Diver missing at Ginnie?

[beldridg]

Is it common in mountaineering that in the wake of a fatality, upset relatives feeling the need to ‘do something’ create political pressure to bar access to that site going forward?

I think that is somewhat orthogonal to publishing a "formal" and independent analysis of the accident.

I don't know the motivations of the families, but my assumption would be that they want the cave closed with hopes of preventing others from dying (I won't comment on whether that is reasonable).

I'm guessing that they aren't asking to close the cave because somebody published an analysis of the accident.

We are a bit off topic for the specific accident so if the moderators want to move this to a new forum/thread, we can do that.

Regards,

- brett

 

[ofg-1]

alright, name has been published. Gloves off boys.

Gloves off boys? Really? Are you just looking for some poor dead yutz you can trash online? Want others to join in? Seek help.

I have known Andrew for 20 years. We did a number of dives around Tallahassee 15 or so years ago when he was in the mood for sinkhole slumming. We also did Indian, sneaked into places, the usual ones. Spent a couple of days at the millpond. We had exchanged emails a couple times a year during his hiatus, last one in late Feb. Talked with him in early March. I knew he was going to be at Ginnie last week, he knew that you would have to beat me with a big stick to get me to go anywhere near that clusterfark. Even if it was just us bitching to each other via email occasionally about airplanes, I will miss Andrew.

Unlike the clairvoyant Mr Bone, I am not ready to write this off as a rusty diver issue. I would like to know what the events were that led up to his death. But you see, I am just curious enough that even after all these years, I would like to know what happened to Steve Berman. Ron Tillman. You could hardly say that either of them were rusty, yet the outcome was the same.

All of us have to decide on any given day if we are able to perform the tasks required to do any given dive. You should decide this for yourself, but you have to be honest with yourself, and that is the trick. If you want to dive by committee, post all of your dive plans here, I feel sure you will get any number of idiots telling you why you cant. At the end of the day, the decision is yours, as are the consequences.

 

[tbone1004]

Gloves off boys? Really? Are you just looking for some poor dead yutz you can trash online? Want others to join in? Seek help.

I have known Andrew for 20 years. We did a number of dives around Tallahassee 15 or so years ago when he was in the mood for sinkhole slumming. We also did Indian, sneaked into places, the usual ones. Spent a couple of days at the millpond. We had exchanged emails a couple times a year during his hiatus, last one in late Feb. Talked with him in early March. I knew he was going to be at Ginnie last week, he knew that you would have to beat me with a big stick to get me to go anywhere near that clusterfark. Even if it was just us bitching to each other via email occasionally about airplanes, I will miss Andrew.

Unlike the clairvoyant Mr Bone, I am not ready to write this off as a rusty diver issue. I would like to know what the events were that led up to his death. But you see, I am just curious enough that even after all these years, I would like to know what happened to Steve Berman. Ron Tillman. You could hardly say that either of them were rusty, yet the outcome was the same.

All of us have to decide on any given day if we are able to perform the tasks required to do any given dive. You should decide this for yourself, but you have to be honest with yourself, and that is the trick. If you want to dive by committee, post all of your dive plans here, I feel sure you will get any number of idiots telling you why you cant. At the end of the day, the decision is yours, as are the consequences.

It was nothing personal with him but before the name is out it is really difficult to have any sort of discussion but we can now have a real discussion about it. I knew him as well and was talking to him last month and the gloves off was more that we can discuss this openly without dancing any information.
Your last paragraph is what I am trying to bring to light. As a community we do not have any real discussions about how to decide if you are actually able to perform any given task, especially after that long of a hiatus.

 

[lowflyer]

I knew him as well and was talking to him last month and the gloves off was more that we can discuss this openly without dancing any information.

IMO, this thread should be closed down and moved to "Passings" until someone actually discusses "this openly without dancing..."

You and others give cryptic answers to people's questions as if to say, "Look at me. I know what happened, here's a clue, but I ain't telling." No one is going to learn anything about diving accidents from this approach which I think is the purpose of this forum.

I don't know the deceased, but it's apparent that he was a remarkable person. May he rest in peace!

 

[sandiegoaes]

This is horrible. Andrew was one of the nicest and funniest divers I knew.

I agree.

 

[sandiegoaes]

Gloves off boys? Really? Are you just looking for some poor dead yutz you can trash online? Want others to join in? Seek help.

Maybe it is because I knew Andrew very well that the "gloves off" comment really struck me as callous and heartless.

Andrew had a wife and family. They are now left to deal with his loss. Andrew contributed volumes to the technical diving community. He ruffled quite a few feathers doing so, probably because he was 10x smarter than most of the people he volleyed online with. It should surprise me that the first response from the online community is to dig up old posts so people can say "I told you so!" and forth to pick apart his character but after 20+ years on these forums, it seems pretty trite to me. However, that is what I have come to expect from the diving community and why I don't pay attention to the online boards any more.

I knew Andrew very well. My last interaction with him was picking him up at O'Hare airport with my son, having dinner and driving him to his hotel in downtown Chicago. He received his PhD from University of Chicago and was in town speaking at a mathematics conference the next day. We had diving in common but discussing business, marketing and mathematics was more common between us. Some of his old UCLA Anderson School of Business students used to work for me when I lived in San Francisco as well, so we had many connections.

Andrew was a huge personality, incredibly intelligent, funny, a fearless diver and a good person. If you have problems with those traits, dance on his grave and feel the need to knock him down, have at it. I think your comments speak more about your character than it does Andrew's.

RIP Mr. Ainslie. The world is a little emptier without you in in today.

 

[tbone1004]

@sandiegoaes I knew him, not as well as you, but I did know him and had many good conversations with him. My comments are not to demean him as a person and maybe it is too soon, but I'm not looking at analyzing this incident about him personally but take this as an opportunity for the community to really learn. I reposted that post from CDF not to demean him but to show that he acknowledged the risk about his personal "envelope" and we need to learn how our own envelope changes. As cave divers we are generally pretty horrible at defining that envelope for ourselves and even worse and admitting that it shrinks with time.
I was looking forward to diving with him this summer, I'm sad that I won't be able to do that, but I don't want his loss to be a waste. Maybe it was too soon.

 

[cerich]

Maybe it is because I knew Andrew very well that the "gloves off" comment really struck me as callous and heartless.

Andrew had a wife and family. They are now left to deal with his loss. Andrew contributed volumes to the technical diving community. He ruffled quite a few feathers doing so, probably because he was 10x smarter than most of the people he volleyed online with. It should surprise me that the first response from the online community is to dig up old posts so people can say "I told you so!" and forth to pick apart his character but after 20+ years on these forums. It seems pretty trite to me but that is what I have come to expect from the diving community and why I don't pay attention to the online boards any more.

I knew Andrew very well. My last interaction with him was picking him up at O'Hare airport with my son, having dinner and driving him to his hotel in downtown Chicago. He received his PhD from University of Chicago and was in town speaking at a mathematics conference the next day. We had diving in common but discussing business, marketing and mathematics was more common between us. Some of his old UCLA Anderson School of Business students used to work for me when I lived in San Francisco as well, so we had many connections.

Andrew was a huge personality, incredibly intelligent, funny, a fearless diver and a good person. If you have problems with those traits, dance on his grave and feel the need to knock him down, have at it. I think your comments speak more about your character than it does Andrew's.

RIP Mr. Ainslie. The world is a little emptier without you in in today.

The fact that Andrew was so smart, and a good diver is why I would really like to see a good accident analysis done. The break from diving makes it easy to think that was the big red flag contributing factor, and it may very well be, but I am not certain of that. He was also an educator, even if not a dive educator, and he did use his own experiences, mistakes and yes, sometimes follies diving in a transparent manner that while contributing to some of the online drama, also was indictive of a desire to make it safer for others that could maybe learn from it.

Sorry for the loss of your friend.

 

[boulderjohn]

In an attempt to learn as much as I could about this incident, I went to the thread on Cave Divers Forum. It was the first time I had been there in a very long time. For some reason, CDF would not open properly in my Chrome browser, so I would have to open a new browser just to read postings, and I just stopped going there. I was pretty surprised to see almost nothing of substance posted there, so I gained no real information.

While I was there, I checked out another thread about another fatality in Ginnie in January. I had heard about the fatality, and I had contacted the editor of the American Caving Accidents publication of the National Speleological Society to see if she wanted me to investigate and write an article about it. (I had been writing the articles for cave diving accidents for a few years.) Well, it turned out she was no longer working as the editor, so I never did an investigation. I was therefore interested in seeing what I could learn about it from the discussion on CDF.

I learned close to nothing about the incident. There had been one post describing what the writer knew, but according to later posts, that description had been seriously edited down to almost nothing by the moderators. The dominant theme I got from the discussion was the strong threatening language directed at that poster and to anyone else who dared give any information about the fatality. Those warnings came from the people who did the body recovery. The poster said he had been harassed at his home for his post. One post said that members of the recovery group (IUCRR) believed the information should be published immediately, but they were afraid to do so because they would be dropped from the group if they did. The people who said it was too soon to discuss the incident prevailed.

But there was some discussion that gave tantalizing clues as to what happened. The same thing is happening in this thread. Some people know, and they are dropping very small hints to keep everyone guessing. I feel like I have some sense of it all from interpreting those clues, but I don't have the confidence to write that here.

I strongly suspect that we now know all we are going to know for a long time, unless someone in the know decides to risk the wrath of others and spill the beans.

 

[boulderjohn]

When I said that it was my understanding that IUCRR had stopped publishing reports due to the fear of lawsuits and based on advice of attorney, that was not speculation. there was a thread about that in CDF a number of years ago. When I wrote that in this thread, someone responded with a comment along the lines that the victim cannot sue.

That may be true, but others can. the family can sue if they think you have defamed the dead. Possibly more importantly, other related entities can be sued or can sue. For example, Wes Skiles died while using a rebreather, and his wife sued the manufacturer, claiming that the rebreather was defective. If the official report suggested something along those lines, that could have been used in the trial, and manufacturer could also have sued, claiming it was inaccurate and had damaged their reputation.

I mentioned above that I had written reports on cave diving incidents for NSS. In my investigations on some of them, I did indeed get the strong message that I had better not include certain information, and the NSS staff had to make a decision about what they could write and what they could not. One entire report was shelved completely. In another case, we had to remove certain information, and what remained, although accurate, could easily lead to people making what I believed to be an erroneous conclusion.