Fatality Cabo San Lucas March 3

[DandyDon]

Swampdiver and Aggiediver
Not sure if you guys are properly comparing CO with CO2. They are not the same. So breathing into a CO (Carbon Monoxide) monitor or tester to check for your exhale gas CO level will not work.

That is a common typo, but yeah - everyone's breath includes a little CO. Just right for bump testing actually.

 

[Ayisha]

I got a second response from Dr Bird, but it was fairly non-committal:

Thank you Ayisha, These additional details really help. If this is indeed a CO incident, it is so tragic as this is so preventable. Thank you for including us. With any luck, we will be able to impact this sort of event moving forward.

Hopefully he will share my letter with his team members as he stated in his previous email...

If anyone else would like to try contacting DAN to advocate for CO monitoring/analyzing or anything else, this is the email contact page:

DAN | Email DAN

 

[Ben Prusinski]

Time for me to buy a CO2 analyzer and nitrox analyzer after what happened to me yesterday is similar to how this diver died in Cabo.

 

[Johnoly]

Time for me to buy a CO2 analyzer and nitrox analyzer after what happened to me yesterday is similar to how this diver died in Cabo.

Can you tell us more details?

 

[koozemani]

What happened to you yesterday? You can't post that and not share details

 

[DandyDon]

Time for me to buy a CO2 analyzer and nitrox analyzer after what happened to me yesterday is similar to how this diver died in Cabo.

I really think you had a valve 1/4 open, but a CO analyzer is a good caution. Most Nitrox providers will have their own analyzers, but not CO analyzers.

Can you tell us more details?

See http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/accidents-incidents/413624-unable-breathe-nitrox-enriched-air.html

 

[Belmont]

I'm reading 2 ppm.

 

[kdsmithjr]

It is utterly unclear how anybody knows this was carbon monoxide. It may well have been, but how the family in another country KNOWS that's what killed her is not clear in the article at all.

I agree. Sounds fishy to me big time.

 

[WSOPFAN]

FWIW This video shows Colin Cross doing an interview in which he claims he was told by the "funeral lady" that it was bad air. Was she the coroner and what tests were done? Who knows.......

Husband seeks answers in wife's Mexico scuba death | CTV News


Also........a video here states that Colin said preliminary toxicology reports showed tank was full of CO.

Dive master with Calgary woman who died in Mexico says he also felt unwell

 

[AggieDiver]

That is very good to know about the flight-safe CO calibration gas canisters. I use air monitoring equipment as part of my job, and we frequently use various calibration gases that we usually have to ship as "dangerous goods" due to the restrictions on compressed gases on planes.

In answer to the questions about CO vs CO2, it has been ably answered by Swamp and Don, but just to pile on, the "bump" testing we are referring to is really just an operational check on the sensor. If it reads anything, you at least know the sensor is working. But since you don't know the exact CO in your exhalation, you don't really know that the value the sensor is reading is correct. So it isn't really a calibration, just a sensor operation check. Ideally, you want to do a two point calibration, which is where the calibration gas canister comes in. If you tell the sensor what zero looks like, and use the cal gas to tell it what 10 ppm looks like, then it can more effectively extrapolate to whatever concentration you are trying to measure. With just the zero check and the sensor operation check, you have to be very careful accepting that a 9 ppm reading isn't actually a 15 or a 20. I don't think the calibration on CO meters drifts as much as sensors for things like H2S or volatile organics, and humidity isn't as a big a factor, but I would treat any reading above the low single digits as cause for significant concern unless I had calibrated the meter very recently.