First off thanks to all who have made comments as I think this is a very good discussion to have about sharing ideas and concepts. Bridgediver I especially enjoyed your comments.
Daniel thanks for the suggestion of networking and I have been to many PSD websites to see what other teams are doing. In fact SMART has been one of the sites I found early on. Please do not misunderstand my PSD team is well established team that was created in the late 70's. We have been refining and improving the way we do things constantly. I am 100% confident in my teams ability to perform safe and reliable operations. That said myself like many of my team members are always looking for ways to do things better and mitigate the risks we face. My observations of the DIR diver were merely discussion about what if anything from the DIR concept could be applied to PSD. I had never really considered it since my outside impression was that is was something only for cave and tech divers and this would not apply to PSD diving. The one big thing about DIR is that they seem to have good buy-in amongst its practitioners and the thought occurred to me that it would be nice to have something similar among PSD diver. I think some sort of standard that we could all use to apply to our own unique situations would be beneficial.
Bridgediver, the comment I lost you on was a stab/dig at a well know PSD training company who seemed to base some of their concepts of PSD diving around the gear that they sold. This was not a real constructive comment and I am not here to bad mouth any training organization as they did offer a lot of good ideas so my apologies. A constructive comment would be that individuals, companies, organizations who have a financial interest should not be the ones setting industry standards. I like the approach NFPA takes, they solicit input from a broad spectrum of public safety professionals to help develop their standards.
I also agree that we should be able to have some basic standard underlying approach to each call we must also be able to keep and open mind and realize that no two situations are the same.
The biggest problem is there is no consensus among PSD as to what is safe. For instance one team might think that single diver on a line with a safety diver on the surface is unsafe. They might feel they need to have two divers in the water on the line at all time no matter what.
I do not know what the right answers are and maybe there is no right answer. I guess the least we can do is continue to share our ideas here in this type of forum and hope that they will benefit someone somewhere.
Mark
Daniel thanks for the suggestion of networking and I have been to many PSD websites to see what other teams are doing. In fact SMART has been one of the sites I found early on. Please do not misunderstand my PSD team is well established team that was created in the late 70's. We have been refining and improving the way we do things constantly. I am 100% confident in my teams ability to perform safe and reliable operations. That said myself like many of my team members are always looking for ways to do things better and mitigate the risks we face. My observations of the DIR diver were merely discussion about what if anything from the DIR concept could be applied to PSD. I had never really considered it since my outside impression was that is was something only for cave and tech divers and this would not apply to PSD diving. The one big thing about DIR is that they seem to have good buy-in amongst its practitioners and the thought occurred to me that it would be nice to have something similar among PSD diver. I think some sort of standard that we could all use to apply to our own unique situations would be beneficial.
Bridgediver, the comment I lost you on was a stab/dig at a well know PSD training company who seemed to base some of their concepts of PSD diving around the gear that they sold. This was not a real constructive comment and I am not here to bad mouth any training organization as they did offer a lot of good ideas so my apologies. A constructive comment would be that individuals, companies, organizations who have a financial interest should not be the ones setting industry standards. I like the approach NFPA takes, they solicit input from a broad spectrum of public safety professionals to help develop their standards.
I also agree that we should be able to have some basic standard underlying approach to each call we must also be able to keep and open mind and realize that no two situations are the same.
The biggest problem is there is no consensus among PSD as to what is safe. For instance one team might think that single diver on a line with a safety diver on the surface is unsafe. They might feel they need to have two divers in the water on the line at all time no matter what.
I do not know what the right answers are and maybe there is no right answer. I guess the least we can do is continue to share our ideas here in this type of forum and hope that they will benefit someone somewhere.
Mark