Statistical Risks of Scuba

[Calvinandhobbs]

Does anyone know how, statistically, the risk of injury (or worse) for scuba compares to other activities like driving, flying, etc?

I did find this website through Google

http://www.afn.org/~savanna/risk.htm

but since anyone can post anything to the web, I wonder how accurate this is.

I also tried looking at DANs website, but didn't find any published statistics.

 

[Thalassamania]

We dealt with that a little while back: Post

 

[Calvinandhobbs]

Thanks for the info. Your thread compares scuba to sports that most people don't play, and that's not the comparison I'm looking for.

The motiviation for asking this question is when I tell people I now scuba dive, they (non divers) frequently respond by talking about how dangerous they perceive scuba to be. I would be nice to point to some statistics that compares scuba risks to a common activity (like driving).

 

[Walter]

It's impossible to know because no one knows how many divers or how many dives.

 

[The Kraken]

Ask them how many people they know of who have died in automobile accidents and then how many people they know who have died in diving accidents.

I know it's not a fair comparison, but it serves to bring home the fact that dying as a result of an automobile accident is, by far, more probable.

the K

 

[Thalassamania]

That is sample dependent. Two friends have died in traffic accidents over the years but nine friends have died in diving accidents. That says more about my circle of friends than it does about the actual risks.

 

[Thalassamania]

Thanks for the info. Your thread compares scuba to sports that most people don't play, and that's not the comparison I'm looking for.

The motivation for asking this question is when I tell people I now scuba dive, they (non divers) frequently respond by talking about how dangerous they perceive scuba to be. I would be nice to point to some statistics that compares scuba risks to a common activity (like driving).

You’ll have trouble making that case, diving is not as safe as the powers-that-be would have you believe. Or should I say diving could be very safe, but on average is not.

The industry's inability to define the size of the user base and their activity level is a major problem for assessing risk. That's why I handled the football stats that way I did.

Let's go back to football for a minute:

For the approximately 1,800,000 football participants in 2005, the rate of direct fatalities was 0.17 per 100,000 participants. To reach that level of risk there would have to be more than 52 million active divers in the US.

Are there 52 million active divers? No! More like 5 million. So you can see that diving has, more or less, an order of magnitude more risk of death associated with it on a per participant basis.

But level of activity also comes into play:

Play with the numbers a little more. There are a little less than 22 player hours per game with about 100 player hours at the field, so each player averages .25 hours per fame (more or less) and about 15 practice hours per week. So lets round down to make it more dangerous and say that each player is exposed to the risks of football for about ten hours per week and 100 hours per season. So for 180 million-risk exposure hours there were three fatalities. Carrying this over to diving, to have the same level of risk there would have to have been over five billion diver hours spent underwater (or more than 20 hours underwater for every person in the United States), not likely.

So, per diving hour the risk is not one order of magnitude, but more like four.

Part of the problem is the lumping of subgroups. I'm sure that if you push the CCR and Tech divers off to the side their numbers are way up. The same could be said newly (or soon to be) certified divers.

If you limit your view to the scientific diving community there is virtually no risk of death, I'd bet that if limited your view to open water DIR folks who where not using CCRs that the same would be true. So there's not a straightforward answer to your question.

 

[ReefHound]

Furthermore, collective group risk says little about your own personal risk, which is very dependent on your actions and your equipment. You can diligently inspect and care for your equipment or you can toss it into the trunk and ignore it until the next outing. You can regularly practice those boring skills like equipment removal or you can master it once and forget about it. You can continue taking classes like Rescue AND regularly review the material or you can put diving out of mind when not actually diving. It's up to you.

 

[Gary D.]

Your far safer on a dive than driving to the dive site and diving is as safe as the person doing it makes it.

Gary D.

 

[mccabejc]

As Walter alluded, you cannot compare the relative safety of two activities unless you know a couple of critical bits of information, which, for scuba diving, nobody knows:

1. You must know the ROOT CAUSE of each incident in any activity your are comparing (scuba or whatever). Was the cause actually due to the activity, or was it due to something unrelated? If a scuba diver dies from a heart attack, was it going to happen anyway if he stayed home and watched football? That information is not publicly available for many or most accidents.
2. You must use a COMPARABLE BASE of measurement, so you can make a meaningful comparison. Do we compare number of dives, or hours diving, or total population of participants when we're comparing the risks of scuba versus, say, bowling? Is there a comparable base that makes sense? Maybe not.

And with all of that, the number you get is for the general population, and may have nothing to do with your own personal risk.

Suffice it to say that with scuba diving it's a lot easier to die or get seriously injured from your mistakes than many other sports and activities. Not many mistakes you can make in bowling or baseball that will kill you. But that's why divers train for diving. The riskier the sport, then presumably the more you prepare for it, so the less risky it becomes.