Diver drowns in guided cenote dive

[Bob DBF]

"Take your snorkel off your mask" isn't a rule. It's a weird hangup and screw that instructor for freaking out a student with some dumb sense of how to do things.

It's a rule if it is taught as a rule. If the student gets more reinforcement on that rule than he does about "don't dive in caves" guess which one sticks. Add in that it is an unnessary and stupid rule, you can bet that if the student sees it as a stupid rule the instructor made up, other rules by that instructor gets filed in the same "stupid" can after he has the OW card.

You see it as a weird hangup looking at it from your perspective, but to a new student it is a rule he has to live by in order to gain certification. You only know what your instructor teaches you, and at least 50% of them are below average.


Bob

 

[John C. Ratliff]

Okay, back on topic:

Corrective Actions and Interventions
I'm not going to look at the Person-machine Communications, or at the Environment. From my perspective, and I believe some of yours, this was a Decision-Making problem. So how do we influence the decisions to dive cenote/cavern/caves without training? That is the primary question.

--One possible intervention has already begun, when I posted this message on the You Tube video.

This is a beautiful cave, and the photography is gorgeous. But, and this is a big "BUT," this is a cave dive, and those diving here should be "cave diver" trained. Goran states below that spots in this cenote can be dived with only an open water certification, but that is only with guides, and you should check to ensure that the guide is cave diving certified. To get where these divers go, significant cave experience is required, and that includes good cave diving protocol (as is mentioned in this video). A diver recently lost his life here on a guided tour. Dive only within your certifications, and if not cave certified, don't go beyond the sign, no matter what the guide states.

Now, what if this message was on all the cenote videos on YouTube? Perhaps a link to the other video would also be part of that message.

--The LDSs involved all seem to be PADI. Is there any way to influence PADI concerning these types of cavern dives for open water scuba-certified divers? Would a letter to PADI, perhaps electronically signed by all the participants of this thread, to change both their training protocol and to better monitor their PADI-associated shops, help?

--I am going to try writing one of the shops directly, and seeing whether they would take that statement off their website pages: "No special qualifications are required for cavern diving." Asking them to ensure that their guides were cave certified and equipped (although the videos seem to show such equipment on the guides) would also be a part of any recommendation.

--In the engineering controls realm, I think that a better ladder, with a platform, would not only enhance the diving experience at this particular cenote, but also enhance the safety for rescue/retrieval of the victim of any type of emergency.

Those are four that may have an impact.

SeaRat

 

[sethw]

I have dived in Calavera several times, both before and after my cave training. As to some of the questions raised by Bob, as cavern dives go it is not a difficult one at all. The cavern zone is formed by a large air space with three holes, 2 very small and one large that can be seen with the ladder running down which divers often jump into. The airspace is very large, one can swim or snorkel around the outside of the space under the overhanging ceiling, a very cool place with the sunlight coming in through the 3 holes.There is a huge debris pile in the center of the collapse, more or less directly below the opening, which comes to within 3 or 4 meters of the surface. This pile is conical, dropping away toward the edge of the air space and down to a depth of about 15 meters max. The cavern line is circular, running around the base of the debris cone, so it would be very difficult to lose your way. The entrance is always in the same direction, up, from the cavern line, which is a gold kermantle line. I believe it is a continuous circle, but I may be mistaken about that.

One difference from most other cavern tours is there is no permanent cavern line from open water down to the circular cavern line, so the guide must run a reel from the top of the debris cone and down, tying into the cavern line. It is a good place to demonstrate use of a reel, and the importance of a continuous guide line.

The jump to the main line is not that close, I would guess at least 50 feet, and like many of the cave lines in Mexico, not easily visible from the cavern line.

What I am about to say is pure speculation, since I have no information beyond what has been posted here, but I have to assume as others have that the guide left the cavern line with his clients. It's just impossible to imagine how you could lose a diver on the cavern line or anywhere in the cavern zone. It is hard to believe, but in at least one other accident in recent years, a guide brought 2 clients into the cave zone of another cenote, Chac Mool, without running a jump reel from the cavern line, they became disoriented inside the cave and all three drowned. Possibly that is what happened in this case as well. The guides do the same tours over and over, dozens of times, and may feel they know the jumps like the backs of their hands and don't need a line. The first passage inside the cave is very nice, called the Madonna Passage, and just beyond that, the Hall of Giants.

However, unlike the Chac Mool incident, there are three survivors of this incident, and so additional information may be forthcoming.

-Seth



------------------
[QUOTE/]It also doesn't answer the questions about what really happened. There are several questions that, while we may not know the answers in this specific case, may provide some value to understanding how fatalities like this one occur ...

• Did this man stray from the line or did the guide take the group in there?
• If the former, why? Was it an intentional act or due to some deficiency in how the lines are marked? I asked that question earlier, and if any of you are familiar with this place, how far off the cavern line are the lines into the caves? Seems like there are multiple entrances, so how well are the marked?
• What was the guide's qualifications for taking these people on this particular tour? While this cenote seems to be a popular "bucket list" destination (partly due perhaps to its more commonly known name as the "Temple of Doom") is it really an appropriate place to be taking tourists? My impression, based on reading the reviews of the cavern zone is that there are better places ... Dos Ojos, Gran Cenote, Pet Cemetary, and Carwash, for example.
• Is the cavern line clearly marked? I've read someone say that it's a gold line, but is that a fact or an assumption? I know from my limited experiences in MX that some of the popular cenotes are not marked with gold line, and instead have the same white line as the ones that go back deeper into the caves.
• What kind of lights were these tourists using? Were they even using lights at all? I recall seeing once, at Car Wash, a guide with four tourists coming out of the cave zone. Two of the tourists didn't even have lights, and the ones who did were using what appeared to be smallish backup lights. Only the guide had a light appropriate to the environment. Yes, this is a clear violation of common sense, much less any kind of training or (hopefully) policy regarding cenote tours ... but how common does it occur? And what's the "culture" of such violations in MX? More to the point, why?
  

  This thread seems to have really taken off yesterday, and it's taken me a while to wade through all of the responses. Several have made some interesting points. And while I see some validity in the "just say no" approach, we should all by now understand that it's a great theory that has very little success in the real world, because human nature is such that people will always find rationalizations to do what they want to do. And in this case, as long as there's a market for taking open water divers into these caverns (and it's a very lucrative market), there will always be those who are willing to do so. The solution goes even beyond making it more difficult, or even illegal, for that market to exist. We've seen in the ongoing US "War on Drugs" how unsuccessful that approach is at changing human attitudes and behavior. "Just say no" does little to nothing to prevent people from doing it anyway.
  
  
  
  ... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[chillyinCanada]

Are these the questions you meant for me to answer? Some of them are obviously rhetorical. See below for my attempts to answer your questions that I think are not rhetorical though having already attempted to explain in other posts not specific to these specific questions, I doubt you'll understand my answers

No, no it doesn't. It means you don't do things without the proper equipment and training. If someone told you to jump out of an airplane with no parachute and no training would you do it? Hell, even if you had a parachute but no training would you do it? You don't have to believe it, but plugging your ears and screaming "lalalala" doesn't make it any less true.

Like I said to what's his name, I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you. If you have no cave diving training, you should not be in the cave. Period. Full stop. This dude had neither, entered the cave, and paid for it.

What else do you want? Honestly, what else are you looking for in this situation? You want to know "why?" Why what? What relevance does any of that have? What answers will help analyze this accident, thus giving us a better understanding of something we already know how to prevent?

I want to know why the guy was in the cave. I probably can't ever know for sure because as you so rightly pointed out, he likely shouldn't have been on the dive at all in the first place.

Be that as it may, I wish to know why he ended up there when none of the other three that started out with him ended up there.

You can put your fingers in your mind and yell "just say no" "it doesn't matter " until you're blue in the face but it won't change one iota my wish to know.

True, I'll never "KNOW" for sure but perhaps I can get some ideas. Do you think the Mexican authorities are not bothering to investigate because he just shouldn't have gone on that dive in the first place?

Do you think that's adequate to his family and loved ones?

I would like to know everything there is to know about this guy. Where he was trained to dive, who trained him, how many dives he's had, what he had for breakfast that morning and why he decided to go on this dive?. Why was he in Mexico, where did he stay? Was he traveling alone or did his diver buddy say "this is a B.S. dive and I'm not going on it with". Or did his girlfriend break up with him by Post It note?.

I want to know and that's all you need to know about my wish to know.

You're reminding me of those old rec.scuba guys that were enamoured of the 'new at the time' DIR 'cult'. (This is *not* to be critical of those divers that actually practice DIR today)

It doesn't matter that he *shouldn't* have been there. He *was* there and now he's dead. That's enough for you. It's not enough for me.

I'll respect your cave diving training and respect what are hopefully your true skills in that regard but if you ever turn up dead, I'm not going to say "oh, JohnnyC got off the line and ended up in the wrong place, that's all I need to know". I'm going to want to know WHY.

Leave Searat alone. He's been pissing me off now and then for more years than I can remember and I don't even recall WHY. But I'm giving him respect for his experience in his field. You're demanding respect for your experience in your field. So be it.

As I said before if it's the wish of some of us "know nothings" to gnaw away at this until our fingers are raw, you're best to go over to the cave diver's forum to avoid the angst and leave us to it because we're going to do it anyway until we've determined that we're unable to get enough background information to assist us in this regard (or the mods lock down the thread, whichever shall first occur).

 

[chillyinCanada]

Sethw, there's no "like very much" click thing for me to show for your post. Thanks so much for the clear information on the cavern layout, as well as your speculation and how you relate that back to the other incident.

 

[sethw]

You're welcome! I took this video a few years back (i hope link works):

and this is the entrance from the water in a rainy moment.

-Seth

Sethw, there's no "like very much" click thing for me to show for your post. Thanks so much for the clear information on the cavern layout, as well as your speculation and how you relate that back to the other incident.

 

[oya]

Is there any way to influence PADI concerning these types of cavern dives for open water scuba-certified divers?

John C. this is PADI's legal and training departments. PADI's legal and training departments, this is John C. He isn't a cave instructor, or even a cave diver, but he has some ideas on how to make your international cavern program run better. I'm sure you'll all have lots to talk about.

It's going to cost you and every one of your dive centers quite a lot of money in time, DM pay, and construction costs for very little benefit to you or your organizations... but hear him out.

So how do we influence the decisions to dive cenote/cavern/caves without training? That is the primary question.

Yes. That is the ONLY question. Better platforms and flowcharts are utterly irrelevant.

You are trying to analyze a single accident and trying to apply "How could we have prevented this one thing? What were the factors that contributed to this one thing?" Bloody useless.

For proper accident analysis and prevention you need to pool information. If the only fatality in decades was this single one then, yes, that would be our data pool and it would be worthwhile to pore over every detail. But it isn't.

There is an organization out there that is better at this than you (or me). They have several people with doctorates written on dive safety and medicine employed full-time on this exact issue. Their findings, from DAN's Annual Report section on cave diving fatalities:
"Little can be learned from the untrained cases except to say that the need for cave diver training is well known and these lives were lost merely reinforcing this well-known maxim."

There is a reason that training is rule number one of the five in cavern and cave classes. Because lack of training is the SINGLE MOST COMMON REASON OF CAVERN/CAVE FATALITIES.

If the student gets more reinforcement on that rule than he does about "don't dive in caves" guess which one sticks.

Which goes back to what Bob said here.

DO NOT GO INTO OVERHEAD UNTRAINED needs to be better reinforced by the instructors. I'm an instructor for three different recreational agencies and this concept is mentioned in all their material. But how much does any given student learning in a landlocked state at a quarry really get this stressed?

When I was working in a tropical location I would brief this one particular popular wreck repeating "Do not penetrate this wreck" over and over and over. Wanna take a stab at how many times I had to pull people backwards out of the wreck by their fun-tips (all guesses will be accepted in a x10 format)? I'd relate, during the briefing, "I am a trained cave diver and technical wreck diver with a great deal of experience and I don't go in here." But I'm pretty sure what people heard was, "My instructor says I'm awesome and this tropical DM is just trying to keep the good stuff to himself because he thinks he's so fancy."

Divers either lack the skill to be in these environments altogether or they are just experienced enough (I'm looking at you OW instructors) to think the rules don't apply to them anymore. They either accidentally or deliberately stray from a safe area and lack the skill to get out. From there I only takes one other thing (not monitoring their pressure closely enough, taking a wrong turn, kicking wrong, their light floods, they lose their mask) any single tiny thing from that point... and they die. In terror.

I think cavern tours can be done safely. But they won't. It would cost money and time that the tour operators are unwilling to commit, because they've decided a few people a year spread among all of them globally is an acceptable rate of loses. I disagree with them and I think they are reckless, heartless douchebags. But there is no way to compel a change... It's their money.

I argue that it would take a cultural shift. Instructors themselves would have to reinforce the lesson. Unfortunately that would take instructors admitting to students that there are things they don't know about diving as they drive that lesson home. And I know MANY professionals who would probably rather die in in cave before making such a confession.

Oh, it would also take a lot of those cavern tour guides to get proper cave training from a proper cave instructor. Most of the cave divers I won't even dive with: trained in Mexico.

 

[chillyinCanada]

Oya, I wonder how much you stressed it when you were a new instructor teaching in the lake, with that as your only dive experience? of course, you stress it now and probably have done for a very long time, especially since you yourself took more training.

I particularly like where you said this:

"Divers either lack the skill to be in these environments altogether or they are just experienced enough (I'm looking at you OW instructors) . . ."

 

[boulderjohn]

--The LDSs involved all seem to be PADI. Is there any way to influence PADI concerning these types of cavern dives for open water scuba-certified divers? Would a letter to PADI, perhaps electronically signed by all the participants of this thread, to change both their training protocol and to better monitor their PADI-associated shops, help?

PADI tells OW students that they must never go into any overhead environments without proper training. Period. Whether that is a good idea or not is up for debate. As I mentioned already, I believe that flat "just say no" warning does more harm than good. I will expand on this later

Asking them to ensure that their guides were cave certified and equipped

They have all already made that pledge. You would be asking them to explain whether or not they are following existing rules.

Could I point out, yet again, that there is no evidence the guide led them into the cave? It is possible he decided on his own to dart into the cave despite being warned not to do so. That sort of thing happens all the time on guided OW dives--the DM leads to a certain identified maximum depth, but the individual diver drops quickly deeper in order to log a 100 foot dive.

 

[CuzzA]

PADI tells OW students that they must never go into any overhead environments without proper training. Period. Whether that is a good idea or not is up for debate. As I mentioned already, I believe that flat "just say no" warning does more harm than good. I will expand on this later

They have all already made that pledge. You would be asking them to explain whether or not they are following existing rules.

Could I point out, yet again, that there is no evidence the guide led them into the cave? It is possible he decided on his own to dart into the cave despite being warned not to do so. That sort of thing happens all the time on guided OW dives--the DM leads to a certain identified maximum depth, but the individual diver drops quickly deeper in order to log a 100 foot dive.

So is it safe to say, the problem is that these PADI or any other agency resorts are flat out ignoring the rules every time they take an OW diver into these caverns? A cavern is an overhead environment any way you want to look at it and many of the dangers of cave diving are also present in caverns, right?

I don't think a guide is a proper substitution for training. You've pointed out many times how easy it is to lose visual of another diver. Up, down, left, right, behind.... We are hampered by our mask and consequently have tunnel vision... Add silt and the inability to make a direct ascent and the open water diver has big problems.

I don't know how many people die every year in these cenotes, but I do recall a well written article here on ScubaBoard about the dangers of diving cenotes in Mexico. It mostly talked about choosing the right guide. I'll see if I can find it because I think it's relavent to this discussion.