Witness to a Fatality

[mderrick]

On a pleasant afternoon in March of 2008, off the coast of Hillsboro Beach Florida, I suddenly found myself at the back of a dive boat kneeling over a fellow rebreather diver and administering CPR. The attached PDF of my article contains my opinions and speculation about what happened that day, and is offered to help other rebreather divers understand some of the factors that led to the accident. It assumes the reader is familiar with closed-circuit rebreathers.​

 

[BKP]

mderrick, I'm sorry to hear of the experience.

Thank you for the chronology of the dive, and the admonitions that followed. I'm not a CCR or SCR diver, however, many of the bullets in your list of precautions are applicable across the board.

 

[Saltwater Junky]

A very sobering reality of how little time we have when deprived from O2. This is staunch reminder of how serious of a sport scuba is and not to take it or our training lightly.

 

[Scubakevdm]

Thank you Mark, for the facts relating to this traggidy. Hopefully your remarks will bring some good out of it, in preventing futre incidents.

 

[mania]

mderrick
thanks for this article. I shared it with my friends on our Polish CCR board.
During my CCR course we did 2 tests. One was on CO2 and the second on hypoxia. So that each of us will understand the symptoms that may occur (they differ for each human). Of course it was done in the classroom in fully controled conditions.

Mania

 

[jupitermermaid]

Wow.....what a sobering article. Thanks for the reminder that we always need to do a pre-check of our gear every time before entering the water (which should be habit) and practice our safety skills often. The titles and/or badges we carry don't insure our safety....only our awareness of what we're doing increases it. Accidents do happen, and this was a sad one.

 

[TSandM]

Thank you very much for the superb writeup.

What hit me the most about it was that, although the victim was a CCR Instructor (and one would think, then, was frequently teaching the self-rescue procedures he appears not to have followed), he wasn't able, in this circumstance, to follow the procedures he had been taught and was teaching. It's a good reminder for me -- I dive with a group of people who make it discipline to practice emergency procedures regularly, and I think we may operate in a flawed belief that we will all respond rapidly and appropriately in any circumstances. Here, that clearly didn't happen. It's a good reminder that even our "human diving equipment" is subject to breakdown.

 

[mderrick]

although the victim was a CCR Instructor (and one would think, then, was frequently teaching the self-rescue procedures he appears not to have followed), he wasn't able, in this circumstance, to follow the procedures he had been taught and was teaching.

It's a common misconception that instructors are always superb divers, many are and plenty are not. Being an instructor means (hopefully) you are good at teaching, and instructors are evaluated in a large part on their teaching skills. Instructor candidates are trained in how to administer a course according to standards, but are assumed to already have adequate diving skills. Certainly their knowledge and skill related to diving is evaluated, but the requirements are rather mundane. In fact as a CCR instructor I describe, evaluate, correct and occassionally demonstrate skills in the pool... but during the actual dives with students where I function as an instructor I don't perform drills myself. For example, I would never actually go off the loop and personally perform a bailout to the surface. It could compromise my ability to be able and ready to respond to the needs of my students. Being an instructor means I am always fresh on theory and instructing keeps my 'problem solving' skills tuned up. But, instructors must practice their skills outside of their role as an instructor, as any other diver.

 

[Dive-aholic]

Thanks for posting this article, Mark. It answered some questions I had about that incident.