Training Scuba Ranch TX Diving Accident

[kammel78]

So you're saying there's a difference between saying "This is what happened ... This is what we think went wrong ... This is how to avoid that in the future ..." and saying "Don't talk about it. Keep it hush-hush. Maybe folks will just forget about it and we can all just go about our business ...*"

Feels to me like an attempted CYA maneuver.

I get the lake and the dive shop having a "no comment at this time" reaction, but the whole "Nobody - whoever you are - talk about it*" line to be self-serving and disingenuous. It paints the persons and operations putting that out in a bad light.


*inferred and paraphrased from some of the posts - not a quote

I think what you're getting at is the elephant in the room, so to speak. The driving force behind this behavior is financial. You could make a case for the state of or lack of tort reform, but at the end of the day, the financial impact from a lawsuit to the person(s) involved, dive shop, training agency, etc drives behavior and not what's "good" for the community or "right" however you want to define those terms.

 

[cerich]

Thanks for sharing. I've had some interactions with that shop and was not expecting to hear it was them.

Either scenario is entirely plausible as I've seen both happen. I personally know of instructors who clip short dog leads to their BCs so their students can hold on and stay close when doing their experience dives (those that actually take students on experience dives). Lots of us have been saying it for a while...it's a continuous race to the bottom in the current recreational dive training industry. Whether it's shortening OW class, making up for lost revenue with a pay-for-a-card instructor mill, overfilling classes, or pushing the limits of a given dive sites. And it. just. keeps. getting. worse. The end result can only ever be increased risk (this, Mills, etc) or just a sub-par, sh***y experience like just a handful of people in this small thread have already attested to. But at the end of the day is a business model based on acceptable risk vs profit. If you took SR and Athens away as approved OW sites, how much revenue in training dollars would be lost to dives shops and the training agencies?

@cerich not sure if you caught this one or not. Would also be interested to get Gareth's take. Granted we don't know the direct cause or any material details, but we know a helluva lot about the environment and risks.

My heart breaks for the family, friends, first responders.

Beyond that.. honestly, I'm tired. 3 decades in the industry, in the instruction side doing all I could to try and bring some sanity to the degradation of training and direction of dive training, I may as well tried to scream at the clouds

Being on the RSTC board and what most agencies really thought about safety broke me, it truly did. It's about a money train, not safety. The long, too long train of incidents like this are just the cost that is accepted to sell cards and materials, looked at with the same cold eyes of the Ford pinto accountants.

Accidents will happen no matter what, but with every equipment improvement of the last 4-5 decades we should have seen much better safety rates, we have not because in the same time training has degraded.
To everyone saying take Gareth's human factors class (a friend and a great class) the problem Gareth has is that the HF framework is not designed to work with an industry controlled at the highest levels of training by too many sociopaths that sell cards and materials, certify instructors fast, make instructors pay for the coverage the agencies hide behind. Anyhow..I could go on, but to what end.


I would both be curious, and I suspect furious of how much pool time that child had received.

 

[scubablue67]

I was not going to post. But as everyone has morbid curiosity and zero patience. Nobody is trying to hide anything. It will all be open to discuss and learn from. There is no diveshop owner that will not be working with their staff to work to avoid this repeating.
There were alot of shops staff that responded selflessly and heroicly working amazingly well together.
If you have never been a part of a fatality and given your heart over to a family than I will give you grace that you dont comprehend the utter devastation.
The family still has not had a funeral.
30 minutes after departing the hospital I started recieving thoughts and prayer along with requests for information. Every post the reponders would see set off a ripple of more questions we are unable to answer. Listening to some of the people chime in with wrong info makes me want to vomit. I can't and won't try to speak for the family. I will speak from a responders perspective only to say everyone is struggling to make this make sense. That is called trama. We will work through it. The investigation will go forward and a report will be made and it will be accurate. The rumour and even innocent speculation will not help and clouds the truth. Please keep the family in your prayers. Please keep the people that just happened to be at the ranch and responded in your prayers as they place what transpired in perspective. I know the vast majority of dive shop owners and instructors in this area. They all care deeply about the dive community and at a time like this we gather our staff and work to make sense. I am sure the posters here are trying to do the same. Please keep in mind how your expertise on the subject might be interpretted from people that gave all they had to help. We all care lets show compassion until all answers are revealed.
I appologise in advance as this will be all I will speak on this not to hide anything but to respect the process of proper investigation.

 

[kammel78]

My heart breaks for the family, friends, first responders.

Beyond that.. honestly, I'm tired. 3 decades in the industry, in the instruction side doing all I could to try and bring some sanity to the degradation of training and direction of dive training, I may as well tried to scream at the clouds

Being on the RSTC board and what most agencies really thought about safety broke me, it truly did. It's about a money train, not safety. The long, too long train of incidents like this are just the cost that is accepted to sell cards and materials, looked at with the same cold eyes of the Ford pinto accountants.

Accidents will happen no matter what, but with every equipment improvement of the last 4-5 decades we should have seen much better safety rates, we have not because in the same time training has degraded.

I would both be curious, and I suspect furious of how much pool time that child had received.

I thought after Linnea that this is the worst it could possibly get and nothing will hit me as hard as that. I guess maybe it's because it's a site I've been to so many times or that my son was 12 when I did his OW and my 11 yr old is prepping for his. It's just getting harder and harder to view this industry as a whole with anything but disgust. Some of my favorite people in the world and experiences come from this industry but it's becoming so much harder for the good apples to outweigh the kids dying.

Regarding pool training, one of the main reasons I stopped teaching shop OW classes was because the model was for instructors to sign up for weekends (not classes). So you could have one set of instructor/AI/DMs in the pool sessions and completely different on OW weekend. Don't know how common that is, but I could not stand spending days with someone with a fear of (fill in the blank), developing their trust in me, their confidence in themselves, making steady progress to help them stop listening to that voice of fear in their head and start trusting themselves, only to turn them over to a drill instructor who's going to give them marching orders, berate them for failing, and generally ensure they never want to get in the water again.



*disclaimer for those who jump in on page 10 of a thread to take comments out of context - no one is claiming to know what happened, why, or assign fault whether implied or direct.

 

[mcohen1021]

The accident is so sad and tragic, I can't/don't want to imagine what the family is going through.

Its incidents like this that make me so thankful I took my 4 courses in college over long semesters. And I always will credit that and lots of crappy lake diving for making me a better diver than so many who go through the too fast cattle car dive shop courses.