Fatalities statistics: what kills people the most in scuba diving?

[theduckguru]

Hey duck, what estimated number would you come up with? Serious question, not intended as a challenge. For instance, I started out thinking of how many divers dive every day just on Kho Tao alone.

Truthfully, I don't have an estimate because I don't believe there is enough data available. 1 million active divers in the US? I question that estimate. That's 3.2 divers per 1000 people. Given age, sex and economic demographics, that seems optomistic.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

I had the priviledge of attending two of Dan Orr's presentations on this very subject last year and the year before. Dan and I have discussed this on a few other occasions as well. What the stats do not show is that the "curve" if you will of fatalities is bathtub shaped. There is a concentration of incidents with the beginning at divers of less than 1 year certified after which it drops rapidly and almost levels out until you get to the divers certified more than ten years.

There are various causes such as out of air, medical incidents, buddy separation, not dropping weights, etc. But the main reason divers die is that they ran out of air. That makes up a lot of the high sides of the bathtub. Numbers of dives is a really misleading stat because the number of dives does not take into account how well trained or skilled the divers were.

The side that is the most misleading is the ten years or more certified. Because it does not differentiate between divers with ten years or mnore with a card and 100 dives (vacation divers with skill deficiencies) or 2000 dives. Active divers like instructors.

What you need to keep in mind is that the biggest killer of divers IMO from the research I have done is :
Lack of training.
Failure to learn rescue skills, including self rescue and awareness of problems before they happen. This needs to take place in the OW class.
Failure to keep skills sharp by diving regularly.
Lack of planning/ gas planning. Divers are not taught to actually plan dives as they should.
Failure to monitor gas.
Poor communication between divers.
Complacency. "I'm good. My buoyancy is good. I took a rescue class 3 years ago. I never run out of air, etc" these are the attitudes that scare, injure, and kill divers.

 

[InTheDrink]

My feeling - and it is simply that - is that a solo mentality at least is a healthy thing, whether diving alone or in a team. I approach every dive as if diving alone and with redundancy for most things altho I am nearly always with a known buddy. But that's the mentality side.

From first hand experiences I can attest to the value of a team/buddy to get you out of dodge when it's all gone south. I've been hooked by 5 fishermen at once and having a buddy around to cut me out certainly helped. Likewise with IPE only my instructor got me out alive.

Perhaps it's a bit like diving nitrox on an air profile. That extra margin of safety.

Anecdotally it seems to me that a lot of the people that are dying are the ppl getting more into technical dives and those slightly older. Novices seem to die a lot less than one might expect.

I'd also surmise that a lot of buddy diving is essentially solo diving. And this in itself is a risk by creating a false sense of security. If your buddy is 10m away from you and you have an OOA or medical event then you'll realise just how solo that is. But that's how we mostly dive. Mostly.

Finally I am fairly unconvinced that 50% of fatalities are from newbies. It's not what we're seeing day to day.

John

 

[John C. Ratliff]

Many moons ago, a physician named Dr. Stanley Miles wrote a book titled Underwater Medicine. In it, he put forth an accident formula that I have actually used in professional safety circles. I am doing this from memory right now, and one of the factors slips my mind. But it goes like this:

A = CE (prf/tms)

Where:
A = Accident
C = Chance
E = Environment
p = accident proneness
r = risk acceptance
f = physical factors
t = training
m = maturity
s = safety measures

I actually remembered what the "p" stood for--I guess I'm not that far gone after all!

The equation has a numerator and a denominator. Increase any of the factors in the numerator, and there is a greater chance of an accident. Increase any of the factors in the denominator, and the chance of an accident goes down.

For many years in professional safety I have maintained that we can do many very dangerous things safely if we pay attention to the details. We need to select peopel (dive buddies, for instance) who are competent and not prone to risk; accept and minimize the risk; make sure that we and our buddy are physically fit to dive; inclease our training for the environment we are going into; understand ourselves, our limitations and our buddy's limitations (maturity in diving); and provide the kinds of safety measures that will ensure that we have a successful dive.

Using this, I have also put into my dive log a section titled "Special Problems and Ideas," as inevitably something goes wrong on every dive. By writing these down, I can then use those problems and ideas to build into my next dive the solutions so that they are not repeated. This is how I gain in experience. I think I've found one of my debriefing sheets, and will try to attach it. I may have to revisit it, as it is now showing what it is.

SeaRat

 

[nimoh]

Don't forget that running out of air was huge in the stats too

running out of air is a result of complacency. I think it is extremely rare for running out of air to be the cause of death, in cases where the diver ran out of air, the cause was most likely not monitoring their air consumption during the dive and maintaining an adequate reserve.

 

[peterbj7]

No, it's not understanding that your breathing rate increases massively when you're under stress. Any number of people have died on PSD-type dives because of not knowing that or forgetting it (possibly in a state of panic). When in a difficult and life-threatening situation the most important thing to do is to calm yourself down. "Complacency" implies knowing and choosing to ignore life-threatening conditions, whereas I think most victims never got that far.

 

[nimoh]

No, it's not understanding that your breathing rate increases massively when you're under stress. Any number of people have died on PSD-type dives because of not knowing that or forgetting it (possibly in a state of panic). When in a difficult and life-threatening situation the most important thing to do is to calm yourself down. "Complacency" implies knowing and choosing to ignore life-threatening conditions, whereas I think most victims never got that far.

good point, I think a lot of divers underestimate gas consumption under stress, when I plan my gas reserves, I double my SAC rate before adjusting for depth.

However, I don't believe complacency implies knowing and ignoring, but rather confidence irrespective of knowing all of the variables.

 

[peterbj7]

Just for the record, SAC rates can increase as much as 7-fold under extreme stress. Not double.

 

[Shasta_man]

It would seem to boil down to our unreasonable need for air.

 

[Ken Kurtis]

Many of you might have seen this link: Alert Diver | The 2010 DAN Diving Fatalities Workshop

I was at this conference and it was fantastic. We actually had a really good (and lengthy) discussion about this conference in this forum in mid-2010. I'm going to throw in some quick comments on a number of the posts that follow (and I think they'll all get lumped together) but this was my big takeway and what I consider to be the most significant stat from the conference:

Of the 947 fatalities, the trigger (incident that got the ball rolling) was identified in 350 cases.
Of those 350, 41% of the time, the trigger was running out of air.

What I think the takeaway is, is that running out of air is far more dangerous than we teach and that IF you run out of air, you have significantly increased the chances of dying on that particular dive.

- Ken

---------- Post added February 14th, 2013 at 05:52 PM ----------

I realize that the number of dives over the period is a calculated guess, but 20 million dives a year seems very high.

Not really. Assume (as DEMA does) that you have 2 million active divers in the US & Canada. Assume they make ONE vacation trip per year, doing 2 dives per day for 5 days for a total of 10 dives. That's 20 million dives. And that's just US & Canada, diving here or abroad.

---------- Post added February 14th, 2013 at 06:03 PM ----------

1 million active divers in the US? I question that estimate.

The estimate is actually 2 million active US & Canada. US populaton 315 million, Canada 35 million = 350 million. 2 million active divers works out to about 0.6% of the total population. Sounds about right to me (and shows what a small sport we are). Futher, it's estimated by DEMA that 8 million people have either gotten certified or tried scuba (resort course) as far back as they can track stuff.

Participation stats for perspective (US):
Active golfers - 30 million
Tennis players - 23 million
Quilters - 21 million

---------- Post added February 14th, 2013 at 06:07 PM ----------

The side that is the most misleading is the ten years or more certified. Because it does not differentiate between divers with ten years or more with a card and 100 dives (vacation divers with skill deficiencies) or 2000 dives.

The other thing it doesn't deal with is something we see a lot nowadays: Someone got certified when they were 20, met another diver and got married, dove together for a few years, had kids and stopped diving, but re-entered the sport after a 20-year pause because now the kids are grown and they have time/money again. They may have tons of dives and been certified a long time, but there's a gap in terms of recent dives.

---------- Post added February 14th, 2013 at 06:15 PM ----------

I think it is extremely rare for running out of air to be the cause of death, in cases where the diver ran out of air, the cause was most likely not monitoring their air consumption during the dive and maintaining an adequate reserve.

Technically, cause of death will be something like drowning because the phrase "Cause of Death" really means "what was the mechanism of death"? The is what's great about the DAN 4-step method of analysis with (1) trigger, (2) disabling event, (3) disabling injury, (4) cause of death. Running out of air is the trigger, which causes panic & rapid ascent (disabling event), which causes embolsim (disabling injury), which cause drowning (mechanism of death).

But you're really splitting hairs IMHO. Then en result of not monitoring air (which would include having a reserve) IS running out of air. To me its like saying, "I didn't run out of gas. I simply had an absence of fuel."