for ambient pressure as you do on a BCD when descending.
Only the O2 the body metabolizes is replenished from the O2 tank. The scrubber chemically binds the CO2 that is exhaled. Otherwise, the gas circulates the loop during breathing.
The two main differences here to open circuit are that you're not breathing the same gas as is in your tank, and that you can breath for quite a while even if the tank is empty or the valves are closed. In the case of O2 on a 4 msw dive that would mean no O2 gets added and sooner or later the O2 content in the loop would be depleted. Lack of oxygen is known as hypoxia.
Hyperoxia is the opposite, the partial pressure of O2 gets too high and becomes toxic. Not an issue at 4 msw, even with 100% O2 in the loop the ppO would be 1.4 ata and within recreational limits.
Either way, the unit used has, like most CCRs, tripple O2 sensors and multiple displays.
Depending on the electronics either two or three displays, most likely including a heads-up LED display mounted to the DSV. Those are in sight at all time and signal the partial pressure of the unit. Those displays are hooked up to separate batteries to give redundancy in that respect, too. As previously written, it's a pretty well engineered rig.
The first rule of rebreather diving is Always know your ppO2.
This unit has manual O2 and diluent injection to maintain the proper ppO2 manually.
Diving CCR manually is the major part of all CCR training classes I'm aware of.
Even if both sets of electronics fail the unit can be safely used in SCR mode before the diver would have to bail out to his OC bailout supply. Although on a shallow dive like this, bailing out on OC is more likely.
Leaves hypercapnia, or CO2 poisening. This occurs when CO2 is in the loop (or not exhaled by the diver). Several possibilities that can make that happen. The one-way valves in the DSV fail to move the gas only one way, so the diver inhales what he just exhaled. Either due to damaged valves or faulty assembly. The chemical absorbant in the scrubber is channeling, allowing CO2 to pass through, due to bad packing of the cannister. The absorbant is exhausted and incapable of binding the CO2. That happens when the absorbant is improperly stored, used past its experation date or simply used up during diving. Before entering the water, divers are supposed to 'pre-breathe' the unit. Just several minutes of breathing off the loop to start up the chemical process and insure there is no (excessive) CO2 in the loop. Any problems encountered would be safely out of the water, where breathable air is but mouth opening away. As far as using up the scrubber during diving and rendering it useless, all manufacturers set strict guidelines regarding duration. Anybody pushing his luck going past that is obviously on his or her own.
These potential dangers of the loop's gas composition are common to all rebreathers (and indeed some of them to OC diving, certainly at an extended range level) and those of us who dive rebreather accept that as we do the possibilites of nitrogen narcosis and decompression sickness. There are more things that can go wrong, but also more ways to remedy the situations, at least with proper training and skills. And like narcosis and DCS, the body responds differently for different divers as well as different dives by the same diver. They can sneak up fast and hit hard, rendering the diver incapacitated or unconcious. Which UW usually means drowning.
As Dave pointed out, one has to be careful assigning blame to the unit. Much more likely than not, the diver made an error, or multiple ones that compiled the situation. Having read probably most all incident and accident reports publicly available, and a few that are not, I can't think of one that did not end up being user error.
Mistakes during the pre-dive or diving procedures have cost more than a few lives.
With rebreathers, even more than with OC diving, complacency kills.
Add-ited: Two more things worth taking into consideration:
Rebreathers, all of them, can be more treacherous in shallow water rather than on deep dives as the correct partial pressure of the oxygen obviously depends on the ambient pressure.
Increased workload during the dive, such as moving about an artificial shark, will increase both O2 consumption and CO2 production. It may also cause the diver to be less diligent watching his gauges.
A few pointers for those of you not familiar with closed circuit rebreathers.
They are fed from two tanks, diluent and oxygen. Diluent is air usually to 40 or 50 msw, trimix or heliox on deeper dives. The diver inhales from and exhales into the loop consisting of a DSV (mouthpiece), counterlungs, scrubber and hoses to connect it all.
Diluent is used to keep the gas inside the loop breathable past 6 msw and to compensate for ambient pressure as you do on a BCD when descending.
Only the O2 the body metabolizes is replenished from the O2 tank. The scrubber chemically binds the CO2 that is exhaled. Otherwise, the gas circulates the loop during breathing.
The two main differences here to open circuit are that you're not breathing the same gas as is in your tank, and that you can breath for quite a while even if the tank is empty or the valves are closed. In the case of O2 on a 4 msw dive that would mean no O2 gets added and sooner or later the O2 content in the loop would be depleted. Lack of oxygen is known as hypoxia.
Hyperoxia is the opposite, the partial pressure of O2 gets too high and becomes toxic. Not an issue at 4 msw, even with 100% O2 in the loop the ppO would be 1.4 ata and within recreational limits.
Either way, the unit used has, like most CCRs, tripple O2 sensors and multiple displays.
Depending on the electronics either two or three displays, most likely including a heads-up LED display mounted to the DSV. Those are in sight at all time and signal the partial pressure of the unit. Those displays are hooked up to separate batteries to give redundancy in that respect, too. As previously written, it's a pretty well engineered rig.
The first rule of rebreather diving is Always know your ppO2.
This unit has manual O2 and diluent injection to maintain the proper ppO2 manually.
Diving CCR manually is the major part of all CCR training classes I'm aware of.
Even if both sets of electronics fail the unit can be safely used in SCR mode before the diver would have to bail out to his OC bailout supply. Although on a shallow dive like this, bailing out on OC is more likely.
Leaves hypercapnia, or CO2 poisening. This occurs when CO2 is in the loop (or not exhaled by the diver). Several possibilities that can make that happen. The one-way valves in the DSV fail to move the gas only one way, so the diver inhales what he just exhaled. Either due to damaged valves or faulty assembly. The chemical absorbant in the scrubber is channeling, allowing CO2 to pass through, due to bad packing of the cannister. The absorbant is exhausted and incapable of binding the CO2. That happens when the absorbant is improperly stored, used past its experation date or simply used up during diving. Before entering the water, divers are supposed to 'pre-breathe' the unit. Just several minutes of breathing off the loop to start up the chemical process and insure there is no (excessive) CO2 in the loop. Any problems encountered would be safely out of the water, where breathable air is but mouth opening away. As far as using up the scrubber during diving and rendering it useless, all manufacturers set strict guidelines regarding duration. Anybody pushing his luck going past that is obviously on his or her own.
These potential dangers of the loop's gas composition are common to all rebreathers (and indeed some of them to OC diving, certainly at an extended range level) and those of us who dive rebreather accept that as we do the possibilites of nitrogen narcosis and decompression sickness. There are more things that can go wrong, but also more ways to remedy the situations, at least with proper training and skills. And like narcosis and DCS, the body responds differently for different divers as well as different dives by the same diver. They can sneak up fast and hit hard, rendering the diver incapacitated or unconcious. Which UW usually means drowning.
As Dave pointed out, one has to be careful assigning blame to the unit. Much more likely than not, the diver made an error, or multiple ones that compiled the situation. Having read probably most all incident and accident reports publicly available, and a few that are not, I can't think of one that did not end up being user error.
Mistakes during the pre-dive or diving procedures have cost more than a few lives.
With rebreathers, even more than with OC diving, complacency kills.
Add-ited: Two more things worth taking into consideration:
Rebreathers, all of them, can be more treacherous in shallow water rather than on deep dives as the correct partial pressure of the oxygen obviously depends on the ambient pressure.
Increased workload during the dive, such as moving about an artificial shark, will increase both O2 consumption and CO2 production. It may also cause the diver to be less diligent watching his gauges.
I wonder if all three of her lights failed. Either more new paper blunders or a real cluster of a cave dive.
I read this article a few weeks ago on the board and just moments ago heard on the news that it was found that he died of natural causes (Heart Attack) and apparently had nothing to do with equipment malfunction.... just thought I would post for those of you who were interested.
Mike
Mike
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