Suit filed in case of "Girl dead, boy injured at Glacier National Park

[divezonescuba]

In the PADI certification database, there is a certification date and a processing date as part of the record.

In order for any of the certifications to have been preordered, the processing date would have to be before the certification date.

In a normal certification process, the certification date is the same as the processing date or earlier than the processing date. According to the certification standards, the certification is to be processed no more than 7 days after the completion of the course.

The most public pre-certification processing event involved Rob Stewart. At one point, according to the legal paperwork, the people involved attempted to withdrawl the certification, the certification agency refused saying that there was no mechanism for that.

However, PADI does allow certifications to be invalidated. I witnessed a situation where an instructor falsified logbook dive entries for open water training dives that were never conducted and subsequently issued invalid certifications. PADI conducted an investigation and withdrew the open water certifications.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

@divezonescuba

How did that work? Did this happen before the students received their cards?

 

[divezonescuba]

@Wookie said in his earlier post that they were not preprocessed..

In practice, any PADI instructor or PADI shop can access that information. It used to be that you also needed to know an individuals birthdate, but now you just need to know their name or their email address on record.

On a related issue apparently being addressed in the current lawsuit is the inability of an individual to see if a particular instructor is certified to instruct a particular course. That is currently available with SDI / TDI. In the event that PADI circulated a survey on that subject, I would support it. I once had a instructor claim to be able to teach a course that he was not certified to teach. I only found that out by calling PADI directly because I was suspicious that was the case.

One thing that the current filing did not actually come out and say was whether or not Debra Snow was certified to teach the dry suit course. On the one hand, they say that a non-dry suit instructor can teach the drysuit dive in the Advanced Course and on the other hand, they say that you cannot tell if the instructor is certified in any specialty. Lastly, they say that you can just self certify with 10 dives. That is not strictly true, you have to have instruction from a course director for just 10 dives, otherwise it is 20 dives to self certify. So, even though they did not explicitly say so, it is likely that she is dry suit instructor certified. I suspect that is because they are trying to play all the angles.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

@divezonescuba

I was asking more about whether the cards has been shipped, as once they leave the station, there is nothing that PADI or any agency can do. The person receiving a card for an invalidated certification is still going to be able to dive with it.

Now in the scenario of an instructor attempting to teach a course for which they are not certified to teach, agencies should catch this every single time and not issue the certification. Now if the instructor is being even more fraudulent by printing cards themselves, that's another matter where the agency could pursue legal action.

 

[Marie13]

@divezonescuba

You can look up individual TDI instructors, but if that’s the case with individual SDI only instructors, I don’t know. I tried to look up an SDI instructor in the past and was unable to.

 

[BlueTrin]

One way would be to add the classes in progress to the student profile with the instructor name teaching it. This would force the instructor to be checked when a student is enrolled.

 

[divezonescuba]

@divezonescuba

You can look up individual TDI instructors, but if that’s the case with individual SDI only instructors, I don’t know. I tried to look up an SDI instructor in the past and was unable to.

You have to look them as a TDI instructor. Once you find them, you can see the SDI courses that they can instruct. I think that almost all TDI instructors are also SDI instructors in some capacity. But, yes, there are probably SDI only instructors that you could not look up.

 

[divezonescuba]

@divezonescuba
Now in the scenario of an instructor attempting to teach a course for which they are not certified to teach, agencies should catch this every single time and not issue the certification. Now if the instructor is being even more fraudulent by printing cards themselves, that's another matter where the agency could pursue legal action.

They would not be able to process the certification if they were not authorized to teach it. However, a student would not necessarily know that in advance.

In my case, I was going down to Bonaire for a class that was advertised as available by the dive shop that the responsible instructor was not actually authorized to teach. If I had not sensed that something was amiss, I would have traveled down there and found out too late, what the real situation was.

Later on when, I was attempting to take the Trimix Blender course, I asked PADI in advance who could teach that class in the area while I was on an extended layover in Florida. That took a fairly lengthy amount of time because of the way the instructor database is setup.

 

[Marie13]

You have to look them as a TDI instructor. Once you find them, you can see the SDI courses that they can instruct. I think that almost all TDI instructors are also SDI instructors in some capacity.

That’s helpful, but useless if you’re trying to look up a SDI instructor who is NOT also a TDI instructor.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

They would not be able to process the certification if they were not authorized to teach it. However, a student would not necessarily know that in advance.

In my case, I was going down to Bonaire for a class that was advertised as available by the dive shop that the responsible instructor was not actually authorized to teach. If I had not sensed that something was amiss, I would have traveled down there and find out too late, what the real situation was.

I would support more transparency from the industry.