Diver missing at Cove 2, West Seattle

[Thalassamania]

The scientific diving community is not exempt from OSHA, rather, we are permitted (given certain criteria) to choose to avail ourselves of an alternative, documented, standard of practice that is maintained by the AAUS. We were granted this concession as a result of ten years of hard work that we put in documenting how our community had operated since 1952 and it's near perfect safety record operating under those consensual rules.

The benefit is that you maintain control over the rules you follow, they reflect reality and not the typical misunderstanding of a less than responsive bureaucracy.

If this is of interest, rather than hijack, please start another thread.

 

[Slamfire]

As a person that dives and was taught by the person that passed away...

What I understand in the overall context is that the deceased taught, coached or mentored you in an informal, non-commercial capacity. Is this correct? In other words, the deceased is not a professional instructor that got paid for imparting scuba instruction, was he? I just thought it be good to clarify this point since the news reports told of an instructor being involved in the incident but surviving the incident. Thanks for contributing to this thread and sorry for your loss.

 

[doubtingGunnel]

I guess my first post on scubaboard will be to A&I. I’ve been a long time reader of this sub-forum and now I find myself really needing its rational analysis of an accident that I can’t stop thinking about.
I know the diver in question. Not personally. But we worked in the same field and were the same age. I’m surprised I never ran into him while diving. I’ve been racking my brain non-stop trying to understand why this happened and I can’t come up with something that makes sense

So I would like to review what we know and maybe a discussion will ensue of what might have happened and what we can learn from it.

From the variety of news accounts, we know that:

-This was an AOW adventure deep dive class.
-There was one instructor and 3 student divers.
-After reaching approximately 90-100fsw, the instructor and students turned around to return to shore.
-At approximately 80-70fsw during the return, something happened that led the diver to bolt to the surface.
-His buddy attempted to follow but realized she was ascending too quickly and stopped at around 30fsw.
-The diver in question had 50+ dives of experience and was relatively young(28 or 29).
-Visibility was high for the Puget Sound, around 25 feet.

For those of you unfamiliar with the area and dive site:
-Cove 2 at Seacrest Park is a popular dive site with very little current exposure. I did the exact same adventure deep dive at Cove 2 for my AOW. You will typically swim out to a buoy and drop down to about 40fsw. The floor slopes rather gradually down to ~100fsw to the I-beams. Travel time is minimal and an adventure deep dive would only spend a most 1 or 2 minutes before turning around.

The three scenarios I can think off are:
-Medical event
-Narcosis induced panic
-Out of air/equipment failure

A medical event is always a possibility. However, the fact that he was young leads me to think a cardiac event is unlikely. I know that epileptic seizures are preceded by a rush of fear. A medical event somehow seems like something of low probability.

I don’t know a lot about narcosis, but I know it can hit people below 100fsw. I know nothing of “dark narc” to speculate if it’s even a possibility at 90-80fsw.

Out of air or equipment failure would be another possibility. Although none of the accounts relayed by the authorities to the news suggest equipment issues. What troubles me is, even in a worst case scenario (sudden OOA, free-flowing reg, etc), I feel like someone with 50+ dives would simply swim to one of the three other divers and take their regulator and breathe off of that.

Am I off on this? Is that a possible lesson? That panic can incapacitate you no matter what your experience level? And what can we do as divers to avoid panic? I imagine drilling emergency scenarios as often as possible would be one step.

I know a lot more detail needs to come out of this. And maybe we won’t get any more detail. Maybe there was a medical event. But given all the circumstances, the good visibility, the calm water, the presence of multiple buddies, the experience level, his age … I just can’t rationally understand why this happened. Your thoughtful analysis would be welcome.

As an aside: To the divers who helped recover the diver and to those who responded at the time of the accident. Thank you. I’m proud to be part of such an awesome dive community. The diver’s buddy also deserves kudos for doing her best to aid her fellow buddy but recognizing that if she kept following, she could have become a victim as well.

 

[Slamfire]

Another possible equipment failure scenario: stuck BC inflator, or drysuit inflator?

 

[TSandM]

Well, I can only tell you a true story of a real dive. I was diving at Three Tree with two friends. One was a guy I'd been diving with for several months; he had about 40 dives, maybe 50 at the time. He'd taken some training beyond OW (I think he did NW Grateful Diver's AOW class, but it was a long time ago, and I'm not sure). At any rate, he had been diving regularly in the Sound and had always been a very solid buddy.

The three of us were down about 70 feet when he began to seem a little erratic -- he was fiddling with his mask, and not kicking steadily. We gave him the "okay" signal, and he returned it. About 60 seconds later, he turned 90 degrees and took off at high speed. The other two of us tried to chase him, but neither of us could come anywhere near keeping up -- this was a big, strong man, swimming as hard as he could.

My remaining buddy and I looked at each other and shrugged, and decided to execute the lost buddy protocol, so we made a steady but controlled ascent to the surface. When we got there, we found our third teammate just getting out of the water, quite a long way from where we were. We weren't thrilled with the surface swim back to the entry!

It turned out that our buddy's mask had flooded, and he was unable to clear it on the first attempt. The influx of cold water panicked him, and all he could think was that he needed to get shallower. (Why shallower would make a flooded mask better, I don't know, but the essence of panic is that it isn't rational.) By the time he got to shore, the panic had abated, and he was absolutely humiliated at what he had done; he almost quit diving altogether over the incident.

So there is a true story of a similarly experienced diver, who encountered something that he had no idea would cause him to panic, but it did. We will never know, I'm sure, what set this diver off the other day, but something did -- whether it was a reg that started breathing wet, or a mask flood, or feeling disoriented, or just letting his buoyancy get away from him (I had an uncontrolled ascent from 70 feet when I was just a bit newer than he was), something sent him to the surface, and he may well have held his breath.

 

[Jax]

What I understand in the overall context is that the deceased taught, coached or mentored you in an informal, non-commercial capacity. Is this correct? In other words, the deceased is not a professional instructor that got paid for imparting scuba instruction, was he? I just thought it be good to clarify this point since the news reports told of an instructor being involved in the incident but surviving the incident. Thanks for contributing to this thread and sorry for your loss.

Hey, Slamfire, he didn't say the guy taught SCUBA, only that he was taught.

 

[Jax]

I guess my first post on scubaboard will be to A&I. I’ve been a long time reader of this sub-forum and now I find myself really needing its rational analysis of an accident that I can’t stop thinking about.

<snipped>

Gunnel, so sorry for the loss of your friend. We hope you will continue to participate in ScubaBoard; there are good people here.

 

[Jax]

[speculation] Besides the stuck inflator and such, there's Immersion Pulmonary Edema - couldn't breath at depth, and shot for the surface, but his lungs were too full of fluids, and he passed out.[/speculation\

Unfortunately, IPE looks like drowning - is that right, TSandM? If there is no blood in the lung froth, how would we know?

 

[Slamfire]

The influx of cold water panicked him...

I have done tons of fully flooded (and underwater doff/don) mask drills starting since well before I was a teen. I started doing them so early in my life I'm not exactly sure how old I was. I know I got my 1st mask on the day of my 5th birthday. It was such a non-issue that I didn't even think of doing a cold water (I was born in the tropics) mask removal and re-installment until I was doing my deco procedures training. My instructor said we were going to operating without my mask, and I thought nothing of it. But then the cold water hit me on the face. I was totally unprepared for that thermal shock. Took my breath away and it took me about 2 or 3 breathing cycles to get my normal breathing cycle again. And then, the freezing-eyeball-pain-from-which-there-is-no-escape began. It did not matter if I opened or squeezed shut or tried to thermally protect my eyeballs with my fingers, the pain did not go away until about 10 mins into the dive when, thankfully, my eyeballs grew accustomed to the cold.

Last Saturday I demonstrated a full mask flood and our blessed cold waters still surprise me and take my breath away.

Hey, Slamfire, he didn't say the guy taught SCUBA, only that he was taught.

Ahhhh, as in teaching math or physics... Sometimes I forget that there are other things to be taught in addition to scuba.

 

[lamont]

For those of you unfamiliar with the area and dive site:
-Cove 2 at Seacrest Park is a popular dive site with very little current exposure. I did the exact same adventure deep dive at Cove 2 for my AOW. You will typically swim out to a buoy and drop down to about 40fsw. The floor slopes rather gradually down to ~100fsw to the I-beams. Travel time is minimal and an adventure deep dive would only spend a most 1 or 2 minutes before turning around.

I'm fairly certain that this is a fact -- the white can buoy suffered some kind of incident and it was not attached to its mooring chain that day (I heard a tug ran over it and various other stories, but that's all largely irrelevant, but it definitely wasn't there that day -- very weird to not see it). So I believe the class shifted plans to dropping down the yellow buoy on the boundary cable and then swimming down the boundary cable to the log piles down there.