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- >Dan, Ray Latulip brought Ariele up from 200 off of the Skyclife while >her instructor who also has his own body count did not bother, "since >she was already dead", and Lyn Simmons, an alert and truly professional >operator who saw the bubbles coming, had her DIVEMASTER, something the >stroke boats and scumbag operators do not have, jump on the situation >with mask and fins as he surfaced her and revived her while the >instructor decoed his little buns off from his six minute bottom time. > This is really too bad. I was really hoping we'd have a good example to talk about for a while, instead of more of the same. When I called a number of the Boynton beach dive people, I found some reluctance to discuss particulars in this case. This actually ties in with the earful I got from Robert Carmichael on Friday, after I spent a few posts on painting Tom Mount and Derrick in the light I felt others should see them in. Robert is concerned that our ability to really learn from these dive accidients, is becoming impaired by both the backdrop of legal or civil liability ( people are afraid to say anything untill after a trial or suit, meanwhile, no lessons can be learned from the errors made but not disclosed ) ; and the other issue was more of a spiritual kind of thing.... .....So far the only spirituality we have on the tech list, is the insistence some of us have that if Mount trains someone, sooner or later they are likly to exist only as a 'spirit" :-) Now I have fun writing this, and George enjoys each wide open opportunity he gets to point to another Tom Mount stupidity, but the problem is, we are ruining the fabric of common interest, and we are not doing anything to foster group adhesion. We have this festering sore we like to keep picking on----but instead of picking on it, we are making it worse ( i.e., the new double 112 configuration minimum as one such potential result ) . Obviously neither I nor Robert is going to ask George to "suck up" to Tom. I don't have any plans of doing this either. But maybe we can find a way to discuss a tragic dive accident, without forgetting about the need for group adhesion we have, if we ever want technical diving to gain better consensus on proceedures, configurations, and general safety. I'd like to try a change in the way we ( I ) handle the blow by blow on a dive accidient we hear about. With the single exception of Derick Mcknulty, whose actions take him totally outside our sense of common interst and beliefs, from now on I would like to try to make some assumptions when an accideint occurs: 1: Lets assume if someone dies, the buddies or instructor did not "WANT " this death to occur. 2. Lets assume if an accident occurred, and a buddy or instructor fails to save someone through negligence, that the issue here was insufficient preparation, insufficient training, and insufficinet ability. We should not confuse this with any intent other than the intent to save the people you are diving with. When we see this, as a "close knit" group, we should be able to make suggestions about how others in the same situation, might find a way to save their friend, or avoid the emergency in the first place. We can do this without attempting to make the ple involved feel any worse than they already do. 3. We need to "firmly" position what the correct action(s) would have been, and do so without making the surviving divers in the incident feel as though we are telling the world how stupid they were/are. This is one of the problems we have now, since many are unwilling to be "shamed" by the techlist, for actions which they felt were beyond their control. And we CAN NOT allow the surviving divers to run with the "you would have had to have b een there to understand" denial, which is SOP for many involved in acidents. Its just part of putting a wall up so that nothing more can be learned. Right now, we have enough deaths so that as a "community", we should be able to agree that bondage wings are contributing factors in so many deaths, that we should explain to those who have been using them, how unfortunate this gear choice really is. We don't have to say someone is "stupid" if they use them. We can say this person would be much wiser to buy new wings. We can say the seriously overweight tech divers, would be wiser to put in 2 to 3 hours per day on a road bike, for several months, prior to any more deep dives. Insulting them won't help them, and none of us want them to be hurt----and that's particularly true of George, even though his posts "sound" like he has no regard for these people---the reality is, George and some of the rest of us, have gotten so frustrated with seeing a death threat that we seem powerless to prevent, that our comments about it have become so negative as to become worthless. A lot is happening now in decompression theory. This is an area which can help bring the list back toward a unified group, one with a common safety goal, and one where we don't have to jump up and down on top of someone else for the fun of it. And some really terrible threats are out there right now in rebreather diving, and alot of members of our group---the entire tech list, have a responsibility to the others to share any dangers and flaws that others need to know to prevent another death. This is not a place wher petty rivalries and jealosies should interfere. We are hearing about life threatening rebreather issues, and many of these are being denied and hidden. To those who are denying potentially fatal flaws, imagine how you'd feel if a good friend of yours got one of these without telling you, and ended up dying from a flaw you were well aware of. While the degree of friendship will vary here, this is essentially what is about to happen in rebreather diving. If someone you do not really know persoanlly, but you do know them from the list, dies from a rebreather accidient, and you could have alerted them to a life threatening problem by posts to the list----how would you feel? I don't think you can be too concerned about staying best buddies with the guy who made or sold you your rebreather, if you know it is dangerous, or has a potential flaw most do not know of-----you can not concern yourself with your future "relationship" with this rebreather company, because, its only a company, and a machine----the important issue is saving a life, and that life takes precedence to all other concerns here. Getting back to my own mistakes in handling issues on this list, I've been slamming Tom Mount for mistakes I think he is making, but this is NOT going to help anything. I think several of us have pushed him so far, even in a situation where we are 100% absolutely correct, there is no way he can bring himself to agree with us, without losing self respect. We have to change this -- there has to be a way that we can allow Tom Mount to "benefit" from the collective expeirience of the tech list, instead of becoming more and more emotionally unbalanced by it. Tom Mount is just too important, and too powerful, in terms of the lives he can potentially save or destroy, for us to ignore any avenue open to us to HELP him make better solutions to problems in tech diving. Maybe one solution for us, is that we STOP slamming him on the list. Completely. When we want to convey an idea to him, we try to do it "politically", nicely, and frequently in private as well. This is not really a cop out, because lives are at stake, and that's more important than the petty enjoyment we've gotten from past slams at his expense. If we stay political with him, long enough, sooner or later he should get over his anger and discomfort, and should again begin to contribute and "think" about the issues raised on the list, and about consensus among the divers on it who have the experience and knowledge to assist him by council. At some point, we need to make him feel that we are really trying to help--and that is exactly what we ARE really trying to do---we just have been doing a very BAD job of it. Regards, Dan Volker -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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