You said:

>      The reality of the situation is that the number of instructors has
>kept pace with the expansion of 'technical diving'  - the quality has
>not. The whole thing mirrors recreational diving, except the potential
>to kill somebody in a recreational diving environment is not as great.
>
>There is always a wailing and gnashing of teeth about 'we have
>standards' or 'the quality assurance programme prevents...'. Folks get
>all uncomfortable when the true facts are revealed about accidents -
>death's or near misses.
>
>You could maybe start a list of supposed (or even validated) causes of
>fatalities. There will be causes that come up time after time after
>time. Formalising the 'what not to do list' should be fairly easy......

Chris,

You're right, it is time to take this bull by the horns. "If the people 
lead, the leaders will follow.". Accident Analysis should have remained 
the centerpiece of cave diving safety practices and analysis, but it 
apparently hasn't. When was the last time you saw a report like Exley's 
BLUEPRINT FOR SURVIVAL?

I think it's great to have socials and all, but the CDS wasn't founded 
for social reasons. It was founded to make cave diving safer and AA was 
at the heart of that effort.

Regardless of where it leads, looking at each accident and each death 
dispassionately and dissecting each event completely to find the CAUSE or 
CAUSES and then telling US is what our representatives should be doing 
with our money, but are not.

I know that as all volunteer agencies, the NACD and the CDS often do not 
seem to have the resources/energy to maintain such studies and to publish 
and otherwise disseminate them. Each agency has a newsletter publisher 
whose job in publishing a bimonthly newsletter of 30 pages or so seems 
enormous. The Editors work harder by far than any Board member. Each 
agency BOD assigns a person(s) to areas they consider important to them. 
So in Florida we have two "Training Directors" and two "Safety 
Committees." There are two individuals responsible for the "Accident 
Advisory/Files" role, one in each agency. There are two Chairmen, 
Managers, and on and on. Duplicated efforts and dues in a sport that 
boasts maybe 1500-2000 dues-paying participants mostly concentrated in 
Florida, but also scattered worldwide. I'm sure you'd find a lot of the 
same names of both lists--like mine.

With all this potential for productive effort, though, we have no yearly 
report on Accidents, there is seemingly no consistent effort to do that 
which is central to modern cave diving: track, report and draw relevant 
conclusions from Cave Diving Accidents! The reportage on individual 
accidents is spotty at best, the analysis is sometimes done, sometimes 
not. And each time it's seemingly done in a different format.

I'd like to see not TWO agencies in Florida, both covering the same 
ground, but ONE. I've been told that the bottom line is "there's no way 
these people can get along" and that the ongoing "turf wars" would 
prevent such a thing and that there are "too many big egos," but WE own 
these groups, don't we? The Members? Having the two editors both working 
together on one newsletter would make it a better and more complete and 
timely document and pooling resources would allow them to use up-to-date 
methods for publishing. One agency by the year 2001?

But I digress . . . it IS time to start regular, consistent and 
meaningful tracking and analysis of cave diving accidents. For my part I 
am researching and will contribute my efforts. I hope others with join 
those efforts and that such reporting becomes, once again, the 
centerpiece of modern cave diving, as it should be.

Later,

JoeL
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