Two divers die at Wazee Lake, WI

[corecomps]

No matter how badly you want to help someone, skipping this step can result in two people needing help instead of one. If you're going to blow off you're deco stops, it's the same thing, even though it may sound cold and heartless.

You sound educated so I don't want to discount your thoughts but what I'm asking for is some guide line on decom emergency ascent. You make it sound like it's cut and dry.... Your statements suggests that we follow the current rules even though we all know they are well buffered and if it's our child / parent / best friend....... welll......

Let me ask another way....in an emergency situation given the circumstances that a buddy diver suddenly stops responding.... at what rate of ascent is possible without a good chance of death for yourself *or* what reducing of saftey stop is needed to prevent death (not sickness).

Non decom Navy rules says 60 feet per minute. I would imagine there are decom rules for emergency situations. Every minute counts and I (and my diving buddies) want to tell people we did everything we could.

I don't mind getting sick to save a life and arming myself with the information and talking with my divemates on an appropreiate emergency ascent rate doesn't seem like a bad idea in any circumstance.

 

[riftvalley84]

Here's another link related to this accident. My condolences to friends and families of the deceased.

Wife of scuba victim: 'They weren't going to leave their buddy' | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ

This article gives a few more clues. It's too bad the two deceased divers didn't ascend with the 3rd man who was low on air or Floyd might have made it. I wonder if the plan was to let their 3rd buddy head to the surface alone? If one buddy is low on air, they should have all been heading for the surface and been closer together. Very sad.

St. Paul, Minn. — While diving on a central Wisconsin lake over the weekend, Milton Floyd and diving partner James Jordan might have violated a key scuba rule: Never make a second victim. But neither would have left the other behind, Floyd's wife said Monday."They made the best decisions that they could possible under the circumstances," said CJ Floyd, Milton's wife of 26 years. "The two of them loved each other so much. They weren't going to leave their buddy."According to Floyd's wife...........The third man on the dive, 53-year-old Milo Squires of Chaska, ...... was at a lesser depth and was heading to the surface because he was running low on air. .........CJ Floyd said her husband was a certified scuba diving instructor and knew the dangers of decompression illness. But because both her husband and Jordan are gone, finding answers may be difficult, she said."We're never going to know what happened down under the water on Saturday because we have no witness to the actual event," she said.

 

[Dragon Eye]

It's too bad the two deceased divers didn't ascend with the 3rd man who was low on air or Floyd might have made it. I wonder if the plan was to let their 3rd buddy head to the surface alone? If one buddy is low on air, they should have all been heading for the surface and been closer together. Very sad.

It's my understanding (from the reports) the third diver, the survivor, did not go as deep as the other two.

 

[DandyDon]

Your statements suggests that we follow the current rules even though we all know they are well buffered

Excuse me, are you a certified diver? You're new here and your profile doesn't say. Those "buffered" guidelines are no guarantee themselves, and the "rules" are based on our best science - not panic.

Let me ask another way....in an emergency situation given the circumstances that a buddy diver suddenly stops responding.... at what rate of ascent is possible without a good chance of death for yourself *or* what reducing of saftey stop is needed to prevent death (not sickness).

Non decom Navy rules says 60 feet per minute. I would imagine there are decom rules for emergency situations. Every minute counts and I (and my diving buddies) want to tell people we did everything we could.

I don't mind getting sick to save a life and arming myself with the information and talking with my divemates on an appropreiate emergency ascent rate doesn't seem like a bad idea in any circumstance.

Rescue training tells us not to injure ourselves trying to help someone else as double the number of injured greatly loads the problem and reduces rescue capabilities both. That said, I suspect that many would push the rules hard, risking somewhat in hopes and all that, but no one is required to do so.

It boils down to doing your best based on your best call, and we certainly don't know the specifics here. In general, we stick to safe diving rules here, but in the field we do our best.

 

[LeadTurn_SD]

Let me ask another way....in an emergency situation given the circumstances that a buddy diver suddenly stops responding.... at what rate of ascent is possible without a good chance of death for yourself *or* what reducing of saftey stop is needed to prevent death (not sickness).

Non decom Navy rules says 60 feet per minute. I would imagine there are decom rules for emergency situations. Every minute counts and I (and my diving buddies) want to tell people we did everything we could.

I don't mind getting sick to save a life and arming myself with the information and talking with my divemates on an appropreiate emergency ascent rate doesn't seem like a bad idea in any circumstance.

"You can fix bent, but you can't fix drowned." An old saying. If the choice is between getting bent and certain death, the choice is clear.

I don't know of any "special" emergency deco rules.... you can't shortcut physics and physiology in an emergency. If you omit deco, or surface at a rate faster than your planned rate, you risk getting bent. The more deco you omit, and the faster you surface, the greater the risk.

If you miss a lot of deco, it is more than just getting sick, it is possibly "getting dead" (or paralyzed.... I have a friend who got bent in the 80's due to omitted deco and now rides a wheelchair, forever).

You do the best you can. If it were my buddy or family member, I'd get them to the surface no matter what, and hope for the best with a chamber ride..... but with my diving these days, the chamber ride is a very slim possibility.

Not sure if this helps at all, and any health emergency that occurs undrewater typically has a bleak outlook.

Best wishes.

 

[razn1]

There a lot of theories and a lot of so called experts out there, but I will always try to follow my training. There are guidlines for a reason I'm sure there's some room for fudging, but anyone who gets into this sport has to realize the consequenses of not following the guidelines. I think for some of the questions floating around here the answers may found on the DAN website. They have been in the dive safe business a long time.

 

[Rick Murchison]

I do not teach nor do I advocate this procedure for anyone.
However...
There's a pretty good body of evidence that suggests it is possible to blow through a considerable deco obligation and recompress immediately to pick up missed deco with a pretty good chance of success (no DCS). Indeed, "Surface Decompression" where a diver is brought directly to the surface and then quickly recompressed in a chamber to complete the deco schedule has been used successfully in the Royal Navy for many years.
In the case where an injured diver needs to get to the surface quickly to survive and I'm the best transportation to get him there, I plan to bring him all the way to the surface where I can (hopefully) turn him over to topside personnel and get back down quickly to complete my own (modified) deco schedule before suffering any DCS. It is in my opinion worth the risk.
Warning! I don't advocate or recommend this for anyone.
Warning2! The modified deco schedule starts deeper and lasts longer than the deco schedule you had before trying such a maneuver. I don't recommend it.
--
Obviously, when you start doing deco dives the possibilities for complicated emergencies increase exponentially with the deco obligation. Support personnel and additional equipment/gas need to increase as well to keep reasonable options available.
Rick

 

[TSandM]

For those who are asking for a guideline to help you choose omitted deco . . . How would you create such a guideline? Have a variety of people blow off a certain proportion of their deco, and see what happened? I don't think a study of that sort would pass anybody's IRB (Institutional Review Board). Like diving in pregnancy, there are some things you just really can't ethically study.

Looking at accounts of people either miscalculating their deco or for some reason omitting it can give you some very rough idea of how much you might survive blowing off, but it would be a guess with little information to support it. So your decision will depend on how much the other diver means to you, how likely it appears that he might survive, how much decompression obligation you have, and what the resources are for you to return to the water or reach a chamber to recompress.

Each situation will have to be evaluated on its own merits, and there are no guidelines. This is one of the very real differences between recreational and staged decompression diving.

 

[razn1]

Does anyone know if the heart attack was when they were at depth or as a result of coming up to fast . I recently heard from a reliable source they surfaced because they ran out of air. If that was the case it sounds like poor training or disregaurd for that training. As far as I'm concerned the first rule they broke was doing that dive with 3 people instead of 4. Second letting yourselves run that low on air, even if one had some sort of failure the buddy should have had enough in reserve to get them back relatively safely. Sounds like very poor planning if that was the case.

 

[TSandM]

As far as I'm concerned the first rule they broke was doing that dive with 3 people instead of 4.

What's wrong with doing the dive with three people? We routinely run teams of three -- that means you've got 2x rock bottom, three brains working, and three eyes spotting interesting stuff.