RF3.0 - Open Circuit Diver Fatalities

good morning everyone what I'm gonna do is talk to you more about what pitar had introduced to you so there's going to be some redundancy in this presentation and we're talking about of course open circuit fatalities and when you look at the data that we have published over the years we have records of about a thousand cases of decompression illness each year in about a hundred fatalities and an unknown number of non decompression illness and other non injury instance occur every year which is extremely important information but up until recently we've not been able to capture that information and when you register today there was a car a box there of cards that talk about our innocent reporting system that we just recently introduced so we can get this information and like we do with our accident reports we have information that can be useful to the diving community to help them reduce or identify and mitigate risks also when you look at things for example like the excuse me go back to that so we have gotten information from an industrial setting to see the correlation between the number of reported incidents and fatalities and using this information we can then help to identify those risks so we can help reduce the number of fatalities that occur every year because any fatality is a tragedy as we all know and we want to make sure to reduce those over time now also we have collected information on the incidence of injury and recreational diving by sending our interns and some of these folks had really tough Duty having to spend time on a live aboard I mean it's really tough and collect that information and we followed those divers through the series of dives they made and then post trip so we could identify any injury and correlate those with the dives that they've made and you can see the injury risk or the incidence of injury varies depending upon the type of diving that's being done and it's any number between one and twenty nine per 10,000 open water dives when you look at fatalities which is really what we're talking about today as pets are mentioned it's somewhere between 15 and 20 fatalities per 100,000 divers which is roughly equivalent to the risk of fatality for automobile accidents the United States and a lot of that depends upon how you drive in fact in fact if you notice the driver is still in the cab of that truck and in fact you look closely he's on the cell phone that's probably the reason why is there now let's put all of this in perspective and compare it to other things for example each year two people are killed by swans and I didn't realize swans were that that dangerous and 24 people are killed by flying champagne corks so it's probably just as dangerous to go to what every session it is to go do some of the diving we've been talking about 40 people are killed by falling vending machines you probably in a hotel when somebody put their money in and grab that and shook it back and forth trying to get their their goodies out of there and about a hundred people are killed swallowing ballpoint pens I mean those things do happen and about 150 people are killed by falling coconuts every year 292 people drown in their own cars and probably one of the most dangerous things the entire world our toasters and about 850 people are killed by toasted every year in fact we were in a Hampton and recently and for some strange bizarre reason they had these miniature bagels and people dropped him into the toaster there's no way in the world those bagels are gonna come back out of there and so this woman had a fork trying to get that bagel out of that that toaster and she probably is one of those 850 and about 1,500 people each year killed by accidental gunfire and of course like any technology it all depends upon how you use that gun and if you look and if you look very closely that says ATF on it right there I mean that it it probably should say WTF but that's another thing entirely though okay going on when you look at Dan's global data pet are mentioned there are about 25 to 28 percent of the fatalities each year are cardiac related when you really dig down into that about 60 percent of those people who were fatalities who had cardiac related involvement had symptoms prior to now these are symptoms that they recognized and the people they were diving with recognized as cardiac related sixty percent and they continued to die and ended up as a fatality I mean that makes no sense whatsoever and 50 percent of fatalities in the 40 to 59 age group as pet are mentioned the diving community is aging when I first came to Dan 22 years ago the average age of a Dan member was 38 the average age now is 46 when we used to go to meetings look out in the audience see a lot of young faces now the faces aren't quite as young well they look the same then okay then another day - 39 percent of the fatality - certified for a year or less and these are people who have limited experience and limited tools to draw from them if a crisis occurs occurs 35 percent were certified for more than ten years and I can tell you that means absolutely nothing that means that those people simply had a certification card in their wallet or purse for 10 years or longer and 88% of the people died on the first dive of their dive trip now is in Long Beach California recently at the scuba show when I attended a panel on diving fatalities and in Los Angeles County 80% of the people who died in Los Angeles County died on the first dive of their dive trip now when you look at the Dan data you can see certification of divers by fatalities and of course right here you'd expect a higher peak because the fact that these are people again who are early on in their training and education they have limited skills to draw from in case of crisis occurs here's something sort of interesting the student area here I don't think it really has anything at all to do with males or females I think what this may represent our people who are in a program not necessarily for the right reason they're there because someone wants them to be there not because they want to be a diver themselves a number of years since engine certification again doesn't mean a whole lot of the fact that here you have people with limited experience and here you have people that have more than 10 years of longevity on their certification card rather than being qualifications as far as diving is concerned this is probably much more important these are the number of dives made in the past 12 months and again you can see a peak here with people again who have limited experience in diving and therefore they have the greatest risk partly because they don't have all those tools and experiences to draw from if something happens so they can solve that problem but here you also have people that have over 300 dives in the past 12 months and still end up as a fatality and you scratch your head you say why in the world with somebody with that kind of experience and those experiences still end up as a fatality well a lot of it can be some of the things we talked about early on that Simon talked about that pet are talked about in these people who have been diving so frequently they feel they don't have to follow all the steps necessary to be fully prepared for the dive in fact not too long ago a guy that I knew was going on a rebreather dive and he was talking to people the day before and he said you know I don't need to use though check listening longer it's intuitive for me I just do it as a matter of habit and of course the next day they find him unconscious on the bottom he'd forgot to hook up the auction line in his rebreather so those checklists are extremely important in those pre dive rituals are extremely important weight classification of diving population they have three different populations here this is project dive exploration which is where we're collecting information on dive profiles we think that is equivalent to roughly equivalent to the diving population the normal diving population if normal applies to diving and the orange here is injury population and the white is fatality population you can see roughly in the injury and normal diving population they are pretty similar but you can see that when you're talking about those who are overweight and over in obese it's certainly skewed towards that end of the spectrum and of course weight can create a lot of issues some exercise tolerance some other issues that could be a way to increase the risk in diving but of course a lot of times you look in the mirror and what you see isn't necessarily reality and as we may know once you've had a drink or two that can excuse your perception little bit so the things are exactly what they seem now we did an analysis of nearly a thousand of our fatality cases to try to determine the factors that turned a recreational dive into a tragedy and these were cases that we reviewed from 1992 to 2003 again to try to determine what those steps were that turned that dive into something certainly a lot worse and a lot of times when someone is delivered to a medical facility they are wet they are dead therefore they're simply labeled as drown and case closed and nothing has ever investigated beyond that and that is really a tragedy as well it's made it a double tragedy because we can't learn from what happened and one of the reasons why divers Alert network is in existence is to help us all learn from what happens to other people so what I'm going to talk about here briefly which is something that Petrov talking about and evidently is a glitch in the system here that I'll talk about what I call the Cascade towards death which is those four different steps that turned a dive into a tragedy and along the way I'm going to tell you a story I'm gonna tell you a story about a dive group that was diving less than a year ago and that dive was supposed to been a fun dive in fact it was celebrating someone's birthday and it was a a dive group a large dive group they hadn't what we will call an open buddy relationship because nobody had a formalized buddy they were all simply diving in the ocean together and there was a second dive of the day and clear water calm seas no current no other issues there that would have compromised the safety of these divers and the depth is approximately 60 feet of water so we'll start looking at these steps at pet are identified the trigger which the earliest identify and den appliable root cause that transformed a relatively unremarkable dive into an emergency that led to a tragedy when you look at the data as pet are mentioned 41 percent ran out of breathing gas 41 percent that's hundreds of divers that could be alive today if they're able to manage their breathing gas supply hundreds of divers that could be alive today if they and their diving partners were able to to manage multiple gas supplies and they could not and you look at the other issues and trap Med equipment problems I actually don't think it's equipment problems I think it's problems with equipment this is something entirely different rough water trauma buoyancy and inappropriate gas so when you look at this starting with that trigger going back to this case history diver number one ran out of air at 45 feet of water exchange air and successfully began exchanging air with diver number two both divers attempted the jettison the weight from the buoyancy compensator on the diver who ran out of air but they couldn't do it because they didn't know how so they were seeing down there struggling pulling grabbing trying to do whatever they could to get those weights out of that integrated BCD and they could not do that because they had never ever looked at that BC before the first time they ever looked at how it worked was when this emergency took place then they also tried to because they were sinking towards the bottom tried to inflate the BC of the person who was providing air and they couldn't do it because it wasn't connected properly no air was going in the BC so they were continuing to sink to the the bottom even though they were trying desperately to get to the surface so the BC did not work now going on here we have the next step which is harmful action definition of root cause generally a reaction rather than a planned and practiced action which they should be that exacerbates the situation or certainly makes it a lot worse so the data says 55 percent emergency ascent or escaped to the surface this isn't necessarily planned practiced emergency ascent process but people then will escape to the service because they know there's air there they know that they're the help anyway that they'll be able to be safe once they reach the surface so going on with this case history divers number one and two attempt an emergency sit but continue to sink because they couldn't do anything about the weights in the BCD could not do anything about putting air in the others buoyancy compensator diver number one was seen reportedly looking at or they think he saw the pressure gauge that the person that was supplying him with air and so his last act was to push her away push her towards the surface break contact saving her life and so this leads to the next area incapacitating injury an action that caused death or entered an incapacitated diver susceptible to drowning and the data says of course asphyxia is simply nothing to breathe and that was the case with these people they were running out of air and he and a heroic act pushed her away and literally saved her life so diver number one originally they were sinking towards the bottom diver number three the once the person got to the surface she looked down she saw another person coming across the bottom to provide assistance the guy who originally ran out of air and then that led to the next step which is cause of death and that is specified by the medical examiner that might be the same as disabling injury and this case is simply drowning and so what you had in this case was diver number two surface successfully she was pushed away in trying to provide air the bodies of diver number one number three were recovered later both had no air remaining and so when you look at all of these steps this is something that was caused initially by running out of breathing gas and how can people run out of breathing gas when you have the technology available to us today all you have to do is be aware of the fact that you have gas available to you the next problem was problems with equipment again equipment problems are not the issue its problems with the equipment equipment problems in my mind implies a design flaw equipment nowadays is really in good working order designed very very well but as dr. George Harper and Ontario said because he did most the inquest for fatalities there he was not able to find a single case where equipment malfunction caused a death or injury to a diver as the divers use of the equipment that caused the problem and then looking at the other issue was buoyancy they couldn't control the buoyancy they had no idea how to get rid of the weights out of the BCD they had no idea that the BC of the other person did or did not work they didn't test or practice that before they went in the water so all of these things conspired to develop the loss of two different people so what we have when we talk about diving safety it means preventing divers from becoming a statistic each year and we can do that we each individually can do that there are a lot of things that we can do to make sure diving is indeed safer so what I'm going to do is a to look at these 100 divers that we talked about if we if we lose a hundred divers every year there are reasons why we do that or why that happens and we can make changes there for example you have 28 divers who are lost each year because of cardiac issues and we talked about before some of these divers you they had symptoms that they displayed prior to or during the dive but continue to dive anyway but those 28 divers are lost from the diving community and then we had the remainder we had two divers who switched to an inappropriate gas as part of the dive and they unfortunately were lost from the diving community we had three divers out of that group that were lost because of buoyancy issues and those are things that we can correct all of those problems and you look at the accident scenarios all of those things are things that can be corrected and those three divers are lost from the diving community four divers had trauma of some sort they really hit by something or hit something during the ascent and unfortunately they were lost from the diving community seven fatalities due to rough water people who couldn't cope with having to swim through rough water or enter off a shore dive for example in California when they never had any experience with wave action before and they were lost from the dive community then you had eleven divers who had problems with the equipment equipment problems that could have been resolved had they actually taken the time to work together with their partner and those divers unfortunately were lost from the diving community we had 15 that were entrapped by going into shipwrecks for example or going into caves without the proper training equipment and qualifications to do that and those 15 unfortunately were lost from the diving community and then we had 30 of those people each year that run out of breathing gas underwater which should never ever ever happen and those unfortunately were lost from the diving community and there's no reason why these things should happen because we are all intelligent people we all just need to follow those pre-dive rituals that we talked about in this checklist we talked about to make sure that we mitigate those risks and eliminate those risks so how many of these divers might not be a statistic each year if diver error was eliminated as a triggering event probably a large portion of those so we want to make sure we're not caught in that cascade of events that ultimately hurts us or the people that we dive with and so we need to make sure that when you are out there diving enjoy the diving world I mean it's absolutely fantastic there's so many things to see and some of the things to do and risk should not be something that really weighs heavily on your mind but it's something that we have to consider each and every time we dive and especially if you travel to great distances you want to make sure you are fully prepared and and it's not Houston we've got a problem well we're seeing that every single dive you make an accident injury free thank you all very very much anybody have any questions yes sir those are our members those are sorry of your name please Garrus look from the UK I'm a thousand DCI instance you've got that's reported Sudan those are reported to us from our members that Dan America members diving all over the world and we hope that's total global population uh no of the Dan America member my sorry members who travel around the world and dive and we know that's probably not nearly all the cases that occur okay that's the ones yeah I mean the numbers in the UK are around the 350 a year they're treated by the chambers yeah and we know that there are there are people who don't report we know people to unfortunately treat themselves so there are a lot of reasons why we never get that information answer okay thanks him yes sir and your name please Tony Howard again from the UK yes there was one item in in that scenario that you proposed earlier on about the the group of divers who went diving together and apart from the obvious issues religious these up buddy checks familiarization with your own equipment I'm assuming a lot of those were rented equipment the one thing that overriding Li comes to me out this isn't something that happens when I'm doing my training is that they were obviously overweighted yeah to start with yeah and that is such a combination it's often glossed over a little bit too much too many divers don't have the right trim and the biggest people have been diving without trim is you've not got any control lift yeah of your buoyancy you're wasting gas to start with you yeah gas with another issue it's the old domino effect you haven't got your trim right you haven't got your boots all right everything's gonna go to Paul yeah exactly right in fact one of the things that we talk about is we we suggested the divers have a logbook and when they're diving someplace and they wear a wetsuit they record the suit they're wearing the record the amount of weight they're wearing to make sure that they do that exactly the same because otherwise they simply repeat that process of overweighting themselves every single time they returned that same diving environment or people that are trained in fresh water who are wearing wet suits or then go to the Caribbean or not wearing wet suits all of the things is extremely important you're absolutely right yes sir my name is Alex I'm from the US I saw that uncertified divers have a fatality rate exactly the same as commercial divers and instructors can you explain that please the fatality rate is the same was that uncertified divers was the same I have no idea why yet yeah yeah it could be it could be you asked about certified divers and using rate we don't know what's the rate for them because there is about seven million billion people who are uncertified in times of what you will take as a denominator no no no could a lot of time they're simply called drownings as we indicated before so they could be wearing diving equipment they're going to the medical facility and if the person's not familiar there's something labeled as a drowning and that's it yes David you have a question okay yeah talking about overweighting right yeah bout the problem with people chronically over waiting that all the same they're at 45 feet and they can't get to the surface with one or two kicks or even a little manual inflation of your BC without dropping the weights and they're all over weighted that says have you looked at that yeah it over waiting is really a problem and there's and of course what we try to do is make sure we pass that information on to the training organization so they can continue to encourage people to make sure they're there waiting part witness so properly or we recommend that people if they're going to go on a vacation find a way to be able to do a shore dive first or find some way of being able to do their weights properly before they're actually out there in a more aggressive dive spot but you haven't really been able to look at that as a it's hard to get a lot of that data yeah okay again thank you all for being here

Channel: DAN TV

Views: 19,203

Rating: 4.8769231 out of 5

Keywords: Rebreathers, Diving, Scuba, Technical Diving, Open circuit, Fatalities, Accidents, Research, Dive safety, Rebreather Forum 3.0, RF3, DAN, Divers Alert Network, AAUS, PADI, Dan Orr

Id: nAsM0w2ofx8

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2013