Well, these might be stupid ideas, but...

Commercial divers just have a hose delivering hot water that they just 
shove into their wetsuit (or coveralls, if you want to call that a 
wetsuit). They make very long hoses, you could stage the hose at your 
longer stops. If you suffer a failure the safety diver could go back and 
tell them to fire up a propane water heater and pump the hot water down 
to you. You just take the hose and shove it in your ripped suit.

Or how about using 2 drysuits, one on top of another. If the first 
springs a leak, pull the zipper open and hook your inflater to the second 
suit.

Some wreck divers here use heavy cotton coveralls over their drysuits. 
Not very attractive but it seem to work for them. Keeps the rip from 
happening in the first place.

Lastly a portable decompression chamber at the surface. Rip your suit, 
come up to the surface as quickly as you can and deco in your chamber. 
These units cost around $20,000 or so, but this would be cheaper than a 
habitat.

 Jim

On 9/3/98 7:20 PM Ingemar Lundgren wrote:

>I would like to start a discussion about the risks involved in cold water
>diving especially regarding dry suit failures. You 
>don't have to bee diving in cold water to have a  life tretaning situation
>in case of a suit failure. WKPP for example are diving 
>in relatively warm water but they have in water times of 15 hours. Even in
>18-20 C water you will probably not survive with 
>a completely flooded suit. In really cold water you will probably not
>survive even 30 min. In open water you can always 
>skip part of the deco and still have a good chance of survival but in a
>cave, hours from the exit it is anouther story. 
>Most commonly a dry suit only floods partially but even a quite small hole
>can flood almost the entire suit. In Plura a small 
>hole flooded 80% of the dry suit and this was from a small hole of 1 cm in
>length.  On every long cold water cave dive or 
>even long OW decompression dive i make i face a very serious risk in case
>of a suit flood.  
>The reason for this post is to ask if anybody can come up with a solution
>to the problem. A decompression habitat would 
>do the trick for OW diving and in some cases cave diving. But a
>decompression habitat is often very impractical. it required 
>heavy weights, several tons and a big boat with a powerful crane for OW
>use.  What i have been thinking of is making a 
>habitat filled with hot water. This is a lot more manageable on even a
>rather small boat as there is no lift created from the air. 
>The problem is that huge amounts of water needs to bee circulated trough
>the habitat to keep the temperature. This calls for 
>a very powerful heating device. I have not been able to find a heating
>device that is both practical and powerful enough. If 
>any one have made anything similar or have some helpful information it
>would bee greatly appreciated. Also  If somebody 
>thinks this is an idiotic idea please do enlighten me. 
>
>Other solutions might bee the use of hot water suits but they require a
>hose to the surface and can therefore not bee used.
>If any body have any ideas that you would like to share it would bee
>greatly appreciated.
>
>
>
>
>--
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