Scuba diver goes missing off Catalina Island

[BMC-9]

George,

As an impartial bystander, with no axe to grind against any party to this very unfortunate incident, I haven’t felt the need to join SB until now. And I explained that my personal live and professional life are kept separate. In the past, if I wanted information about an area I was traveling to, I could just search it and there was usually answers to any questions I might have. As I get older and maybe a bit more cautious than in my youth, certain topics hit close to home. I love to dive and will continue to do so but as I said in a previous post, I want to come back from my dive.

As a researcher, I take a problem, analyze data pertaining to the problem and come up with the solution.

Problem: Boat left without all divers onboard - Did that cause the death of the diver – we do not have all the data – no body and no dive computer - unable to say 100% either way.

Process of keeping track of divers - did rules get bent, become lax or broken and not everyone diving get placed on the roster? Since I am not party to any of factual details of what happened, unable to determine if this is true or just rumor. I think I read on someone’s post that the diver went in at 9:55 or possibly earlier. If the diver was not on the roster, i.e. DM didn’t know to check her back in, how accurate is her entry time? And does that change the possibility that boat leaving her behind did play a part in her death? Unfortunately without recovery of dive computer, unable to determine.

But “IF” this is what happened, what is the solution to keep this from happening again with any dive operation?


My condolences to Laurel’s family and everyone who knew this diver. She sounded like a wonderful person to know.

 

[george_austin]

BMC-9
I think part of the problem, in fact almost all of the problem in this case (thread) is that there is no evidence whatsoever beyond what I and others (posting here) consider to be anecdotal evidence and cherry picked bits of nonsense completely unrelated to the matter.
As an engineer routinely assigned to tasks involving safety and operational issues of critical power equipment worldwide, it is my regretful opinion that without hard data supporting anecdotal evidence, assumptions and "gut feelings", we will likely be forever chasing our tails around in the dark, making ill informed guesses and applying corrective measures to an issue that we don't understand because we just don't have the data.

There is nothing, in my opinion, to be gained by pointing fingers, assigning blame or libeling a business or its owners and operators without settled facts.
- and that will likely never happen in this case.

We don't have Laurel's computer, depth gauge, cylinder, regulator, or any other forensic evidence and until we do, all we can do is support the family, remember Laurel and think really hard about "Lessons Learned" with regard to our own lives.
Just my opinions.

 

[Dizzi Lizzi]

Richard, whatever EHA's associations may be, the link provided to the USCG notice was a valuable contribution to the discussion. I am still pondering the content and wondering whether our missing diver wasn't logged out/in or included in a verbal roll call because she was serving as part of the crew and not thought of as one of the 'paying customers' who needed 'Duty of Care'? In other words was she off the radar of the persons responsible for diver oversight?

I asked this question long long ago (post 21). I've been patiently waiting for an answer and it seems there is no "standard protocol" I am a nurse and we have standards that are state wide to ensure continuity and best practice as well as positive patient outcomes. This industry might benefit from that. They only way this would happen would be a grass roots effort. If I was ever a volunteer/crew/non paying guest on a boat I would insist that my name be placed on the slate....

 

[BMC-9]

George,

I am now confused..... I thought it was a settled fact the boat moved to a second site before realizing all divers were on board. But, since they do not have forensic evidence to prove that leaving a diver behind lead to their demise, we can only make educated guesses regarding that.

The question I was asking was how to prevent this from happening anywhere. Suppose, the boat left, got to the second dive site, realize what had happened, "oh s...." and zoomed back to the first site. At the first stop, the diver is floating, unharmed, waiting for their boat to return for them. Should everyone just say, "No harm, no foul"? Shouldn't the dive industry as a whole - world wide and all the divers that support this industry take a stand and say "not one more left behind"?

The ocean is a beautiful and wondrous world but can at the drop of a hat turn into a merciless mistress unforgiving of human mistakes.

 

[Storker]

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A ScubaBoard Staff Message...

Thread locked for moderation. In the meantime, re-read - and learn - the Special Rules for the Accidents and Incidents Forum

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[MMM]

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A ScubaBoard Staff Message...

You may notice that there are SUBSTANTIALLY fewer posts in this thread. That is because I have deleted those that are off-topic, blamestorming, and personal attacks, and all of those posts quoting them.

We also seem to have had the odd sock puppet appear (which have been reunited to its other appendage). Most of these things would not be allowed in any forum but they are especially heinous in this forum....and contrary to its special rules. But I will remind you: this forum is not intended to cast blame on anyone involved: its purpose to to attempt to address the root cause of the accident and hopefully prevent is recurrence . Anything else is OFF TOPIC. Take your personal, petty fights elsewhere!

Due to the sheer number of actions involved, I am not sending you individual messages of the editing or deletion. Look and see if your post is gone....or edited. If it is, then you have violated the rules for this forum. I'm leaving this thread closed for another day or so to ensure that everyone posting has familiarized themselves with the rules for this forum since any - and I do mean ANY - repeats once it is reopened means that your forum privileges will be jeopardized. Marg, SB Senior Mod

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[Dive Time Remaining]

In the endeavor to run a safe operation one tries to identify all the hazards, graph the risk of the hazard based on probability and severity, and then go thru the process of risk mitigation for those items that rate the highest. The first step is to try to engineer out the hazard. If that cannot be done you develope standard methods and procedures that must be followed to reduce the probability of the hazard occurring. This can be explained in Reasons Swiss Cheese Model of risk mitigation. This is based on putting layers of protection in such that a failure (hole) in one layer of mitigation should be caught by the next. Sometimes the holes line up and that is where liability insurance comes into play (the last risk mitigation for a company). One hazard that has not been addressed here is a boat strike. If a boat pulls anchor and starts to move before all divers are on board this creates a huge risk for any diver still in the water. Most dive boats also fly a dive flag that is intended to signal other boats that divers are in the area. If a boat leaves so does this flag. This removes another layer of risk mitigation as other boats would not have a signal that divers are in the water. This is a risk that based on severity alone would be placed fairly high on the graph. The mitigation by procedure is of course a proper dive roster, a DM logging every diver in and the out of the water, and then a roll call prior to moving the boat (several layers). If these standard procedures are not followed it would increase the probability of the hazard occurring. With a higher probability combined with an already high severity this risk is elevated to the top corner of the graph which is the unacceptable zone.

 

[CuzzA]

I'm sick of hearing about how she possibly might have died by not using a BC.

Eric, I want to clarify my post as more of a generalization and not necessarily what happened. It was brought up, but you are right, at this point we don't know what she was wearing.

 

[Dive Time Remaining]

This whole "no BC" thing is bugging me becaue I don't think it's true, so I tried to track down the source. (As others have said, pictures posted of Laurel show her wearing a BC.) I started at the beginning of this thread. The first mention of "no BC" is in post #25 from AADiver69. If he's still watching this thread, perhaps he can provide more info on how he knows that or why he believes that to be true.

The next time this comes up is from Zog in post #60 where he quotes AADiver69's post and then there are a number of posts talking about diving without a BC and stuff like that and it all seems to have morphed into "Laurel wasn't wearing a BC".

I don't know if that's true or not but it strikes me as odd so I'm inclined to believe it's not true. But some clarification would be nice.

- Ken

This is confusing to me also. In an earlier quote you stated pretty precisely what time the diver went in the water at 9:55 (no source of info quoted). This was not stated as around 10, or between 9:30 and 10, but precisely as 9:55, then assumptions were made from there. You also stated the divers complete dive plan. She was going to go to 80 ft for stretching and then look for lobster. As a side note I have been to this location during the current lobster season and it is pretty barren. The boats will even tell you that there are not many lobster at ship rock except for the tech divers who go down past 200 ft so this doesn't make much sense either. But the real confusing part is that with as much detail that was provided about the precise time of entry and the complete dive plan there was no information provided on what gear she was using? The story that we have heard from friends on the boat is that she may have been using an old fashion horse collar type BC that belonged to the boat.

 

[drbill]

I cannot comment intelligently on this situation since I was not on board.

When I dove on board SCUBA Luv's King Neptune as their marine biologist, I was quasi-staff rather than a customer. However, I was always placed on the roster and checked out and in like any other. I have no idea if this was the case in this incident so I'm only pointing out what that crew did. I dove solo and frequently to 200 ft at sites like Ship Rock.

I'd known Laurel for a number of years. Laurel was a friend of the Sundiver crew and, as I understand it, DM'ed for them on occasion. I'm sure the entire crew is heart broken by this.