My ISP was down yesterday, so I missed a lot, but have caught up now.
Here's what I love . . .
I have been working with SCBA for WAY many more years han I've been working with SCUBA. I'm not sure what the short term exposure limit value for liquid H2O is, but I'm confident it's a lot higher than many of the things I've worked with since the mid-1980's. Self-rescue was a real issue then, there are more rules on this stuff now than there were 20 years ago, in terms of secondary backup, both personnel staffing when SCBA is required, and use of egress bottles. There are specialized contractors I've seen that use quintuple-redundant SCBA in the performance of their jobs, and fatalities still occur in their line of work (last one I know of was in 2002)
The concept of team can be learned elsewhere as well. I always enjoy it when my wife / dive buddy and I transfer to a new facility and we're put through firefighting training for the first time under a new fire chief. They wind up pretty impressed at how quickly we complete the exercise with a minimum of communication, and how much training powder is left in our extinguishers. This crosses over into our scuba hobby.
Yet, when I post my reasoning and philosophy, there are extrapolations that I've learned 'everything I need to know' from any one particular instructor/ agency, or my post is copied into a mythbusting exercise, and so on.
I have both led as well as contributed to incident investigations using two different standardized methodologies (Apollo and TapRoot), yet when I offer to use that for everyone's benefit if someone will supply quantifiable data associated with their assertion, the data never appears. The data doesn't change due to name calling - the data is what it is, impartial. The interpretation of the data however is often less than impartial (I remember when the lab rats were fed overdoses of TAB soda in the 1970's for example - cyclamates). Use of the standardized methodology assists in minimizing this though. I have a pretty good track record at dispassionately reviewing data (this is how I've outlasted many supervisors through reorganizations).
My main point is I don't limit what real life experience I have from outside of scuba training I choose to apply to the way I participate in scuba as a hobby. This definitely doesn't make me fit into any one easily labeled category, although it is somewhat amusing (and sometimes to a degree frustrating / insulting) to see how often it's performed and what permutations it takes as this goes along. Paradigms are definitely not limited to any one group! Having an open mind is independant of any scuba certifying agency.
I think my stake is at least up to medium, or near medium well, at this point in this thread (still feeling somewhat like Copernicus). I definitely have some things in common with Net Doc.
Time to knock off for supper.
