I recently lost a friend to a diving accident (briefly mentioned on another thread on this forum) and this has deeply changed my mind about assessing this kind of tragic events.
Unfortunately, it seems, we are ALL capable of judgment lapses and this, unfortunately, can lead to a chain of events that can have fatal consequences.
That such a tragic outcome could occur in apparently close to perfect conditions at Farnsworth Bank is shocking, but not unheard of. And I suspect that there have been many close calls in similar situations that have never been reported here.
Excluding a medical condition or some other freak event of nature which we don't know of yet, a lesson that may be drawn from it, is that each dive should be treated as a training dive: we should be aware of our environment , always listening to our body, checking our equipment, and take mental note of whatever problem we are not dealing with satisfactorily this time, in order to improve our skills for next time. In essence, learn what we don't know we don't know, as Rumsfeld once put it so eloquently.
The quoted experience of the victim is, if I recall correctly, the proverbial danger zone: if you never had a close call up to then, comfort and sloppiness can set in, and when a problem occurs (possibly due to a rooky mistake - a rooky that the diver is not anymore - say, forget to check your gauge), there is no learned and rehearsed reflex that kicks in. And sometimes, anyway, it is just too late.
It's all to easy to get deep at Farnsworth, especially if conditions are great. It's a gentle slope, everything is amazingly beautiful, you may get narked and turn around the pinnacle, loosing track of the anchor line.
When the "oops I am low on air!" moment occurs, you start going up, but the more you go up, the farther from the surface you realize you are, the more stressed you get, the heavier your breathing, the faster the gauge needle goes down, and on and on. By then any mistake (such as, as suggested, pressing on the wrong button of the BC inflator) can be dangerous, even fatal.
Paradoxically, I suspect that this accident may well not have happened in terrible conditions (as they can sometimes be on this exposed site). The two buddies would have been stressed right at the onset of the dive and would not have wandered off too far from the anchor line, or too deep, or for too long.
So, of course, we can ask natural questions:
Why did TWO divers run low on air?
Why did they not use the rule of third?
Why did they not make a controlled ascent rather than doing a safety stop while low on air (did they have deco obligations and got unsure of what to do?).
Let's not judge the diver, lest we are sure we would have fared better in comparable situations for our own level of training as well as mental and physical state.
I can't start to imagine how the family and friends are coping with their loss and my deepest sympathy go to them in this terrible moment.