Unknown Tourist dead, Dive Master ill - Ambergris Caye, Belize

[Outbound]

Not the way I'm reading it.

She doesn't mention donating air to him? She's fine. He's drowsy. Bad air. Get him good air.

Instead of going to the surface, they play around with a dsmb, then do a safety stop? Seriously?

You're assuming she knew, at the moment, that he was drowsy and that it was due to contaminated air. From my reading, all she knew was that he wasn't feeling well and something was wrong. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say. Yeah, she should have skipped the safety stop, but - correct me if I'm wrong because I didn't re-read that post to check - I thought the DM had signaled to do a SS as well.

Overall, she handled it extremely well and saved his life. We can and should dissect the incident and learn from it, but very few people handle emergency situations 100% correctly in the moment.

 

[MidOH]

I could have sworn she said he was moving or looking funny.

If you're having a health issue, and I'm not, I'm putting you on my long hose.

And if our decos are clear, we ain't doing a safety stop unless we're 100% certain the issue was simple.

 

[DandyDon]

Safety stops are suggested, not required. In a rescue, I might skip a required deco stop as well, depending.

 

[iointerrupt]

I wonder if training about Safety Stops has become overzealous to the point that people are terrified of missing them. It's fair reinforce to would-be future Rescuers, to skip the Safety Stop. The old "you can fix bent, you can't fix dead".

Regardless, the Rescuer in this case deserves all the credit possible.

 

[rmorgan]

I thought the DM had signaled to do a SS as well.

I'm not sure that the Belizean DM was in shape to agree or not agree, but the American DM, who was assisting the writer, agreed based on their joint assessment of the Belizean DM's condition (and then agreed to abort based on his deterioration).

She doesn't mention donating air to him? She's fine. He's drowsy. Bad air. Get him good air.

Instead of going to the surface, they play around with a dsmb, then do a safety stop? Seriously?

A second dive master (who was more familiar with the group) assisted with the ascent and agreed to do a safety stop based on the situation. The DSMB was (poorly) deployed by the Belizean DM; I'm not sure that counts as "playing around with" the DSMB. Would a donated second have affected the outcome? Maybe, depending on the cause (although it seems unlikely that the writer had a "long hose"), but maybe not, if the DM was having a medical crisis. But the octopus switch, to a semi-conscious diver, also would inject risk: Taking his regulator out of his mouth in order to work the switch, the chance of him blocking insertion of the octopus or spitting it out, the chance of a problem in close quarters--those all seem serious to me, not to mention the risk of a potentially-panicked diver being attached to the rescuer.

Having thought a good bit about this over the last few days, what bothers me the most is, what happened to Mr. Hughes. Was it the same cause as what happened to the DM? Maybe--but he was following the three divers up, but was then on the surface, sank to the floor, and then was pulled back up to the boat. Note his symptoms: "Oral Foaming, blood flow (appears atrial in color), liters of sea water (apparent drowning) and pinpoint (hypoxia) pupils are visually evident." Atrial blood indicates oxygenation, so it seems unlikely he'd been breathing poison gas for 20 or more minutes. Oral foam is an indicator of pulmonary edema, which certainly could result from a rapid ascent. Liters of sea water ingested? Perhaps his regulator was out of his mouth the whole way down; it's not reported either way.

Anyway, although it's tempting to assume one cause for both casualties, I don't think there's enough information. Nor is there enough information, in my view, to conclude that breathing-gas contamination was the cause of either. It's certainly a good time to revisit the discussion around personal CO detectors, but I hope that the process is at least slightly transparent, so that in due course we can learn what happened to these men, and whether these events were a well-managed near miss unrelated to an adjacent tragedy, or two victims of the same equipment and/or human failings.

 

[rmorgan]

I wonder if training about Safety Stops has become overzealous to the point that people are terrified of missing them. It's fair reinforce to would-be future Rescuers, to skip the Safety Stop. The old "you can fix bent, you can't fix dead".

Regardless, the Rescuer in this case deserves all the credit possible.

There were no safety stops in my 1980 training. "The PADI Open Water Manual recommended safety stops in the 1984 edition. The 1988 release of the Recreational Dive Planner introduced safety stops to a wider audience. This step, along with PADI’s “S.A.F.E. Diver” campaign, was a big help in educating divers. Slowly Ascend From Every Dive became an acronym dive instructors passed along to new students."

 

[boulderjohn]

I wonder if training about Safety Stops has become overzealous to the point that people are terrified of missing them.

I think many people, including professionals, have been led to believe they will die a horrible, painful death if they skip a safety stop on any dive.

One of nice things about modern computers like the Shearwater is the SurfGF feature, which allows you to know what percentage of a supposedly safe ascent you would be in if you were to surface immediately. I have seen DMs signal a safety stop after dives when we were in the 30s for SurfGF. The max I saw was the dive with CocoView in Roatan where we never once got my SurfGF above 19. Yep, the DM signaled for everyone to do a safety stop. (When I dived with CocoView, we rarely initiated a safety stop with SurfGFs above 50; they just wanted to make sure there wasn't even an infinitesimal chance of DCS.)

 

[Steelyeyes]

Our rescue training when I did my Divemaster course in 1981 didn't include a safety stop. I took a rescue course in 2017. When I lived in Bonaire I helped my neighbor in his rescue training for a Divemaster he was teaching. If memory serves our diver rescues did not have a safety stop in any of those instances. In both courses we did deal with diver panic and not making a victim of yourself. I'm not going to tangle with a compromised diver and mess around trying to get a different air source in their mouth when an infinite good air source is just over our heads. Get the "victim" out of the deadly environment ASAP while keeping yourself safe is my position. To that end I'd be behind them with a grip on their first stage and managing our buoyancy and ascent rate while making sure they're still blowing bubbles. Once I get over this Covid I'll walk over to my instructor's shop from the 2017 course and have a chat with her.

 

[boulderjohn]

Safety stops are suggested, not required. In a rescue, I might skip a required deco stop as well, depending.

Here is a quick summary of the whole idea for those who don't understand.

• On any NDL dive in which the diver stays within limits, the diver should be able to ascend to the surface at a safe ascent rate and be fine. The odds are very much in your favor.
• On dives that come close to NDLs, especially dives near the recreational limit, the uncertainty of conditions and individual physiology make a safety stop a good idea. If you skip the safety stop, the odds are still in your favor, but they are not as certain.
• If you incur a deco stop requirement of a few minutes, the odds have shifted and may be slightly against you. If you skip the decompression stop, it is likely you will still be OK, but you are taking a risk.
• The longer and deeper your required deco stops, the more important they become. At some point, DCS becomes likely.

 

[rx7diver]

There were no safety stops in my 1980 training. ...

Nor in my 1986 NAUI/YMCA training. It's important to keep in mind that back then we were taught to dive different profiles than many PDC-wearing divers dive today. Back then, using tables, we were taught to begin our ascent directly to the surface, at 60 fpm, when planned bottom time (using maximum depth) was reached. (Actually, I was taught to approach things a bit more conservatively than this.)

Some (many?) PDC-wearing divers who remain within NDL seem to be "riding" their PDC up to the SS.

I don't know if these two different approaches yield materially different likelihoods of experiencing DCS, though, if the SS is aborted in the case of the latter approach during an emergency.

rx7diver