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Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 00:49:49 +0000
Subject: Re: cave deaths
From: Joel Markwell <joeldm@mi*.co*>
To: <Hypohippo@ao*.co*>
CC: Cavers <cavers@cavers.com>
on 3/22/00 4:33 AM, Hypohippo@ao*.co* at Hypohippo@ao*.co* wrote:

> As far as your assuming that I meant being killed in a cave is inevitable for
> all cave divers is completely off base.  What I said was that "as long as
> people continue to dive in caves their will be deaths. That is a simple fact
> of the sport. I have been diving caves for many years and I am well aware
> that even the most safe and sophisticated cave divers do perish in caves no
> matter how well they are trained or how experienced they are. The same is
> true for mountain climbers.


As long as people take baths there will be deaths. As long as people walk on
sidewalks there will be deaths. I saw a statistic that something like 15
people died in lakes in the West (I think it was California) in one year
trying to retrieve their hat that had fallen out of a boat.

When I started cave diving in 1990 and for some time after, in fact for
eight years there were no deaths of trained and certified cave divers in the
United States. Training, maturity and experience will keep divers alive in
caves. There is no reason for divers to die in caves, it's not inevitable. I
also whitewater kayak and I know that kayaking is more unpredictable and, in
my opinion, more dangerous than cave diving. Cave diving has very
controllable risks, kayaking does as well, but there is a much larger
uncertainty factor, like undercut rocks, unpredictable currents, unseen
holes, changing conditions due to water height and bottom changes. Even
changes in light can be deceiving and ultimately deadly to the advanced
whitewater kayaker--but even these risks are controllable up to a point.

A well-trained cave diver who is careful, who takes care in the selection of
his dive partners and his profile and who dives the right gas and who dives
within safe parameters is very unlikely to die in a cave. There are some
changing conditions, like vis, but even this is just part of the planning.

No caver should take comfort in a death in a cave, but every time a diver
dies in a cave and I learn the trail of cause and effect, the Accident
Analysis, and I learn that it points to something like bad planning, poor
equipment or diving beyond one's training, I AM glad. I'm happy because I
can then take a fresh look at myself and say, "Nope, don't do 'personal
best' dives after a long layoff. And nope, I didn't start scootering before
I was fully trained or use stages. Nope, I don't trash the cave. Nope I
don't do big dives AT ALL after a long layoff.

That's why AA is so important and why it's imperative that SOMEONE start to
take responsibility for doing this research and publicly and loudly report
those findings to the lists, the newsletters, web pages and in training
manuals. Every web page related to cave diving ought to have, on it's first
page, a link to recent accidents and an archive of accidents going back to
as long as that diver's been diving caves.

It's time to pull our collective heads out of the sand . . . or elsewhere,
and get in the game. Safety isn't a sidebar, it's the whole show. A strong
focus on safety made cave diving. This lack of focus--and maybe an
overabundance of well-mannered apathy--will kill it.

Later,

JoeL

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