What happened here?

[Ken Kurtis]

I think there's value in speculating as to the cause of an accident. We can still discuss it as a potential cause and how it could have been avoided even though it may not be the actual cause.

I disagree. There's a fine line beteen "speculation" and "making stuff up to the the facts as we'd like them to be".

The problem gets to be that once you start speculating, and then there's speculation upon the speculation, you get into areas that aren't even remotely based on facts of the accident. So the lessons learned may not actually have any real-world application, let alone fit the actual events of the incident being discussed.

And to be very clear, I'm not saying "Is it possible that this and then this could have happened???" But specaltion presetned as fact ("What he most likely did is to blah-blah which in turn would have blah-blah and that's probably what happened") is useless, possibly dangerous, and potentially hurtful to family and friends who may read the posts, IMHO.

 

[Missdirected]

Personally, I feel the rules are pretty clear here. This is not the condolence forum.

On many occasions (Spiegal Grove and others more recent come to mind), I have either pm'd a mod or hit the "report post" button and asked the mods to move the condolences a.s.a.p. The sooner the better for a couple of reasons: 1. A mod isn't stuck wading through a huge number of posts figuring out which ones go where 2. It makes it clear the point of the thread (no confusion as to it being a condolence thread or accident analysis thread).

I feel very strongly about the benefit of this forum it has saved my butt a couple of times. Additionally, not guiding people to the proper thread to place a condolence is a disservice not only to those trying to learn but to the friends and family members as well, as I am sure most, not necessarily all, of them care not to read our discussion about someone they loved. Keep in mind, it is not as though a condolence that is left in the "Accident Analysis" forum is deleted, it is simply moved to the condolence thread.

 

[Missdirected]

As mod I can delete the posts, but too much of that and you start looking like a heel.

I dunno but I think if one is on top of a thread from the get-go, it ends up being pretty obvious what the intention of said thread is. I know mods can't be everywhere all the time, so I think those of us that care for this forum need to assist in keeping things in order by pm'ing a mod or reporting something that should be moved. Just my lil thoughts

 

[ba_hiker]

I get into this as well. It is hard to really pick someone apart when they have just done something stupid and died from it. I don't think it's very good taste to criticize something someone did in these cases where the loss is still fresh in someone's mind. It just doesn't seem right, and I would feel like a jerk if the family were to read my comments...

Another thing that bugs me about the discussions about divers who have passed very recently is that we just don't have a clue what happened. If someone posts a link to an internet writeup of some diving tragedy, the newspeople don't publish enough information for divers to really analyze the events leading to a fatality, and all anyone can really offer is just "It is a great Loss" etc.

Most of the time these events are discussed, it is based on a lot of heresay, and people here make up the facts that were not clear in the initial report. Some of my least favorite threads here have been the ones with just enough information to make people jump to all kinds of conclusions without any actual knowledge that it actually happened that way.

Perhaps its best to keep things out of the accidents and incidents forum until we A. Know enough to make an accurate analysis, and B. Let the incident pass long enough so the family gets the chance to mourn...

$.02
Tom

My feeling on this is:

If i do something stupid (or even smart) and die doing it, and you pick it apart and someone else lives because of it GREAT. Otherwise my death will be in vane. For me at least feel free to dissect any dive in which i kill my self for any clues or lesions it may hold.

That said, real investigation can not be based on hearsay, misleading information, or guesses. We need the facts, but sometimes they are hard to get, or only arrive 6 months or a year (or more) later. Because of this someone must be watchful and grab the final reports and post them -- after they are finally available.

we dont seem to do this well too often.

 

[TSandM]

I think most of the time, nothing of significance is ever discovered on scuba fatalities, other than the information which is available at the time of the accident. You can have the rare incident with bad gas, or with a medical problem (like the fellow who died in the mine last year). But, unless the diver's buddy on THAT dive posts here and gives a thorough description of what happened, we rarely ever really know.

That said, I DO think that, with the scene set as to where the accident occurred, who was involved, what the conditions were, what the dive objective and profile were, we can often make some reasonable hypotheses about what might have caused the accident, and reading those analyses is useful for new divers, because they illuminate points of error that people might not otherwise have thought about.

Honestly, we could do the same thing with fictitious accidents, except most of the time, we wouldn't do as good a job of inventing incidents as people do of reporting them.

The "Near Misses and Lessons Learned" forum is probably actually more valuable.

 

[Andy077]

Thats the way the American culture has become, everyone has to make a big show out of "giving condolences" or "my prayers are with them" nonsense. Look around and the hugely overblown memorials that grow up around everything from piles of flowers and junk for minor misfortunes to immense billion-dollar boondoggles for national disasters.