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DAN’s publication, Alert Diver, has an entertaining column known as
“Incident Insights” which, more often than not, provides “insights” into the
overall “Doing it Wrong” mindset of the Industry.  Fasten your seat belts
for this months column and deploy the screen splashguard.  If there ever was
a reason for the insurance industry to sit up and take notice at the
unmitigated, dangerous ignorance of these folks this article is a prime
justification.

To recap the story:

A husband and wife “team” of open water divers make a 200fsw air dive in a
38F freshwater lake. They are wearing wetsuits and the usual single tank
open water gear.  Although this fact has no bearing on anything, their
previous deepest dive was to 170 fsw in the Caribbean. Predictably, they
both get varying degrees of narcosis and after hoovering all their air
within the first eight minutes they “initiate” the ascent.  During the
ascent  the wife “thinks” that she is ascending too slowly (which may have
been true given the compression of her wetsuit) and she hits the inflator.
During the subsequent rocket ride to the surface she panics.  On the way up
she “thinks” that she loses consciousness, but regains it at the surface.
She developed a variety of symptoms at the surface including chest
discomfort.  At the hospital she was treated for hypothermia and anxiety and
released without any residual symptoms.

Everyone who has followed this list for years knows that this story could
have ended in yet another death. The cause of  death would have been
essentially identical to last weeks death at 40 fathom Grotto and not really
different from the many deep air deaths of the last several years.  The
problem here is Deep Air and we all know it, yet in reading the discussion
and outcome of the article you realize, to your shock,that nobody at DAN has
got the message.   Remarkably the author of the article suggests that it
would have been a wiser decision to have made this dive part of a regular
class – “with an instructor to oversee the dive and more importantly (these
are not my words) add the instructor’s experience in evaluating the wisdom
of  making this particular dive on this day”.  Sound familiar? Remember Doug
Missavage, who died on a TDI training dive in 200ft lake Wazee and the
infamous Gregg Zambeck who presided over another such escapade in the same
lake. We could go on and on here with examples of instructor guided deep air
dives, which at one time were in fact required by IANTD as a prerequisite
for mixed gas certification.  In many cases instructors if not the cause of
death certainly contributed it.

The author goes on to ask other “hard hitting” questions such as “Where was
the ascent line” and “where was the rescue diver?”.  Among other things the
author concludes that the two survived because of their “advancd” training
and he discusses factors which may affect nitrogen narcosis.

No where in this article does Joel Dovenbarger suggest that deep diving on
sir is stupid, irresponsible and likely to cause your death.  Instead he
regurgitates the usual nonsense we hear from the technical training
agencies, which would like you to think that they can educate you to handle
the problem by getting lots of sleep, taking no funky medication and not
partying the night before your deep dive. This is wonderful stuff.

This would cause no more than a yawn if it was coming from somewhere other
than DAN.  These people are charged with dealing with the consequences of
this form of stupidity and their insurance carrier pays out millions
annually in treatment expenses and lawsuit settlements. Don’t you think they
would wise up and take a unambiguous stand on this subject?

The problem is that the DAN rag is read by tens of thousand of recreational
divers, who may well be tempted to pursue deeper diving, in the same way
most all of us were lured by the deep air pheromone attractant. Peter
Bennett, whose text “The Physiology and Medicine of Diving” is the single
best reference text on dive physiology anywhere, is allowing his name to be
used on the masthead of an essentially negligent publication.  He needs to
wake up and loudly disclaim this nonsense and force DAN to lead by example
or else he will be called as a witness for the defendant (which may end up
being DAN)  in the next deep air wrongful death lawsuit.

And last but not least. Did you ask yourself why the above couple were
attempting to do this in the first place?  Someone had suggested to them
that the deep air thing was an experience worth visiting and that
accomplishing this was somehow a significant challenge.  In short they were
trying to prove something to themselves and possibly others, because they
were led to believe that the risk to reward ratio was weighted on the reward
side.  DAN’s article does very little to dispel the reward value and instead
suggests ways to contain the risk.  To set things straight  DAN needs to
publish the list of people who have died over the last 15 years where the
circumstances surrounding their death were heavily influenced by deep air.
To start with they can get the NACD’s list of cave deaths.  In most of these
deaths deep air was either the direct cause or a contributing factor.

Now is the time to take an affirmative stand against this dangerous idiocy
before the story of the above mentioned couple becomes a recurrent litany.


Best Regards,


Bill Mee


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