Polish diver dies in world record attempt to 333m

[1atm]

I imagine it must be difficult to get the full support crew together. On the fateful day the 200m support diver couldn’t make it, but everyone else was there (presumably unpaid). Several support divers, a medic, dive manager, press/media, ...? If you cancel and postpone, maybe next time you have the 200m guy but are missing the doc or the 60m diver, and so on ... it’s a lot of pieces that need to come together.

 

[beester]

It's a very tough call to abort once a certain level of "sunk cost" is reached. It is one of the reasons I teach my students to do their site assessment BEFORE they have unpacked the gear from the car etc. It is easy to talk yourself into a dive if you have already geared up and are standing on the beach.

In this case, a barge full of tanks and all the rest going on, it is easy to go "Nah, it'll be fine". It does take a lot of discipline to abort at that stage.

Really like this! Sunken cost fallacy is a real killer.

Off topic, but had this happen once on a north sea wreck dive, which I was organizing and still use it as an example (with permission of the divers involved) to students.

3 man team of tech (GUE T1) divers planning to do a 50m wreck dive on the north sea. Couple of days before 1 team member bails because of family obligations, so the 3 man team is now a 2 man team.

The day before the dive diver A is not feeling 100%, he thinks about calling it off but doesn't want to disappoint diver B, because he really was looking forward to the dive. Since they were now only a 2 man team, him bailing would mean dive cancelled (peer pressure).

So he decides to drive the evening before to the harbor, sleep in the car and evaluate the next early morning how he's feeling. Next morning he still feels like ****, not super bad, but not good either, not having slept well etc etc... but now his buddy arrives and he's really stoked to do the dive. At the same time the charter tells them conditions should be good. So he decides to load up all the gear on the boat, and evaluate again when arriving at the wreck.

30 seamiles later (2 hour+ drive) they arrive at the wreck and the visibility is exceptional, never been so good (reward goes up). So although he still feels like **** he decides to dive, gear up is slow, his buddy and some other guys need to help him with some **** (backup reg behind the backplate)... he seems slow on the equipment check, seems absent and not really focused (this his buddy noticed, but he didn't speak up).

They jump in and when they arrive back at the surface something is wrong. I'm already on the deck after my dive and we load buddy A on the boat and he has DCS. Not a very bad hit, just a type 1 hit, but still. We put him on O² and water and call DAN and the services.

The DCS hit might be linked to him not feeling well, but that's not the point of the story. The point is, that only because of the DCS hit, did he tell the full story during debrief a couple of days later, of him not feeling well, etc. Without an incident, he would never have spoken up, because the dive went well no? This was just a north sea wreck dive, the cost, organisation, involved was nothing compared to a dive like our polish friend did... but still it happened.

Sunken cost fallacy at work in combination with inner peer pressure (he didn't want to disappoint his buddy). Dangerous combo and also me and I'm assuming a lot of divers have fallen victim to this in some or another way.

 

[rjack321]

I imagine it must be difficult to get the full support crew together. On the fateful day the 200m support diver couldn’t make it, but everyone else was there (presumably unpaid). Several support divers, a medic, dive manager, press/media, ...? If you cancel and postpone, maybe next time you have the 200m guy but are missing the doc or the 60m diver, and so on ... it’s a lot of pieces that need to come together.

This is a common problem on big projects.
You get to the point of needing backup people - like 2 hyperbaric Drs or two 200m safety divers and then assume one of them is being capable of being (only!) a 100m safety... Then you run into people not getting along or feeling slighted because backup people all have their own motivations and idiosyncrasies too.

 

[Dsix36]

I had everything setup and divers arranged for a big dive 2 separate times and both times did not happen due to scheduling conflicts or cancellations. Third time had a cancellation and things had to be revised but it still happened. I did not have near the numbers of people to organize that these guys did so I am impressed that they could ever do it.