Oh, I understand. We were all in rash guards or maybe 3 mils at most. The water temp was 86 degrees all week.
Fatality on Rosalie Moller wreck
- Thread starter vjongene
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Oh, I understand. We were all in rash guards or maybe 3 mils at most. The water temp was 86 degrees all week.
I agree that her decision was not a conscious one. It sounds like (and of course NONE of us can speak decisively on what was actually going on in her brain/body) she saw that weight pouch as her lifeline and went after it as if it was a life/death decision. Her (subcortical) brain made a decision on the information she had - 'weight pouch = life', so she went after it. If she'd had the benefit of logic she may have made a very different decision. When we are in flight/fight we do NOT have access to our logical brain (unless we are highly trained to make those decisions in frightening situations - i.e., highly trained soldiers).
If going after a spool of line appeared to be a life/death situation we very well might go after it. I went after my husband's spool at the beginning of a dive - but it was right after we splashed and there was no danger in doing so. Who knows what I might do if my gut told me 'this spool will save our lives'? I hope we are never in that situation ...
Bob DBF
Contributor
I agree.
What we should learn from this is that one needs to make conscious decisions while diving, or accidents similar to this will continue.
The training that instills fear about events in SCUBA, such as dropping a weight belt or going OOA instead of understanding of the situation and how to recover is part of the problem. Another is taking rec divers on deco dives which exacerbates the fear without proper preparation and understanding is another.
I'm not against rec deco dives, I've been doing them for decades, but the diver has to understand what they are doing. Training by catchphrase does not cut it.
Bob DBF
Contributor
Fair enough, but rational thinking is what separates us from animals, so it might be good to cultivate that part of our nature.
Along those lines, back in the olden days when I was a kid, I got interested in electronics about the time transistors were invented and did all manner of projects. In my reading I ran across the fact that many workers and hobbyists were having severe accidents because they caught a falling soldering iron. I trained myself to let things fall unless I consciously knew what was falling and could catch it without injury. This has come in handy for other endeavors, including scuba, not only for avoiding injury with falling objects, but also for being aware of what is happening and making a conscious decision before acting.
John the Pom
Contributor
I think these are two different accident modalities. One of the hazards with very experienced people is complacency - "It was fine the last three times I did it, so nothing is going to happen if I do it again." The accident in this thread sounds more like someone diving outside the safe envelope for their experience / training making a poor decision in a moment of anxiety / near-panic.
But I agree very much with your point that, when it comes to safety, we must take it as inevitable that people will make mistakes. That is a basic principle of safety in engineering.
In the stone ages of diving, a weight belt wasn't infallible, but it was about as simple a piece of kit as you could imagine, and you could pick up any weight belt and know how it worked. Now we have a plethora of different weight systems, each with their own relatively complicated method of holding and releasing weights. I understand why tech. divers with their complex gear want very flexible weighting, but for rec. divers I'm not sure it has made things better. TBH, I'm not convinced that my modern BCD with all of its straps, adjustments, and integrated weights, is any better than my old Scubapro bright orange "stab jacket" and separate weight belt.
fsardone
Solo Diver
I beg to differ. As Bob says above, rational thinking is what separates us from (the majority) of other species (there are a few species that show rational thinking caèabilities albeit to a lower level of abstraction).
The problem is we have different modalities of making decisions. When we drive home from work, we keep our decision makin to a lower level. We recognize known situations and apply pre-canned decisions. But when road works require us to detour we need rational-conscious decision making (Modality 1 and 2 of decision making).
Modality 1 is very economic in term of sugar used by brain and effort to make decisions so if we have a model that fit the situation we will use it (even if the model is not adequate if we THINK it fits we will be used). This is why we need training and experience. To develop models and be exposed to different situations. This will prevent us to apply the wrong solution to an unknown problem. Many incidents happen because we did not recognize the unfitness of the applied model.
Modality 2 is very intensive in term of areas activated in the brain and we revert to it with conscious effort. We need to use it when we have no model or when training tell us to be careful about something and we re-evaluate the know model for fitness to the current situation.
The third modality is when we make no decision and we just react with our lizard brain and we enter in the fight or flight mode.
Neurosciences is still thinking about many of these things. Decision making model is particularly studied by advertising, which makes money on your decisions as a consumer but it is useful in risky environment. Flying safety has been studying this field before advertising, but (maybe) advertisers have more money ....
The Neuroscience of Decision Making | The Kavli Foundation
Concur that those were different modalities but both are based upon wrong decision making. But both incidents have a few common areas:
1. Situation awareness in both was lacking
2. Analysis of possible consequences was insufficient
3. Gas planning inadequate (evaluation of adequacies of reserves or gas available was not performed)
In both incidents the victim focussed on the task at hand (recovering an object) without the big picture. Worst when the more experienced team had time to make a decision while the less experienced just reacted. The former did no make use of team resources by communication and common sharing of the analysis of the task at end. The second team broke (no team integrity) when one team member correctly did not follow.
Just couple of my thoughts about the above.
Another interesting page below.
Clarifying multiple-mode decision making in conventional psychological models: A consideration of the influential mechanism of car use's characteristics on the behavioral use of public transportation - ScienceDirect
Sadly, she just didn't want to lose the pocket to her bcd.
beester
Contributor
Not the first time that I totally agree with you on this.
Training and gaining experience build templates that can be used by your level 1 brain (low energy to decide). Specially in OC diving there are a lot of failure scenarios that can be trained, so they become second nature and when the **** hits the fan you can then act faster, but are also sure that the right framework is used. Typical are for example, out of gas scenario, valve failure scenario, stuck inflator (drysuit or bcd/wing), freeflowing reg, etc...
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