Why do accidents happen?

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Cave Diver

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I was thumbing through a magazine recently and ran across an article about the sinking of the Titanic. It immediately struck me that several of the points made in the article apply equally well to SCUBA diving, so I thought I'd tweak them a bit and include them here.

1. No disaster (or incident) is a single event.
This has been talked about before numerous times but it bears repeating. Some people refer to each contributing event as links in the incident chain, while others refer to it as slices of pie. Regardless of what you call it the premise is the same. Each event that occurs adds another link, or slice of pie. If you fail to control those contributing factors, you start a cascade of events that becomes unmanageable. Panic may start to set in and lead you to taking unnecessary risks, or worse taking no action at all. The sooner you can isolate and eliminate those individual events the more likely you are to avoid a disaster.

2. Success breeds complacency.
Every time people have a successful dive and nothing goes wrong, they have a tendency to become a bit more complacent. This can lead to skipping things like buddy checks, S-drills, or ignoring established rules and protocols. The "It will never happen to me" syndrome starts to take effect. Planning for a worst case scenario on every single dive may be a bit overkill, but stopping to at least consider the possibilities of what might go wrong will go a long way to keeping it from ever happening, or at least to help make sure that you're prepared for it.

3. Technology outpaces judgment.
In the "old days" there were no octos, no pressure gauges, no dive computers and no ready access to thousands of dive sites. It's hard to get into too much trouble doing a shore dive with a limited gas supply. Now, any OW diver with minimal training can strap on a 100cf tank and do a wall dive while relying on their computer to keep them safe. Doubles, rebreathers, and all manner of equipment is available to people with minimal amounts of training. Popular technical dive sites such as caves and wrecks are widely publicized and easily accessible to the foolhardy. I speak from experience here, because I've personally outpaced my judgment numerous times early in my diving career. Looking back and knowing now what I didn't know then, I'm probably lucky to have survived some of those escapades.

4. People fail to plan for the worst.
Having a plan for what to do when the fecal matter hits the rotating air mover doesn't mean that you have to live in fear. It just means that you've weighed the risks and come to a decision about what you consider an acceptable level. It could mean that you carry a signalling device in case you get separated from the boat, or it could mean that you carry 3, plus a waterproof radio. Regardless of what you decide, the important part is to make a decision. Analyze what could go wrong, and decide what you can do to mitigate it, then follow through with your approach. There is a reason why bad things always seem to happen to the unprepared - it's because they're unprepared to deal with it!

I'm sure there are many more points that can be made, and I feel confident that our knowledgeable user base will have no problem adding to this list. Hopefully it will give someone reason to pause and give some consideration to their own diving, and how it might apply or could improve it.
 
Thanks for the post. It is a good reminder to everyone. I particularly take to heart the point about complacency that can come from incident free diving. Thanks for the transport back to reality and thinking safety in all things.
DivemasterDennis
 
Peer pressure can be deadly. I've read all too many reports of people setting out on dives they really didn't think they ought to do, or being convinced to break the dive plan, or stay in the water until they are too low on gas. If the little voice in the back of your head is telling you, "This isn't a good idea!" it's probably right.

Inexperience has pitfalls that aren't obvious. One of the situations where we see accidents here in Puget Sound is the diver who has just finished his AOW class, and does a deep dive. Having done ONE in class, he feels ready to do it again by himself. These divers run into problems and panic, or worse, run out of gas, and they don't make it to the surface. To use a very tired cliche, "You don't know what you don't know." A safe diver extends his limits GRADUALLY, no matter what he may have done in a class.
 
Complacency is a constant enemy that we fight daily, especially with the PSD dive team I manage. We are also firefighters so a formal rank structure is the norm for us, but for our dive team operations it can present a problem. Newer members of less rank are sometimes reluctant to point out incorrect things that could lead to bigger problems. We realized this a few years back after a couple of close calls that could have had disastrous results. Now we we preach and employ a concept we adopted from the airline industry called CRM or crew resource management. Theirs a lot to it but basically it empowers every person, regardless of position or rank, to be obligated to stop or speak up when something is wrong. This combined with a dedicated safety officer has resulted in a much improved operation and safety for our divers. I also do this when diving off duty for pleasure (some of my dive buddies call me the safety natzy) but it has worked for me. To the OP, if you can stop the obvious small things first then you break the chain of events that are often overlooked or not realized, leading to safer dives!
 
Peer pressure can be deadly. I've read all too many reports of people setting out on dives they really didn't think they ought to do, or being convinced to break the dive plan, or stay in the water until they are too low on gas. If the little voice in the back of your head is telling you, "This isn't a good idea!" it's probably right.

To expand on this a bit, one of the worst cases of peer pressure can be from dive professionals (Instructor, DM, etc.) whom newer divers trust implicitly due to their professional status and go on "trust me dives" where all the planning and decision making is left to their buddy and the newer diver is just along for the ride.
 
Try new equipment in a shallow, safe environment, like a pool. This means any new equipment-dive light, dry suit, mask, fins, camera, undergarment,etc.
When a key piece of equipment fails on a difficult dive, it tends to be either brand new or ancient. If it's worn-out you will usually have noticed it coming. But, if it's brand new, hopefully, you'll find that it doesn't work on a check-out dive, not at 100 feet, or on a night dive, back in a cave, etc. Learning new gear can increase task loading and change weighting.
Also, keep a mask in your pocket if you can. When I was a rank beginner, I was sold a mask with a purge valve. I think I was having issues with masks leaking at the time as I've always had a problem getting masks to fit. Anyway, I was on a wreck in Hawaii, the purge valve broke and I had a free-flooding mask. It was no fun being lead back from 80 feet, across the wreck and up the anchor line without being able to really see anything. Even if you don't have a stupid purge mask, masks can break or get swept away in current. If I'd had an extra mask, I could have put it on and continued my dive.
For newbies, practice mask removal and replacement, mask flooding and clearing. That is one skill that really seems to cause panic in many new divers. If you aren't 100% confident with it when you did it in OW class, keep on practicing it. In fact, keep practicing it anyway. I've seen a lot of divers on here post, after 3-4 years of experience, that they haven't removed their mask in that entire time. You don't want to have a panic or drown over something as simple as a mask kicked off.
Finally, the practice the other skills taught in OW class. These skills are taught to keep you safe. Remove and replace your gear above and below water. That's a good one to be comfortable with if you ever need to get untangled or your tank slips. Practice manually inflating your BC above and below water. Practice sharing a regulator and and OOA exercises using the your buddy's octo. These skills should all be practiced until they're easy, second nature for you. You were basically given an introduction in your OW class but it's up to you to keep practicing the skills. You can practice in a swimming pool or shallow water, some skills are easy to practice during the safety stop. Skills are great to practice on those boring, local lake or quarry dives when you've seen the wrecked school bus a hundred times.
Do your full self and buddy checks every time you dive. Do it the same way very time so that you don't forget anything. In fact, it's a good idea to set your gear out the same way each time. The more you do the same every time, the less likely you are to forget something.
Pilots and missile launch officers have checklists and actually cross off each step of the checklist. It wouldn't hurt to make a checklist, if you feel you need one. I think rebreather divers have one?
 
To summarize Tracy's excellent post:

Diver stress should be minimized. ​One way to ensure this is to change one variable at a time. The time to try some new equipment is not at a site you've never dived before, or with a bunch of people you don't know. Doing your deepest dive to date with an instabuddy isn't a great idea. Challenging a deep wreck in a high current area in rental equipment may not be wise, unless you know that rental equipment well. Change one thing at a time; any change will increase the baseline diver stress level.

Emergency skills decay over time. No matter how well you did your air-sharing or your mask skills in class, a year later, they will not be as crisp. The time to find out you are out of practice is not when you actually NEED the skill.
 
I think the first point is the really key one. Every really good disaster usually has about four or so connected elements. Often times when I decide to dive in definance of something (head cold, poor weather conditions, item of gear broken, etc) I mentally tell myself: "Well, that's the first thing... three to go."
 
I think the first point is the really key one. Every really good disaster usually has about four or so connected elements. Often times when I decide to dive in definance of something (head cold, poor weather conditions, item of gear broken, etc) I mentally tell myself: "Well, that's the first thing... three to go."

Probably works well for some problems (such as those you list), but in some cases, the first element might be the disaster.
 
but in some cases, the first element might be the disaster.

Do you have an example of such that you can share? There might be some preceding elements that we can collectively identify that may help prevent the disaster.
 
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