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John,
I am not sure that the forum is the place to discuss the demise of a
fellow diver, but for the sake of clearing up any mis-information regarding the
sad loss of Ian Roland.
(1) Ian set off to explore solo.
(2) Following his failure to reappear at an agreed time another team member
returned through the system to alert the support team.
(3)Some 5 hours after Ian had been overdue one of the team members entered the
chamber c/w medical supplies + food. ( the medical supplies were in view of Ian
being a diabetic).
(4) Ian's body was found shortly after. The line reel was not in his hand. The
rebreather control system was fully functional (4 of the 5 cylinders were full),
the mouthpiece was in the closed circuit position and was not in his mouth. The
master oxygen shut off valve was in the closed position (note:- shutting off
gas supplies when in dry passage is standard cave diving procedure). All control
systems,head up display and 'buddy guard' were active and displaying a PpO2
below 0.21. The left diluent tank was empty. Downloading the ' black box' data
showed that the diluent tank was emptied over a 7 minute period following loss
of the mouthpiece as the rig attempted to automatically maintain counterlung
volume. All systems were operating correctly.
(5) Ian had eaten a normal breakfast that morning. There was no sign that the
rig had been removed & subsequently re-donned when leaving the water. The
combined weight being approx 140 lbs, would require a fair amount of exertion
whilst traversing the airbell. The master oxygen shut off would still be in the
'off position (see item 4 above) and would be re-enabled upon entering the
water.
(6) Since the rebreather appeared to be fully funtional it was initially
presumed that Ian's death was down to operator error in not re-enabling the
oxygen injection system. However downloaded 'black box' data indicates that at
the time of what apparently was an uncontrolled descent from the surface to 9ft
(2.8 metres) the PpO2 was 0.24 - i.e NOT hypoxic., indicating the blackout was
due to some other cause. The observed PpO2 of 0.17 resulted from the purging of
the gas processor with heliox 14/86 during the descent. It's subsequent
stability at 0.17 indicates the Ian was not breathing from the rig following the
initiation of the descent.
(7) From the position of the line reel it was clear that Ian was returning to a
sand bar in an attempt to return to the surface after realising something was
wrong. Given that Ian was a diabetic and had not recently eaten, coupled to
heavy exertion, and mental impairment ( indicated by the failure to re-enable
the O2 injection system) it has been concluded that the black out was due to
hypoglycemia and/or related events such as arrhythmia or seizure.
Ian Roland was an extremly experienced and meticulous cave diver and had logged
in excess of 60 hours on the rig.
Chris Hellas
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