I received recently the Oct-Dec 2008 edition of Alert Diver, published by DAN Asia Pacific. As usual I found this magazine to have a wealth of articles about diving and diving safety. Receiving Alert Diver is just one of the benefits of being a member of DAN - an organisation that every diver should be part of.
One article in particular that I appreciated was 2003 Diving Fatalities: A review of the regional diving-related fatalities recorded by DAN AP for 2003. This article detailed a range of diving and snorkelling related deaths in Australia, NZ, Thailand, the Philipines and Mirconesia. As a breakdown, the following fatalities were recorded:
- Australia - 9 scuba & 11 snorkelling
- New Zealand - 12 scuba & 2 snokelling
- Palau - 1 scuba
- Philipines - 3 scuba
- Thailand - 2 scuba & 1 snorkelling
There are many interesting things in this article. The apparent disporportionate number of snorkelling deaths in Australia is down to 2 factors
- The enormous number of snorkelling tourists visiting the Great Barrier Reef; and,
- Unavailability of reported data in many AP locations
The main area of interest for me however lay in looking into the brief outlines of each scuba death in Australia. One thing in particular was strongly apparent to me.
In 5 of the 9 scuba deaths in Australia in 2003 the deceased had become separated from the buddy/group prior to dying.
Not only did these 5 people die, but they died alone.
Now its impossible to say whether they might have survived if they had not become separated, but I would strongly assert that their chances of survival would have been significantly higher had they not been alone.
Now please understand, I don’t believe that these people were trained solo divers conducting solo dives. I believe that through inattention and probably through the often poor observance of buddy diving procedure they became inadvertently separated.
I believe that there is an important lesson herein - buddy diving procedures need to be followed by divers much more stringently than they often are. I stress buddy procedures on all courses I teach, particularly for Open Water Diver (learn-to-dive courses), but also on PADI Instructor Development Courses.
For other dive instructors reading this, please consider this data, and think about how you teach buddy procedures. Do you just talk about it and practice it during certain skills (BWRAF, AAS), or do you make it a feature of all dives, even confined water (pool) dives? Do you get people to swim back and forth as a buddy team in the pool, communicating regularly? Do you go around checking peoples gauges, or do you set guidelines for buddies to check with each other, then check-in with you, and then reinforce that behaviour?
Do you, as an instructor, do a pre-dive safety check with a buddy and role-model good behaviour, or do you practice the “do as I say, not as I do” method?
For all divers, when was the last time you did a pre-dive safety check with a buddy? Do you communicate regularly with your buddy or team throughout a dive, or do you follow the “same ocean, same time” behaviour that seems to typify a lot of diving?
I guess that 9 deaths (8 if you ignore the one that a coroner has deemed not to be accidental) is a relatively small number in the context of the number of divers diving throughout Australia every year. But when one of those is a friend, family member, acquaintance or perhaps buddy its terrible. For 5 of them to have died alone is even more tragic.
Divers, unless you’re trained and certified as a solo diver and are diving according to good solo diving principles, please emphasise the buddy system. Apart from anything else, it will give you someone to talk with about what a great time you had.