Near drowning incident - November 12, 2016

[The Chairman]

That's not what I am talking about.

That short moment between feeling safe and then being in deadly peril is non existent most of the time. One moment, they were on solid ground or floating and the next they were sinking in water over their head. There was no time for them to react in a rational manor before instinct overrode their ability to consciously decide to do something differently. If it's the spring I think it is, I've done just what that person has done. Unlike that person, my muscle memory from thousands of dives kicked in and I hit my inflator and found my bailout simultaneously. I didn't even drop fins or mask but I felt rather sheepish kicking in without fins. I was glad my experience saved me.

Again, this is why having a buddy is so stinking important for the new and newish diver. You should have each others' backs until both of you are out of the water. Training can show you all the right moves, but it takes far, far longer to turn that training into true muscle memory. At the beginning you're still fumbling with where this or that is. You get into a situation and you're churning through your memory to find the right combination before you even realize you should have called out or signaled your buddy. With an attentive buddy, you won't have to die. Ken's distressed diver really lucked out with him there.

The best rescues are the ones you prevent. Again, what was Ken's first take away? Don't be overweighted. We see these overweighted people out on the reefs all the time. They are a BC failure away from being in a rescue situation. If you are balanced (neutral just below the surface with no air in your BC), keeping your head up without fins is doable and you'll probably have the ability to call out for help.

It's your choice. Believe you can do what no one else can do, or get neutral, expand on your experience and improve your buddy awareness. We can only give you suggestions how to be safe. The rest is up to you.

 

[Duke Dive Medicine]

To me, this is more of a function of experience. We can show people what to do and when, but they'll still be like a deer in the headlight when presented with similar yet somewhat different scenarios. I think it's a noble aspiration, but I don't have a clue how to raise their panic threshold, especially since we aren't allowed to do harassment drills anymore. I feel that they were not only great for the new diver, but they were fun as hell for everyone.

Concur. Training should (and I think if done with that goal, does) contribute to the experience you're talking about. If a new diver has the muscle memory of clearing a flooded mask, recovering a regulator, etc it increases the likelihood of him or her being able to do that under stress.

 

[The Chairman]

Then the instructor takes his reg out to talk to the students and the students do the same.

I'm guilty of this. Hard to give advice or further directions with a reg in my mouth. I do it in the pool too. I'll have to think on this.

 

[dmaziuk]

There's a barrier to calling out "help". What if I'm overreacting? Does my situation warrant a full-blown rescue scenario? I've been in (non-diving) situations when someone has hit the "emergency" button, and the majority of those people have been extremely embarrassed and/or rather distressed for causing a big scene.

In one of the two cases IME there wasn't time for any of that. My brother went from standing on a sand bank to "oh crap there is no bottom and current is dragging me away" in less than a second. I'm fairly certain the only reason he was in trouble was it was very sudden and completely unexpected. I suspect this may be true of the diver in this thread as well.

 

[Ken Kurtis]

Great post and great thread. (But then again, when your name is "Ken" you're expected to be good, right???

In all seriousness, many good take-aways for both divers AND dive professionals:

On November 12th, I was involved with the rescue of a near-drowning victim in a spring . . .

Just because this happened in a spring and Ken S is cave, don't for a minute think this is a cave/cavern incident. It's not. This is pretty typical of OW diving.

. . . out of the corner of my eye I noticed a diver bobbing up and down . . .

For the pros: It won't always be your diver that gets in trouble. Be aware of the surroundings. A number of years ago I was in Avalon doing Rescue drills with an OW class when a diver's buddy (not our group) surfaced 100 feet away screaming for help and I responded. (Buddy survived.)
For the divers: Same suggestion to be aware of others in your vicinity.

The diver was treated by paramedics and released without transport to a hospital.

This I found surprising because the near-drowning can trigger post-event slow accumulation of fluid in the lungs and hours later what is a "dry drowning". I'm surprised he wasn't hospitalized for observation as I thought that was SOP in general terms.

The diver was wearing a jacket style BC with an integrated weight system and he was overweighted with ballast.

I don't think the BC style fits in (if anything, it helped him keep his head upright vs a back-inflation that likely would have tipped him forward) but I've ranted for years about the dangers over-weighting.
For the pros: Take time to properly weight your students in class lest you instill bad habits in them.
For the divers: Try ding your next dive with 2 pounds LESS than normal. If that's OK, do the dive after that with another 2 pounds less. Keep doing this until you've removed 2 pounds too many. The results may surprise you.

During the rescue I noticed large quantities of air leaking from the pull dump on his corrugated inflator hose

Always do a pre-dive check of gear that includes BC inflation and checking for leaks.

. . . so it appears that he had taken his mask and fins off

Unclear if this was beginning or end of the dive but the lesson is still the same: Don't take off fins & mask until you're on solid ground/boat/stairs/etc. Kicking sans fins and with only booties is MUCH harder and less effective than with bare feet. Try it sometime if you haven't already.

The first reason is that there were two scuba divers standing in the shallow area no more than 5’ away from the victim that were unaware of the problem unfolding next to them.

As others have mentioned, drowning is not the obvious easily-observed event we are led to believe it is. We had a fatality in the Avalon UW Park some years ago where there were likely 200 divers (land & surface) within 50 feet of the victim and no one noticed that there was anything wrong. Not an indictment of them but this is the reality of drowning. It can be very subtle.

The second reason is the diver had a fully functional regulator and air in his tank

You can solve just about any problem UW with air. Without air, you have as long as you can hold your breathe - most likely after an exhale - to fix whatever is wrong. KEEP THE REG IN YOUR MOUTH!!!! (Personally, I prefer divers do that over a snorkel which can still flood.)

. . . ditching his ballast when he had time to realize his BC had failed.

Dead divers, especially those recovered on the bottom, have their weights in place. DITCH YOUR WEIGHTS IF YOU THINK IT'S GOING SOUTH. And if it's not, better to be embarrassed by unnecessarily dropping weight than to be dead because your pride got in the way.

The other pro lesson here is that you've got to be constantly vigilant, even if it's on a subconscious level, of what might be going wrong in your diver as well as others around you, for all the reasons mentioned above and in previous posts.

A few years ago I was teaching a DM class in CA and we were on a boat with 30 paying divers doing their "final" exam which consisted of assisting in running the 2-day trip. I had about 6 candidates. They had completed the first dive and we were all on the bow of the boat with our breakfast doing a debrief. I suddenly put my plate down and simply said to them, "I'll be right back." With that (I was in my Farmer John but no fins or mask), I jumped over the bow and into the water 10 feet below. Needless to say, my candidates thought I'd lost my mind. When they looked over the bow, they saw me on the surface by the anchor line with a conscious but tired diver in my grasp, towing him back to the stern. Once I got back on board (diver was fine), I went to the bow, picked up my plate, and said, "Now where were we?" Their immediate question was, "How did you know someone was in trouble?" My answer was, "Even sitting here I could hear how he was breathing and I didn't like it so I went."

And the point of this story for those of you who are pros or want to be, is that you need to (and will) develop a sixth sense about things that never turns off. You may not be aware of it, but there will develop within you a radar that's on the lookout for minor troubles and you'll intervene when necessary so minor doesn't become major.

It's what I call the difference in the mindset between a diver and an instructor. A diver enters the water assuming everything will go as planned and then may not be prepared to deal with things when they don't. An instructor (or any dive pro) enters the water assuming there will be trouble and tries to spot it before it gets out of hand, as Ken S did in the story that got this thread started.

- Ken (K, not S)

 

[catone]

The often repeated mantra of not being overweighted becomes less and less valid with increasing dive complexity and gear. It is very simple to stay close to neutrally buoyant with on AL 80 on your back, be it at the beginning or the end of the dive, however, once starting the dive with overfilled steel tanks, and adding stages and O2 bottle, planning on thousands of feet penetration, and preparing to be close to neutral with used tanks, one can be overweighted beyond the ability to swim up on one single breath, fins or not.

 

[Freewillow]

Total agreement with the post and comments.

One point that I did not read. Did the victim have a dive buddy. If yes, where was he?

I am always diving with a buddy and when I am the more experienced diver - 99% of the case -, I am the first in the water and the last to exit the water. AND WATCHING my dive buddy from point A to point Z.

 

[Ken Kurtis]

The often repeated mantra of not being overweighted becomes less and less valid (empahasis added) with increasing dive complexity and gear . . .

I would take great exception to the phrase "less and less valid" as it almost seems to imply "so why bother?"

I understand - and sort of agree with - your general point but perhaps a phrase like "more and more difficult with increasing dive complexity and gear" would be better.

- Ken K

 

[KevinNM]

The often repeated mantra of not being overweighted becomes less and less valid with increasing dive complexity and gear. It is very simple to stay close to neutrally buoyant with on AL 80 on your back, be it at the beginning or the end of the dive, however, once starting the dive with overfilled steel tanks, and adding stages and O2 bottle, planning on thousands of feet penetration, and preparing to be close to neutral with used tanks, one can be overweighted beyond the ability to swim up on one single breath, fins or not.

You should add air to your dry suit then.

 

[boulderjohn]

For the pros: Take time to properly weight your students in class lest you instill bad habits in them.

I will take this opportunity to speak once again my firm belief that this is the most persistent problem with dive instruction, and I will repeat what I believe to be its cause. I will start with a short anecdote.

I was conducting the OW checkout dives for a couple of students who had received their OW instruction by another instructor in the shop with which I was then working. One of the students, knowing that he would be doing the OW dives in a 7mm wet suit, had insisted on using a 7mm wetsuit in the pool sessions so he would know his proper weighting. He told me he was thus certain he needed 22 pounds. I looked at his slight build and thought "No way on God's green Earth does he need 22 pounds." By the end of the dives he was happily diving with 10 pounds of ballast. Why did he think he needed 22 pounds? In the pool, he had needed that much weight so that he could stay firmly planted on the bottom of the pool on his knees while doing the skills.

Most OW instruction is still being done on the knees, and students MUST be overweighted significantly to do it that way. Otherwise they are constantly bobbing up and down and tipping over. If instructors would switch to teaching skills neutrally buoyant and in horizontal trim, they would find that it works best with properly weighted students, and overweighting and a host of other instruction-related problems would go away.