Scuba Diving Risk Management Divers need to avoid a dangerous situation, Silent World Divers Puerto Vallarta

Scuba Diving Risk Management Divers need to avoid a dangerous situation or know how to avoid them.

You learned to dive. You can control our presence in the water, find your way around, and now you are starting to notice that some other divers are not quite as comfortable and confident as you are. Possible they are out of trim, overweighed, all bubbles and no poise. Maybe their eyes are wide with panic, maybe they are seriously out of control – maybe they are about to have an accident.

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Experience and training count for a lot when it comes to diving, but log-book numbers and certification cards cannot be relied on to guarantee safety in the event of an accident. There are freshly certified divers with such presence of mind and control in the water that you would follow them if they led you, and at the other end of the scale, some people with hundreds of dives go to pieces at the first sign of a bit of current. How people respond in an emergency can never be predicted; once the animal brain takes over, the instinct for fight-or-flight can affect people very differently. Unfortunately often that the people who have accidents are those who have reached a certain level of experience and become over confident about the risks involved in diving.

Dive safety, the overriding concern should be to eliminate as many problems as possible before you get in the water, through a pre-dive briefing from a guide, or planning session from an unguided group. Any dive should include somebody with at least some knowledge of the local environment – if this is not the case, a more thorough planning session is required.

Maximum depths, bottom times and signals should be discussed and pre-arranged so that everybody is reading from the same script. The generally accepted standard, hand signals can and do vary, from air pressure checks to aquatic life spotting. Ask for reassurances about the environment, how to get out, or signals to abort. If you do not get them and do not feel comfortable, do not dive.

If you do not feel it, do not do it. And if you observe somebody who is not feeling it, tell them it is okay to sit this one out, nobody will think any the less of them.

Safety checks can avoid serious problems

A misunderstood exercise debate about the buddy check and people proclaiming their buddy is ‘fit to dive’. If you are diving with an experienced colleague, the safety check is just a quick show-and-tell, but it should be more rigorous than that. They forget the buddy check is for their sake as well.

For example, check you know where your buddy’s alternate air supply is and how it functions, because you might need it. Equipment can malfunction, such as a high pressure hose exploding at depth (rare, but it may happen). Then, it does not matter if your buddy is an instructor with 10,000 dives or ‘merely’ an Open Water diver, their octopus is your lifeline. Perhaps you have been diving with an undiagnosed medical condition which suddenly rears its head underwater; it would be useful if your buddy knew how to get you out of your backplate and wing, even if you consider their own rental BC sadly inferior.

These should be the basic checks: that the tank is open; that the breathing apparatus works; that the weights are present and securely fastened. It may only save you from sheepish embarrassment (forgetting weights or to turn your air on happens all the time!), but it may prevent a serious accident.

Overweighed without realizing it.

Look for signs of stress both pre-dive and under the water. A diver may be overweighed without realizing it. These are some of the signs that all is not okay that you can look out for: constant finning, either in legs down (overweighed or underinflated) or head down (overinflated and often, therefore, overweighed) positions; heavy breathing; flapping arms. These symptoms can become more dangerous the longer the diver remains underwater with the problem unresolved. Excessive breathing leads to a carbon dioxide build-up in the body which causes more excessive breathing which eventually leads to a panic cycle that can spiral out of control.

Sometimes all it takes is a short tug on the kidney dump valve to let air out and stop the problem escalating. Other times, there is no option but to abort, ascend, discuss the problem and maybe try again later.

Panic reaction is self-preservation, and you react automatically. How would you react? Calmly reach for your buddy’s alternate? Are you sure?

Experience in terms of number of dives is not always meaningful in these circumstances. When somebody really panics, it is blind and uncontrollable. You have to do your best given the situation you find yourself presented with. The basic philosophy is stop, think, then act. Do not rush into unpredictable situations, and judge how much difficulty you might get into yourself.

Approach a panicking diver cautiously. Attempt to make eye contact and reassure the diver that everything is okay. They may respond, just to have another person with them, but they may not.
This is known as passive panic, it is very frightening. It might sound strange, but a diver who is obviously in distress is somewhat easier to deal with – for example, you would rather see a diver bolting for the surface than sinking, because although they risk serious injury, it is better than plunging into the depths.

One of the most common causes of diver fatalities is an inability to establish positive buoyancy at the surface. A diver could have a problem underwater, swim to the surface, be unable to (or simply forget to) inflate their jackets or ditch their weights; they get tire, sink and drown.

Should you see somebody bolting, the priorities are to slow them down if possible, but without putting yourself in danger of being pulled too rapidly to the surface. Should you not be able to remain with them, follow them at a safe ascent rate. At the surface, ditch their weights, if possible, do this while you are still under water, because this is the one place you can be assured they will not attempt to grab you. Once they’re floating, they can thrash and scream until they run out of breath, and you can sit back and wait for the panic to subside, because once they have run out of steam, you will be more able to assist them.

With recreational diving, it does not matter how you get there, at least at the surface there is a chance we can patch you up. A rapid ascent or a near drowning incident will inevitably result in a visit to hospital or the chamber, but that’s a whole lot better than a visit to the morgue. There is always up, and in recreational diving, up is almost always better than down; floating is always better than sinking; breathing air is better than breathing water.

In most recreational diving situations, the likelihood is that there will be somebody in the water more experienced than you, in which case you should try to get their attention so they can deal with the problem. The most important rule is to keep yourself safe, so unless you are prepared to deal with a problem, do not attempt to put yourself in harm’s way.

On the other hand, through some basic, easy practices and simple observation,

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