Matthew:
Thanks for the link. I am just curious as to which part/s of the article you find dissapointing?
Here they are...
Article:
diving as a major tourist attraction has yet to live up to its full potential due to several factors—chief among them, safety. The incident in San Teodoro is a case in point. The problem is that little is being done to prevent similar “drownings” from recurring in Mabini and elsewhere in the country.
This appears to be the thesis of the article: that more action on the part of the government would be helpful / useful.
Article:
although in the case of one of them there is reason to doubt the authenticity of the certification course she had purportedly undergone. After just 14 dives, she was reportedly certified—by a still unnamed scuba diving agency—as an “advanced open water” diver, a claim that quickly raised the eyebrows of more experienced scuba enthusiasts.
Implying that AOW has an experience requirement which it does not, and giving far too much credence to the credentials implied by a c-card.
Article:
whose owners are said to include a former party-list lawmaker.
I imagine that if I lived there, I would understand why the paper wishes to involve the political connection of the owners in the article, though it appears irrelevant to the incident. This is one of a number of statements that allude to an underlying political slant to the paper instead of focusing on the accident.
Article:
Although they were unfamiliar with the two dive sites—called The Barge and Twin Rocks—in Planet Dive’s house reef, the two divers reportedly declined an offer to have a guide accompany them underwater. On the strength of the certification cards the two divers presented, they were allowed to enter the water on their own.
As though it is unusual to dive a new site without a guide, and within the resort's power to disallow the divers from diving where they wish.
Article:
first-timers, however, might be driven to panic by the jacks’ tendency to swarm divers, albeit harmlessly.
Perhaps I do not understand how scary these fish are. But I would imagine that very few certified divers would panic just because of proximity to fish.
Article:
They claimed that her dive computer showed that she had descended well beyond the “no-decompression” depth of 10 meters, or about 60 feet, and then went on a quick, uncontrolled ascent.
"no-decompression" depth?
Article:
Retrieved by other divers and resort staff, the woman reportedly showed signs of decompression sickness, or DCS, a disorder also called “the bends” that affects divers who have breathed air from their tank compressed to levels much, much higher than surface pressure.
The DCS symptoms I am familiar with generally require the person to be conscious to confirm them. Aside from incontinence and death, I am not sure what symptoms the author feels the staff observed.
Article:
The woman, who already showed disfiguring signs of embolism, was declared dead on arrival when brought to hospital.
As though embolism usually has a slow onset, and this was an unusually severe case that appeared quickly.
Article:
an investigation needs to be done on whichever agency had given the woman her “advanced open water” certification after logging just 14 dives... without giving her enough self-sufficiency and survival skills—as indicated by her panicky rapid ascent.
A clear misunderstanding of the structure and purpose of this certification.
Article:
Also, even if the woman had suffered DCS, she still would have had a fighting chance to live had there been a hyperbaric or recompression chamber nearby...can be reached only after an hour and a half of driving on the winding hillside roads of Mabini
As though most dive sites have chambers within < 2h.
Article:
The divers who perished in Mabini were victims probably of improper training and certainly of inadequate health and safety facilities.
There is no evidence to support this. We do not know what sequence of events triggered the tragedy, nor heard any evidence that equipment failure was ruled out or really had any reasonable body of evidence to support the conclusion that they are victims of their training; nor is it apparent to me how different health or safety facilities could have avoided the tragedy. These divers were DOA, and no amount of health or safety equipment, even if it was on the shore itself, would have changed that.
Osric
