Posted by Wayne on September 07, 2001 at 10:09:16:
In Reply to: it will be difficult to influence training in Germany, Arizona, etc posted by Karl S. on September 07, 2001 at 05:21:36:
Let's say that the problem of a hypothetical German tourist diving a man made wreck of the Sea Turtles (actually Wayne's SeaRay which has spent the last 9 months in repair yards and still is not back in service and his wife wishes had sunk).
Captain Wayne does not know her training, but Divemaster Karl gives his standard briefing and goes over the dangers and emergency procedures to be used in case of seperation or equipment problems, etc. If Karl covers all the bases in a way that allows the tourist to know how to get back from a problem and reminds her of what to do (since we know she in an infrequent diver doing a surgey, deep, dark, cold, and unfamiliar dive) she can get separated from other nearby divers (buddies?) and still make it safely to the surface. Maybe this is more than a lecture/briefing. Maybe Divemaster Karl has slates he passes out to the divers and goes over prior to their back roll from the SS Minnow.
I am suggesting that there may be simple things that can eliminate many of the accidents. We will not easily change the caliber of the divers showing up, but we can change how we set them up to dive. This will not help the divers with thousands of dives, experimental gear, God complexes, or complacency. And we really do not know (without evaluatign the data) how many of the deaths fall into each category. So we do not know if the Wayne/Karl dive business should do things differently. I think it would be nice to know. If the data pointed to any generally useful solutions it would be shared and potentially picked up by the industry (assumes that others believe the conclusions are useful).
Wayne