Diver Panic (Video)

[scubafanatic]

That lady was already stressed (total novice diver, very poor, murky visibility) then the straw breaking the camel's back was getting 'abandoned' on the bottom (buddy behind her out of view) so suddenly everyone's ascending toward the surface....totally forgets the BCD inflator...forgets about finning upwards.........does the instinctive (and useless) arm flapping/ladder climbing technique....and may have overbreathed the reg (debatable as I really don't think she had worked her reg that hard at that point, it just happened too fast....although for all we know, she may have been working the reg hard before the video portion we see )...I really think, as others have mentioned, that she just 'wanted out!' ASAP ! ...and ripping off all that alien gear was her way of getting out, especially her trying to rip off her hood, of all things...very telling and revealing about her mind set. Those eyes bugging out, pure animal instinct for sure!

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

That lady was already stressed (total novice diver, very poor, murky visibility) then the straw breaking the camel's back was getting 'abandoned' on the bottom (buddy behind her out of view) so suddenly everyone's ascending toward the surface....totally forgets the BCD inflator...forgets about finning upwards.........does the instinctive (and useless) arm flapping/ladder climbing technique....and may have overbreathed the reg (debatable as I really don't think she had worked her reg that hard at that point, it just happened too fast....although for all we know, she may have been working the reg hard before the video portion we see )...I really think, as others have mentioned, that she just 'wanted out!' ASAP ! ...and ripping off all that alien gear was her way of getting out, especially her trying to rip off her hood, of all things...very telling and revealing about her mind set. Those eyes bugging out, pure animal instinct for sure!

What I wonder is how many potential new divers are out there that sit right on the edge of freaking and bolting every second of every dive?
As long as everything goes perfect and nothing happens that's out of their very small comfort zone I suppose they can pull off a dive, sort of. But what about divers like this who on their first few post cert dives and follow some DM down to 60 or 80 feet on a trust me led dive and this happens? I'll bet it happens quite a bit.
We only hear about the ones that go fatal but what about the ones where they make it through Okay, maybe a bloody nose or some inspired water and a good shake up.
I've seen my share of crap like this in my time of helping with classes and also diving with people that had no business in the water without more solid training whether formal or self taught. People are not trained these days to fully understand what they are potentially getting into, it's bad for business and the bottom line. Gear works well enough now to cover for some lack of skills, but comfort level and know how/experience cannot be covered for by any newfangled gear.
The industry got what it wanted, more people into diving to spend their money. But there's a dark underbelly and we saw it in the video. The dive industry is chronically ill right now and will hobble along sick, and unfortunately I see no fix without severely damaging the financial aspect of the sport. There's a trade off between fully developing students, saying no to those that really shouldn't be doing it, and profits. At this point they simply can't increase time frames, cost, etc. because they've found themselves in a hole trying to balance maintaining or increasing participation and thorough training. In a nutshell, they've made it too easy for people that maybe don't really want to be there or shouldn't be there - reluctant spouse, partner, family member, etc.

IMO The industry is broken right now.

 

[Storker]

The industry is broken right now.

In the world you know, you may well be right. However, your world doesn't align with my world.

In Europe, diving is - AFAIK - to a large extent an activity led by non-profit clubs (CMAS or BSAC affiliated), not by for-profit businesses. In those clubs, you'll find gradual progression (with the occasional yahoo who isn't aware that he doesn't know what he doesn't know (and yes, I'm deliberately using the male pronoun here)), mentoring of inexperienced divers and a focus on having fun under water rather than making money from churning out the maximum number of graduates possible. I'm not saying it's a perfect world - it's far from that - but at least it takes the Put Another Dollar In aspect away.

 

[eelpout]

Here we go again let's bash the certifying agency. They are at fault for making so many changes that cause these problems.. OK so I started as a Assistant Instructor with NAUI in 1979. I got my NAUI Instructor rating in 1980 under the direction of Jim Hicks and Jed Livingstone. In 1984 I did a lot PADI crossover with "Arch" Bruce Archibald. I learned really early in my teaching career there were certain skills and teaching methods that aalowed me to feel comfortable with handing my students to the open-air instructor. It was essential that they were comfortable because in most cases they were doing their OW DIVES with a referral in a warm climate.. That was the reality of teaching in Minnesota. To insure that they were ready (my job) I cherry picked certain skill performance exercises when I taught. Over the years I learned a lot from other people. In the last years of my teaching the biggest influence was GUE's concept of diving DIR. So I am PADI instructor,I followed their standards and made sure that MY standards were also met. I would sit down with my regional PADI rep to discuss skills and procedure differences and get approval. Example, a few years ago we stopped teaching any of our skills to be done by a student in the kneeling position. WHY? It is bad habit that we instructors used for our convenience. We then had to re-teach them not to do it in the open water. So 10 years later PADI now suggests to not kneel doing these skills. Your students are your responsibility. So why the long diatribe. It isn't PADI, NAUI, SSI, CMAS, BSAC etc.. Fault. It is the instructor's job to prepare the student. There are good instructors and bad instructors in every every agency. Just my 2 cents. Lastly,.panic that occured to this diver on this video can happen to anybody under certain circumstances. Training, continued education, and good fun bottom time will help prevent this from happening to most people.

 

[Diver0001]

So I will offer a guess as to what happened in this video that led to the panic. My guess is based on something I saw once myself.

Let's start by looking at what we see.

We see divers in cold water gear at the end of a dive--they are giving the thumb to begin the final ascent. Everyone seems to be fine, swimming calmly with neutral buoyancy. Suddenly we see one of the divers is significantly deeper than the rest, deeper by far than she was only a few seconds ago, and she is struggling to ascend, struggling, in fact, to stop her descent. Unable to do so, she panics.

Some years ago I had a student I had never met in in an AOW class. She had newly moved into our area, and this was her first time wearing a 7mm wet suit and hood. At the end of our first dive, I signaled the ascent, and she immediately raised her inflator hose, dumped all her air, and started to plummet into the depths. I caught her as quickly as I could.

When we got to the surface, I said, "Let me guess. Your OW instructor taught you that when it was time to ascend, you are supposed to dump all your air and swim up, right?" She said, "Yes, isn't that right?"

Many warm water instructors with students wearing 3mm suits with minimum compression at depth, teach that silliness.

I didn't notice that. If this clip was staged then it was staged very well, but assuming that what we are seeing is real then what I noticed was the following:

a) I'm reading this as a training situation. I'm not sure if this is true or not, but the person filming seems to be leading the dive and the diver who got in trouble is clearly so inexperienced that they seem to be a student.

b) at the 15 second mark he signals to everyone to initiate an ascent but this student (I presume it was a student) was not "engaged". She was looking away, not communicating and at that point already sculling with her hands. A student who seems to be unaware of what is going on around them gives me warning bells. These things can be obvious indicators of stress and in any event he shouldn't have been initiating an ascent without double checking on her state of mind. So already after 10-15 seconds we are seeing trim issues, communication issues and situational awareness issues on the part of the "student". Why the dive leader would ignore that is, frankly, hard to understand.

c) The sculling with the hands was already happening when she was more or less horizontal. This indicates that either something is wrong or they had never worked on proper trim with her and she had grown accustomed to swimming with her hands. This impression is reinforced a few moments later, as I will point out in a second. This is another indication of trim issues and possibly stress, but in any event indicative of someone who is not yet comfortable in the water. Someone who was still doing this should never have gotten out of the pool. This may not have been the fault of the person leading the dive if she wasn't actively in training, but if I were in that position, I would have been getting alarm bells and I would have kept much closer to her for this reason.

d) the protocol for ascending in the PADI system begins with communicating intent (signing to go up) and the other buddy either repeating the sign or giving an OK. Personally I teach for both buddies to repeat the sign so that there can't be any confusion about what we're doing. The person filming (who I assume was leading the dive) did not wait for a response but initiated his ascent without ANY communication from the diver in question that this is what we are doing. To say the very least, this is sloppy. This indicates *severe* performance and communication issues on the part of the person leading the dive and he/she is very lucky that this lack of competence didn't cost that young woman her life.

e) The sculling with the hands appeared to get worse as she was trying to ascend. This is clearly visible at about the 35 second point. At this point she is vertical, which seems to indicate that she understood that she needed to ascend but the sculling with the hands had gotten a LOT worse and she was "bicycle kicking". Breaking that down, she was clearly trying to "swim up" with her hands because the way she was kicking had obviously not been addressed during training. Moreover, and this is very VERY disturbing, the rhythm of the sculling with the hands is *alternating* at this point. That's a clear "PANIC" sign because it indicates that the diver's brain is now in a mode like "treading water". When treading water, your brain wants your head out of the water. When this wasn't happening, the main short circuit started to happen.

f) To the benefit of the person filming it was apparently clear that the diver was in difficulty at that moment because he descended again, presumably to intervene. However, because he had initiated his own ascent too early, he was too far away from the diver in question to get there on time. Because of this, her problem ascending quickly escalated into a life threatening situation. This could have, and should have, been avoided by adhering to proper ascent protocol.

g) The diver's buddy, who had made a fairly solid first impression in the first moment of the clip was closer but also was not ascending in tandem with the diver who got in trouble, indicating once again, the sloppy protocol and lack of communication that would have prevented this. In addition, by the time he had figured out that she was in trouble, he was also too far away to get a hand on her.

h) during the ascent it became too chaotic to see what the divers were doing but it was clear that the diver who was panicking was no longer in a state to think through any solution. She also rejected the regulator once put back in her mouth. How she didn't either hold her breath from that and get an lung barotrauma or drown during the ascent is quite beyond me. To me it looks like she DID hold her breath but perhaps her lungs were not full enough from her last breath on the regulator for it to cause an over-expansion injury from that depth. Nothing the person filming did during the last part of the ascent would seem to have made it any better or any worse. This is, of course, a graphic reminder that if you don't put your energy into avoiding problems, that fixing them might not be an option.

All in all, I'm seeing the things you would suspect.

- bad trim
- bad buoyancy control
- sculling with the hands
- bicycle kicking
- lack of communication and adherence to protocol
(summarized: bad skills)
- leading to stress, leading to panic and leading to what I believe was a completely avoidable accident. I'm going to go ahead and call it an accident because the *only* difference between this and the many fatal accidents we talk about on Scubaboard is that the diver didn't die.

R..

 

[Dizzi Lizzi]

You know how we were taught to sip air from a free flowing reg, if the reg was being purged in her face, and if she took a breath would she get the air or the water? I suppose it would depend on her position of course. But would that be a way to help a panicking diver? Im new at this so if my terminology is wrong, correct me.

 

[Bogtrotter]

You know how we were taught to sip air from a free flowing reg, if the reg was being purged in her face, and if she took a breath would she get the air or the water? I suppose it would depend on her position of course. But would that be a way to help a panicking diver? Im new at this so if my terminology is wrong, correct me.

She would have to accept the regulator into her mouth, or at least mostly in her mouth in order to get air. Forcing her to take purging air is dangerous and may also require restraining her- expending time and energy and perhaps even causing greater panic. The least dangerous option at that point would be to let her go and reach the surface. I think one of the divers did well to stay beside her and have a reg at her lips at the ready. Beyond that it was complete cluster*.

 

[Basking Ridge Diver]

She would have to accept the regulator into her mouth, or at least mostly in her mouth in order to get air. Forcing her to take purging air is dangerous and may also require restraining her- expending time and energy and perhaps even causing greater panic. The least dangerous option at that point would be to let her go and reach the surface. I think one of the divers did well to stay beside her and have a reg at her lips at the ready. Beyond that it was complete cluster*.

Just curious - if you are at 80 feet and it is someone you know or like - you going to sit back and watch them try to make it to the surface? And when they don't what next? I am not sure I like your option...

 

[Bogtrotter]

Well the correct answer is I wouldn't let it happen in the first place. For starters an intro diver has no business diving deep. A properly trained diver should not panic to that level of distress over minor issues- shark attacks, entrapment etc withstanding. IF you got yourself into that situation I would recommend approaching from behind, holding their tank valve since they are probably thrashing, and try getting a reg into them- while ascending. If she's absolutely not accepting air even if you get a reg in her mouth and are tapping the purge, then the alternative is only to get her to the surface in as controlled a way you can manage. At this point however you're seriously risking your own health of course. That's your call. But as mentioned by several others, it should never get to this point, with proper training it is avoidable.

"And when they don't What next". Haul ass to the boat or shore- skip the breaths, and start proper cpr. IF not passed out get them on oxygen.

 

[Edward3c]

Whether this was a training session or not the 'leader' was not controlling the group.

Prior to the ascent they should have ensured all had seen (and responded) to the up signal before starting the actual ascent.

All the analysis on the distressed diver is ignoring the 'leader' whom if they had communicated properly, and got proper responses, would likely have prevented the situation happening.

I don't know any agency that teaches 'thumbing a lift' as the up signal; its a steady upward pointing thumb followed by an OK.