When would you ditch a buddies weights?

[cdtgray]

Example:

Dive where the rescuer has a deco obligation (whether planned or not) and the rescuee is not breathing.

Skipping the deco obligation puts the rescuer's personal safety at risk - while a rescuer could skip deco and accept the risk, doing so in some situations could result in death or a bad case of DCS for the rescuer.

If the recuer has to deco, then they have no choice but to send a non-breathing diver to the surface.

A bouyant ascent is bad, but certain death from not breathing is worse.

 

[SPEEDSTER]

at depth...never. Not even on a body recovery. Blowing someone to the surface screws up almost every autopsy thereby leaving any mourning family and freinds in the dark as to what happened. Trying to get closure on an accidental death is hard enough.

Its not hard to do a controlled ascent with an unresponsive diver, alive or dead, if you know and practice how to do it.

-m

 

[SPEEDSTER]

I started my reply with the same idea, only on deco obligated dives, but then left it out b/c its in the basic scuba discussions, not the technical section. But I agree with you wholeheartedly.

m

 

[cdtgray]

True, this is the basic scuba discussions area, but the situation certainly could come up on a dive with an unintended deco obligation. In which case it's entirely up to the judgement of the rescuer - skip their deco or send their buddy up on a bouyant ascent. Each has risks, but they have to get the non-breathing diver to the surface asap.

 

[Genesis]

if you have a deco obligation you can always ascend in a controlled fashion with the unconscious diver to your ceiling and THEN inflate their BC enough to make them positive so they would ascend the rest of the way.

In the context of a recreational "NDL" dive though this would not likely apply. But if it did, then the logic makes sense once you reach your ceiling.

However, before you do an ascent of any kind from depth with an unconscious diver who still has a reg in their mouth you need to be darn sure it wasn't a tox hit that rendered him unconscious. If it was, and you take him up while he is not breathing, you risk giving him an embolism where otherwise he would not suffer one.

The question is, if you didn't SEE the tox hit, (or maybe even if you did, if it wasn't a "grand-mal" type seizure), how do you know?

 

[SPEEDSTER]

although I certainly see your point, what are you going to do for the unresponsive diver who is not breathing? You can either sit there and hope they start breathing again before they die from not breathing, or take them up and risk an embolism? I would propose a risk of embolism over certain death from asphyxiation. In the event of oxtox, bringing them up would still be the better choice, if they began breathing again at depth, they may just tox again.

mike

 

[dc4bs]

Had to strip a divers weights once.

He had a rental BC and the tye-wrap holding the top end of the BC inflator hose to the valve on the shoulder let go.

We held the hose on by hand for him till we reached the surface and then I took his weight belt and another diver took the BC as it became negative with no air in it.

That left the 'victim' on the surface in just a wetsuit and fins (quite bouyant). We all swam back to shore with no further problems.

 

[SPEEDSTER]

dc4bs once bubbled...


We held the hose on by hand for him till we reached the surface and then I took his weight belt

that is the important part, you made it to the surface, then dropped the weights.

-m

 

[Genesis]

If they have toxed, one of two things has probably happened:

1. What's in their tank is not what they (and you) think is in there. There is no way for you to know that or confirm it underwater.

2. You can SEE they have the wrong mix (e.g. you find him on the bottom with a reg in his mouth - when you look at where the hose goes you find it leading into a bottle with "70" on it, and you're in 110' of water!

Now let's look at the possibilities here:

1. The guy's unconcsious and not breathing due to a cardiac or ischemic event. Assume you find him 30 seconds after it happens. The statistics are that for every minute EMS response is delayed from such an event, the person's survival chance goes down by 10% - even if the people attendant know CPR and immediately use it. That's unrealistic on its face; even if you put him into a buoyant ascent it will require a minute or so for him to reach the surface, then quite a bit more time for the people on the boat or shore to get to him, get him on land, and get enough gear off to start CPR. (Yes, you can give artificial respiration in-water - CPR is another matter!) What are the odds you can save him, assuming the barotrauma which he will likely suffer doesn't get him on top of whatever else is going on?

2. The guy is unconscious and not breathing due to somehow aspirating water or running out of gas (in the first case the reg will likely be out of his mouth, in the second it may be in or out, depending on what he did when he ran out.) If the reg is in his mouth he probably didn't aspirate water, and you can check his gauges to see if he ran out of gas. If he's out of gas and has stopped breathing he has ~4 minutes from that point before his heart stops and he's cooked. If he aspirated water, depending on how much he aspirated he may be beyond help without the aforementioned instant EMS response.

3. He's unconscious and not breathing due to a O2 tox event; either he's breathing the wrong bottle, went below the MOD for some reason, or the fill in his tank isn't what he thinks it is. Assuming he has the reg in his mouth (if not it probably looks like (2), and at least in part likely is) he LOOKS like he's in respiratory arrest, but is really in the tonic state post-seizure. If you do NOT ascend with him, he will come out of it. Assuming he doesn't immediately tox again - and he might - once he calms down you can give him YOUR known-good gas supply for the depth you are at. If you send this diver to the surface while he is in the tonic state you will likely kill him. His airway is almost certainly locked closed - the worst possible situation for ascending even a few feet from where you find him.

How do you KNOW (assuming you don't witness the original event that led to the unconsciousness) which of the three cases (or any of the other possible ones) you have? (1) and (2) might be helped by being immediately sent to the surface - but the probability is that (1) and (2) are either already dead or will be shortly, and the injuries suffered as a result of a buoyant ascent are likely to be substantial. Whether those, plus whatever caused the original event, are survivable is a question I can't answer with certainty, but I can look at the above statistic on cardiac events and your odds without EMS being immediately available for guidance. (If you can verify a pulse then the odds may change somewhat.) But if the diver is in situation #3, and you shoot him to the surface, you probably kill him, .vs. quite possibly no significant harm at all if you do NOT raise him in the water column.

I still think that, unless there''s more info about this that I don't already have, that in such a situation I'm going to first attempt to ascertain the likelihood of a tox hit, and assuming I believe it to be extremely unlikely (e.g. either a Nitrox mix well within the MOD, or a tank presumably full of AIR, or an EMPTY tank!) I would make a controlled ascent with the unconscious person to the surface if I did not have a significant deco obligation. If I did, I would rise to my ceiling and from THERE send him up as slowly as I could reasonably arrange. If my deco obligation was slight I might choose to go to the surface with him, assuming I could get him immediately to surface support, and then decend back down to depth to complete my deco. I might get bent that way, but if it was only a minute or at most two and the obligation not great I'd be pretty likely to get away with it. If I have reason to believe it IS a tox hit, he should start breathing within 30-60 seconds - it may be prudent in that case to wait the minute before ascending if there is reason to believe that is what happened (anyone else?)

Tough call... and good discussion...

 

[Lawman]

It would depend on the depth and how long he'd been down. If you were shallow [ under 25'] or had only been under a short time he isn't going to fizz if you send him to the surface quick. Bouyant on the surface near the boat is where you want him.
Deeper or longer a controlled assent and dump the belt on the surface. I don't think I can remember all these steps in an emergency...simple is better