Minimising Rebreather Deaths / Fatalities

schford

No recreational dive needs to be done - it is a hobby not a job - following that line of thought then we could quite easily stop all scuba related deaths by not diving at all.

Personally I believe that the benefits of an Rebreather outweigh the risks in all sorts of dives, not to mention giving you much more options to deal with potential problems.

Unfortunatly new Rebreather Divers have died too.

__________________
Bailout and Kit Management account for Murphy's Law

The only bad question is one you did not ask and later wish you had.

Use of Rebreather World is subject to the Rebreather World Terms & Conditions of Use

Drmike

Didnt say it wasnt a hobby. Scuba diving is mostly recreational mostly OC there is NO need to use CCR on most recreational dives. OC recreational is always going to be safer than CCR recreational.


As do I, but the benefits do not outweigh the risks on non overhead shallow recreational dives hence my 1st comment about recreational dives.

Yes I never said they hadnt but if you look at the recent Rebreather deaths they have largely been experienced divers (either CCR and OC or OC) Although it does have a basis in fact I would have thought it obvious the last comment was partly tounge in cheek

__________________
Get a girlfriend you sad twat - a Rebreather is an unfaithful mistress - dont blind yourself to her faults just because she goes down on you

rdmmdr

Shallow water rebreather diving, while in most cases is overkill, allows us to stay current on our skills. And i like the added safety factor while diving in the kelp. Too many oc guys have died from entanglement issues. So to say that we should not be diving them unless we have to just does not fly. I am still on the fence for traveling with them unless you are going to a tech dive spot that will allow the deep or long dive that would make the travel hassle worth it. Cattle boats out of Maui just don"t seem to worth the excess baggage. But at home, dive it , practice your skills. Fly it manually, do intensional scr bailout. plan for the last ten minutes of the dive for skills. You can't say you don't have the time, use it productively. besides the smb's and reels get lonely if you don't play with them.

Ask the soldiers that fought in Desert Storm, The training at National Training Center, Fort Irwin was much tougher then the Iraqis. Our responses to any emergency should be automatic, muscle memory. Your hands should be moving before your conciseness catches up. The first basic steps in any emergency, should be an automatic response. As any good pilot single engine piston pilot will tell you, the second the rpm starts to drop, thye don't ask why, their hands are already moving, carb heat on, mixture full rich and tank valve check. Then we look to what else it could be. Figure out what has happened after you have secured the loop.

PS the only thing the prop is good for on an airplane is to keep the pilot cool, watch him sweat if it stops.

If you have a high po2 warning from your hud, don't grap for the handsets and try to figure out who is lying to you. secure the o2 valve and dil flush the loop. You know that you can breath it. Then and only then, stop to look at the handsets and figure out what has happened. If you keep practicing these skills, then when it come time to use them, we will get to read the story not the obit.

rick

Drmike

Yes of course shallow water diving is useful to keep skills current for when we need to use the rebreather (deeper/overhead etc) BUT the problem is there are a shed load of people who ONLY ever do shallow water non overhead diving with their units and have no intention (or very very rarely do dives where a Eccr is even needed or where its risks outweigh the benefit. So the argument is not valid.


You are arguing my case for me. If Kelp entanglement is a risk factor then Id call that an overhead dive and Id call that a dive where a rebreather clearly adds safety.

__________________
Get a girlfriend you sad twat - a Rebreather is an unfaithful mistress - dont blind yourself to her faults just because she goes down on you

Mdemon

Exactly.

The way to stay alive on these things is to do the basics well.

What machine you dive is irrelevant.

__________________
www.southwestmafia.com

jmurba

Hi Stuart and All,

I have just discovered your article...a bit late am afraid.
First of all let me congratulate you for trying do such a job.

I would kike to discuss your point 8 and to add one

1/ point 8 boyancy

Boyancy is a fundamental safety problem.

you say get more then one source of boyancy, ok but it means also get more then one source of gas to fill the second boyancy mean (second wing bladder, dry suit if it can view as a source of boyancy).

And there we get into the eternal discusion of necessary or excessive redundancy.

A second source of boyancy is a good thing but it should not be here to solve other errors that may turn it it useless ,

among those errors there are :

-lest that can't be dropped and that is attached or scrown down is the shell
-too mutch lest.

unlike oc divers we carry small volumes of gas so we have to be as light as possible and need to be able to drop the the weigth used to compensate loop boyancy in case of loop floading.

one of the means of lightening the diver is to use neutral boyancy spares tanks instead of steel ones (that are used a lot in france)

what I mean is that a correctly and accurately ballasted rebreather diver will be able to go up with a drown loop easily

an heavy rebreather diver even with 2 compensators and 2 dedicated tanks could not managed to join surface emptying his 2 sources of boyancy gas.

2/ to be a good rebreahter diver requires to be a diver not a trainee...

this point seems to be stupid, but it is not, teck diving and rebreather diving used to be praticed only by experienced divers and is now solded to relatively "young divers".

Love of tek gear and tek diving Fashion leads a lot of not enough experienced diver in rebreather diver.

professionnals are also impatient in bringing their clients in this world

Diving a rebreather increases task load, it the rebreather diver can't master the other diving problems perfectly like orientation, boyancy, decompression, used of reels and boy markers and watever

In my opinion a rebreather diver should first be a perfect diver before getting in the rebreather world.


my two cents

jean mi

rdmmdr

Mike

i am sorry that i don't dive to seven hundred feet. And personaly think that anyone that does that without a full surface support team of sat divers is nuts. if i want a little more bottom time at 100ft and figure a rebreather is the way to go why not. what this thread was about how to keep us alive, your diving is how to keep us dead. there is less then .001% of the divers in the world that dive to those depths and still live. But most who have done it are dead. While i respect the big ones you have hanging, 95% of us are going to be diving ing the 50 to 85 meter range. So let us limit this thread to reasonable depths, that the current users who own rebreathers dive. We need the practice, so lets go dive.

Drmike

so am I - but what the **** has that got to with discussing if CCR is safer than OC on shallow non overhead recreational dives? A dive doesnt have to be deep or long to be an overhead dive or to be one where a CCR gives a safety benefit. You yourself brought up the kelp diving as an example.

well thanks for making this personal. I think anyone using a CCR for shallow recreational non overhead dives is nuts - but apparently Im not allowed to have my opinion. at least not without being called names

because (ill say it slowly so you understand) it adds uneccessary risk thats why.

yes thats why my comment about ccr bringing uneccesary risk to recreational dives is a valid opinion to write here.

there you go again making this personal - so Im nuts right? well Im still alive AND unlike you Im the one advocating safer dive practicies - and IM the nutty one?

again this has nothing to do with anything. Nobody said CCR is only for 700feet dives there are plenty of shallow overhead dives or dives in the sub 50m range where a ccr is a wiser option I was limiting the discussion to reasonable depths. You are the one who brought exrieme 700 feet dives into it. The vast majority of my CCR diving is in 50-85m range

Say what you like call me names and be a smart ass all you like but its a fact that;

Using ccr on shallow non overhead dives increases the risk of death on that dive compared to using OC.


This thread is about reducing risk and keeping people alive.

I would have thought all this was glaringly obvious...

__________________
Get a girlfriend you sad twat - a Rebreather is an unfaithful mistress - dont blind yourself to her faults just because she goes down on you

decoweenie

It was...

__________________
"...after a while you get bored offering advice to a bull that like to keep butting the fence with its head rather than walking through the open gate..."

- Rebreather World PM

Mdemon

No. I think it adds some risks and reduces others.

Diving "safely" with a rebreather is about knowing the risks and choosing which ones are acceptable and mitigating the ones which aren't. "Safely" is in quotes because all diving carries a risk - and all divers accept a different level of risk. Whatever the risks taken, the basics still need to be done well. I think that is what Stuart is getting at with this article.

PS I don't like the personal swipes at DrMike. If anyone has helped me identify risks and mitgate them, it's him.

__________________
www.southwestmafia.com