What do you think about the one who lived?

[DCBC]

I can't vote on this without knowing the actual circumstances. Trace said that one diver was OOA and the 2nd "estimated" that only one diver could make it out alive. I would not make a life and death decision on an "estimation."

I would make the attempt; holding my breath on the horizontal, free ascent in the verticle. What people can do is often more than they perceive is possible. I would try.

If however, I was convinced that I would die unless I left the other diver behind. I'd abandon the buddy. I've been in similar situations in my military and commercial career. Fortunately, things never got so bad that the death of another diver was my fault. I've learned that I can't second guess another person's actions without knowing the actual situation.

How would I feel for the surviving diver? I would feel sorry for him. No one should have to go through the horror of losing a dive buddy and the agonizing guilt that's sure to follow.

 

[Jax]

Reminds me of the tale recounted in Touching the Void . Joe Simpson is hanging in a crevasse by a rope on an isolated Andean mountain side, slowly dragging down his friend and fellow climber, Simon Yates, so that eventually both of them would plunge in. And so Simon cuts the rope. By a series of miracles (you have to see the film if you haven't - a storyline that would be panned if it were fiction) Joe survives.

Joe Simpson to this day has always defended the actions of Simon, cutting the rope.

This is a great analogy. This is a fact of survival that all climbers learn and swear to. It's the bottom climber's duty to cut the rope to save his friends, and save his friends the guilt from having to do so.

 

[Blackwood]

I can't vote on this without knowing the actual circumstances.

Without having been there, you can never with certainty know the actual circumstances.

 

[DCBC]

Without having been there, you can never with certainty know the actual circumstances.

Yes, as I said: "I've learned that I can't second guess another person's actions without knowing the actual situation."

 

[Web Monkey]

You hear that two divers made a dive into overhead environment. From the short accident report you read that they went in as a buddy team but at one point they got into bad trouble, and finally one diver ran out of gas. Only one diver made it out.

The report says the surviving diver had barely a measurable amount of gas left on him when he surfaced. The survivor says he had decided that he could not save his buddy, and had left him to drown at the last moment he still thought he could make it out himself.

I'll know the gas is gone when we both stop breathing.

OTOH, this type of thing is exactly why I don't do non-trivial overheads anymore. There's nothing inside any cave or wreck that's worth my life.

Terry

 

[Tigerman]

I have not been in a situartion thats turned out that bad, but I HAVE been in the situation where Ive had to decide wether to let my buddy ascent without control to the surface and likely to be bent or try to stop her. Its not a fun position to be in, even when you know the result is unlikely to be fatal and I wouldnt want to be in a position where it will certainly BE fatal and I will not pass judgement on anyone who need to make that call without having anything but "he left his buddy to die, because he felt it was the only option"..

 

[1amphibian]

IF one can live, it's best, it makes is safer for the recovery team to only have to recover one body, and the survivor may be able to tell them the exact or relatively close position of the body (as in the death late last year at Eagles Nest). The recovery team is going to have to go in and bring out the bodies at the risk of their own lives.

 

[Meng_Tze]

Better one fatality than two. The real question is WHEN do you decide that it has been enough and it is time to head out to avoid becoming a fatality yourself?

To me it is not a matter of IF I would leave a buddy to save myself, but WHEN.

 

[Tortuga68]

Not to turn this into a Touching The Void thread (amazing book/film btw), but...

Joe Simpson to this day has always defended the actions of Simon, cutting the rope

It's the bottom climber's duty to cut the rope to save his friends, and save his friends the guilt from having to do so

The situation was a little more complex than the brief description provided here allowed for; you can read more here Touching the Void - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's also quite different to the cave scenario in the OP - basically the two guys at either end of the rope had no clear idea what situation the other was in


As to the question posed here, that's a tough one, and I found myself voting for several conflicting options... on the one hand, by saving himself, the survivor potentially prevented two deaths. On the other, maybe they could have both made it out if they ran into some major luck. As people have rightly said, you never know what you'd really do yourself until you were in the situation, no matter what you've discussed/trained/prepared for

 

[marchand]

None of the above. Has not happened as postulated in recent memory (last decade). There are bigger fish to fry on why people are dying (its not due to having only enough open circuit gas for one diver to exit).

there was an almost incident recently at devils where one guy came up through the eye and the other came up through the ear; neither diver had much gas left at all and neither of them knew where the other was until the second one made it back to the steps...