BKP:
I agree with you 100%.
However, don't you need to also factor in risk? Cave and technical divers expose themselves to much more apparent risks -- and I'm not sure I'd classify them as casual (and good divers/poor divers present themselves in those categories as well). So, you'd naturally expect a larger percentage of deco/ooa/etc. statistics there... no?
I admit to not having read the DAN reports you cite (and perhaps I will... strike that... I WILL take a look), and I absolutely agree with your contention re: the agencies willingness (or lack thereof) to change stride...
Cave and technical divers may expose themselves to more things that are potential risks but the actual risk level has more to do with the ability to manage those risks.
Who is more likely to get hurt, a cave diver doing a cave dive that's well within their training, skill and experience or a recreational diver who isn't very good at any aspect of diving...ie the later is, IMO, an example of a case where all dives are beyond their training, skill and experience. Whether or not they survive is a matter of luck and the skill of their DM. Take away the DM and it's just dumb luck.
The fact is that you can live through being a pretty poor diver. Lets face it, you can sink to the bottom, walk around a while and climb the rope back up and probably not get hurt or killed. The industry takes full advantage of that by contending that they are doing something right in training because only a few people get killed. Only a few would get killed without the training. I dived for years with no training at all and I had a blast and never got hurt. Is that evidence that my training was good? It can't be because I hadn't had any training.
Divers are buying access not training. Since they have the access we have to provide supervision. I'm pretty much ok with that. What I'm not ok with is when one of those poor shmucks starts thinking that they can dive, try it on their own and go get themselves hurt, in part, because they have been lied to and mislead by some one they thought they could trust.
Probably the most disturbing case I've seen wasn't even one where anyone was killed. I've writen about it before but it was a dad, mom and little boy on a dive in a local quarry. They were sitting on the wing of a sunken airplane at about 30 ft and there wasn't much going on. Mom started to freak for no reason that I could see (I was later told that she just got uncomfortable). Dad had his hands full trying to figure out what to do with mom and they ended up getting themselves in some real trouble and Jr was left on his own. Dad tried to take mom to the surface but they were negative so when they slid off the wing of the plane they sunk to the bottom even though they were kicking toward the saurface. They dropped to the bottom where they were ungulfed in a cloud of silt and now the vis is ZERO. When they did start to actually ascend, they just about reached light speed by the time they reached the surface. They turned a little discomfort into an honest to goodness life threatening emergency. IMO, those three divers are subjected to unacceptable risk on any dive, anyplace on the face of the planet.
Later, I had the chance to talk with Jr who was pretty upset after seeing his mother pulled from the water screaming. In keeping with the thread title, I would like nothing better than to defend these casual divers. Who do we defend them from though? Me? The agency? The dive shop? ok, blame them but some one handed them their cards and lead them to believe that they could handle a nice 30 ft dive in the good vis that we had that day. I have little doubt that they could have skated through 99 out of 100 OW class at the exact same skill level that thay demonstrated that day.
Taking a casual approach to diving goals is one thing...sure just go watch the pretty fish. Taking a casual approach the the skills that are involved in just that sort of dive though is just plain stupid. Encouraging or excusing an approach like that, IMO, should be criminal.
There was another case that really got to me though I know of several that are very similar. I wasn't there that day but my son was and BTW, there is a long thread on this board someplace discussing the incident. A diver was on an AOW deep dive. As I recall, one of his fins came off at about 80 ft, he lost control of his buoyancy sunk to 100 ft or so, paniced and hit the surface unconcious and not breathing. He lived and even came onto this board later to defend his instructor. Why take a student deep if they can't do a decent job of diving shallow? Might not a fin come off at any time? Just the other day, I was on a very casual dive just to look at the fish. My left big toe was hurting so I took my fin off for a while. The good news is that every one lived and didn't even need an ambulance because I can dive with one fin or even no fins. I won't win many races without fins but it doesn't have any effect on my ability to control up and down moevement. The injured student, however, was almost certainly trimmed head up and therefor diving negative and would certainly need his fins to control his depth. Lots of divers have that skill issue and while most don't get hurt because of it, some do and the solution is NOT usually taught in recreational classes. Should it be? I think so.
Worse, this business of teach divers to dump air and fin to the surface is stupid beyond description. They don't have much of a chance at controling an ascent if they lose a fin do they? Would we consider being able to control an ascent important to even the most casual diving? I would.
I won't say that these divers WILL die because of it but they might and some ARE going to. Every year a few do and the industry doesn't learn a thing from it. Applying just a little of bit of common sense in what we teach and how we teach it can avoid some of them. It's not very many people and we aren't stepping over the bodies but as long as defenders of "casual diving" want to keep bringing up the liklelyhood of death I have to point out that the nonsense that we are teaching and what we are failing to teach is killing some number of people that I believe would live a lot longer otherwise. Hell, it's only a few so who cares?
It's not always rusty divers or out of practice divers but rather it's often divers that never knew what they need to know in the first place. The evidence that they probably never learned it in the first place can be found right in the agency training standards. You don't need any statistics or complicated analysis to see it either.
