How Safe Can Cave Diving Be?

[jjoeldm]

"follows the rules"

Sadly, as we found the day before yesterday, that isn't always the case, even by experienced cavers; and when they do violate those rules they are just as at a risk of a fatality as any newbie.

Arrogance mixed with complacency kills...

I think sometimes, as you suggest, it's just too much comfort. Look at Berman and this fellow from Virginia on Valentine's Day. Both very experienced, both comfortable doing long, highly technical dives solo. I wonder if sometimes they aren't losing their fear of the environment and this leads to complacency which leads to mistakes and "accidents".

I think a little fear is a healthy thing. It makes you respect the environment you're in.

JoeL

 

[jjoeldm]

a newbie's perspective:

cave diving has risks. protocols are developed to deal with those risks.

if you don't follow protocol, you are facing those risks head-on and basically playing Russian roulette

can you die even if you follow protocol? sure, of course ... but the chances are greately diminished

how safe is cave diving? as safe as your dive plan, dive skills, and dive protocol make it

Agreed.

You can't make cave diving completely safe any more than you can make boating safe. I remember reading a statistic where in one year, more than a dozen people died while trying to recover their hat that blew off while fishing from a boat.

And I assume those are the ones that got reported. Nothing is safe. Sitting in a chair in a protected room is not safe because sedentary people die prematurely. Of all kinds of related diseases.

Do what excites you but do it intelligently and approach safety and training with vigilance.

JoeL

 

[Meng_Tze]

Do what excites you but do it intelligently and approach safety and training with vigilance.

JoeL

And the fear is a healthy thing comment:

I like your mindset Joe, you should come back to it...

 

[chickdiver]

And the fear is a healthy thing comment:

I like your mindset Joe, you should come back to it...

Hey Joe,

I agree with Meng Tze (imagine that ).

I see you are in Atlanta- my husband and I dive in Marianna a lot. If you get the jones to come down, let me know- we'd be happy to dive with you.

Heather

 

[azcaddman]

If there isn't one now, there should be a searchable database online of these accidents for the use of cave divers online. Purged of names as in Exley's book, "Basic cave diving: A blueprint for survival," which lists examples of cave accidents and analyzes them. That book was a touchstone for me in my cave diving development. Something like that could be invaluable to cave divers especially if we really are in an era where the accidents aren't wandering OW divers so much as they are trained and even expert cave divers.
JoeL

There is an on-line resource .. IUCRR

 

[jeandiver]

Remember Jeano Beano's phrase:

PRUDENCE , ALWAYS PRUDENCE !

The MOST IMPORTANT piece of equipment for us cave divers is our brains!

But that's just My Humble Opinion.

Thanks!

Jeano Beano
Fort White , Florida

 

[jjoeldm]

There is an on-line resource .. IUCRR

Thanks! I know about this page; it's been up for a while. It's been an ongoing concern of mine for nearly a decade. I know there are many, many, many of these files but they appear to be held very closely by the IUCRR and others. I was hoping by now that they or someone might have something more substantial and useful.

I'd like to see a more robust database including all accident files, cross-referenced, searchable and including statistics so cave divers can clearly see how divers are dying and what practices are leading to these deaths over the years.

This is a start, but a very small start and it seems that it took a lot of prodding just to get this. I hope someday they'll see fit to release all of the accident files they currently hold or have access to. I don't know why they haven't. How many cave diving deaths are there? Does anyone know? It's certainly not the few they have on the site. I don't understand the tiny dribble of info coming from those who possess it.

Information like this doesn't belong to the IUCRR or the NSS-CDS or the NACD or GUE or PADI or NAUI or the US Government. It belongs to cave divers and it should be freely available to them.

I understand the need for discretion, for scrubbing names from the reports, but if you look on the IUCRR site you'll see this last accident is _already_ published and his name is all over the papers, online and in forums like these! We _know_ who this guy is! What's the logic behind that? Why is it being published so quickly when so many others have never been published? Who decides what we get to see and why some reports and not others?

Information is power. And information on how people die in water-filled caves could be incredibly powerful in the hands of divers who could use it to make their diving better and safer. I respect the IUCRR but I don't respect this sort of secretive approach to Accident Analysis. AA is only useful if it's public.

BTW, this may appear to be tangential to the thread, but I think absolutely it's germane to the issue of diver safety.

JoeL

 

[jjoeldm]

And the fear is a healthy thing comment:

I like your mindset Joe, you should come back to it...

Thanks! I think about it a lot. It'd be a big change for me. The last couple of years I had settled into a once-a-year liveaboard trip while my wife and kids are up at the Jersey Shore for their annual hang with her Dad et al. August of 2004 I dove for a week on the Thorfinn in Truk and diving inside those incredible wrecks felt sort of like being in a cave and that was a LOT of fun!

JoeL

 

[jjoeldm]

Hey Joe,

I see you are in Atlanta- my husband and I dive in Marianna a lot. If you get the jones to come down, let me know- we'd be happy to dive with you.

Heather

Heather,

I appreciate that. I have some conditioning to do and some more thinking on the subject and of course my 104's would have to be hydro'd along with all my 80's and 72's!

I'll keep a link with your info and drop you a line when I get ready. Thanks for the invitation.

JoeL

 

[Caver95]

The MOST IMPORTANT piece of equipment for us cave divers is our brains!

There are a lot of cave divers in trouble in that case.