Diving Safety – Who's Really Looking After You?

Imagine you are new to the world of diving. You’ve recently completed your week-long diving course and are looking forward to your first real diving holiday. You may be green behind the ears but what’s to worry about? After all, every diving magazine and website is full of advertisements for dive charters and centres who claim that safety, your safety, is their paramount concern. All you have to do is book up, pay up and in a few months time you could be in a tropical paradise, preparing for an underwater adventure, safe in the knowledge that the dive company you’re using has taken care of all those niggling little safety issues. Of course if that’s the case, the spate of recent diving accidents hitting the headlines might just be setting off a few alarm bells in your head. In fact it would be fair to say that the last few months news coverage has been woefully bad for the sports credibility when it comes to safety. To illustrate this let us take you through a few incidents that, in our opinion, paint a worrying picture for any of you interested in taking up the sport. 

A recent coroner’s inquest into the death of Melanie Stoddart, who died whilst on a diving holiday in the Maldives in 2012, has highlighted some disturbing issues with the emergency procedures in place on the Islands.

The inquest in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, heard how Miss Stoddart, an experienced diver from Greater Manchester, had arrived in the Maldives on April 2012 with her boyfriend. She had been on the same holiday the previous year. On the third day of her organised trip, she was in a party of 12 holidaymakers and two instructors who went to Vaavu Atoll for the last scuba dive of the day just after 3pm. This was her third dive of the day. The inquest was told she returned to the surface after about 30 minutes and asked for medical assistance, as she was feeling unwell. Doctors were called and she was taken to the Alimatha Aquatic Resort nearby. When it became clear her condition was deteriorating the resort's doctor said she needed to be taken to a decompression chamber, but there was no transport available. A speedboat only arrived from neighbouring Bandos Island, more than 40 miles away, when insurance checks had been carried out. A doctor sedated Ms Stoddart, but decided she was not stable enough to be put in a decompression chamber. She was then transferred for a second time by boat six miles to the capital where CT scans of her head and chest were taken at the ADK Hospital.  But at 2.15am the next morning she went into cardiac arrest and died thirty minutes later. 

Peter Stoddart told the court his daughter was a qualified diving instructor and member of a club who had dived all over the world. He said the family had tried for many months to establish exactly what had happened in the hours before Miss Stoddart passed away. They spotted "discrepancies" in the reports from police and the tour company Scuba Tours Worldwide that raised serious questions about the safety procedures in place on that fateful afternoon.

 

Recording a narrative verdict, coroner Paul McCandless said: 'Melanie was a practiced and experienced sea diver who took unwell on a dive. Due to a lack of appropriate transport at that time of day there was a delay in taking her to an appropriate facility.

'Once there, there was a partial misdiagnosis that she was not suffering from decompression sickness. It is possible that if her condition had been diagnosed sooner that she would not have died when she did.' The Coroner added: 'Holidaymakers need to be aware of what emergency procedures are in place should any particular difficulties arise.' 

After the hearing, Melanie's mother Irene, said: 'My daughter's death was down to sheer incompetence. She received no treatment for nine hours, how can that be right?'

A full report is here

Then there is the case of American citizen Roger Pieper, who died whilst diving the Blue Hole in Belize this year. The Blue Hole is a notorious dive spot and has regularly claimed the lives of divers. Once again however there are troubling contradictions and discrepancies in the witness statements.

The official police report by the Belize City Police Department, states that Pieper, a retired pilot from Texas, along with his family, employed Amigos Del Mar Dive Center  for a dive trip to the Blue Hole. The group arrived at the Blue Hole and proceeded to dive. At about 50 feet below the surface, Pieper started to experience complications and alerted the dive crew. By the time Pieper was brought to the surface he had already fallen unconscious. The Belize Coast Guard was contacted to transport Pieper to the Karl Huesner Memorial Hospital in Belize City. Pieper was pronounced dead on arrival. A post mortem examination certified the cause of death as asphyxia due to drowning. 

The initial incident reports taken by the San Pedro police were comprised of statements issued by Amigos Del Mar employees. According to the report the crew had learned that Pieper had undergone triple bypass surgery last year as he suffered from heart problems. They also indicated that his condition was not reported to the dive company prior to the dive since persons suffering from heart conditions are not allowed to dive. Reports from the family however dispute this, saying that: as a First Class Pilot, Pieper suffered from no medical conditions and was in optimal health. The dive centre in question, Amigo’s Del Mar was expelled from the PADI diving organisation in 2014. Although the reasons for the expulsion are not clear, the dive centre had been embroiled in a case of sexual assault prior to the PADI expulsion. A police investigation into the death of Roger Pieper is ongoing and serious questions remain about what exactly happened and why there are contrary statements as to Mr Pieper’s medical condition prior to diving. Although expelled from PADI the dive centre is still affiliated to a number of other diving organisations.

The full report is here
PADI Expulsion
Amigo's Del Mar’s response to the sexual assault allegations

Finally there is the truly distressing case of Bethany Farrell. In February of this year Bethany was taking part in a try-dive on the Great Barrier Reef. Bethany had been snorkelling before but had never dived before. It is reported that Bethany and two other students were to be guided by an instructor on the dive. However one of the other students refused to dive, though the exact reason as to why they refused is not known. This left the instructor with Bethany and one other novice. At some point during the dive, the instructor lost sight of Bethany and could not locate her. Bethany was later found at a depth of 11 metres. A post mortem determined the cause of death as drowning. Following the tragedy, two people who were on board the dive boat at the time took to Trip Advisor to question the dive operator’s actions during and after the incident. Including making the claim that photos were deleted. Bethany’s father, Patrick Farrell, said the loss of photographs was incomprehensible.
“There is no excuse,’’ Mr Farrell told the Courier Mail. “Grave mistakes have been made. Ultimately her life was in their hands. Now she’s dead.

“NEVER TRAVEL WITH WINGS DIVING ADVENTURES!!!”

I had a very negative experience with Wings Diving Adventures in mid February. One of the girls on the boat had a horrible, horrible scuba dive accident after being separated from her instructor. While they were looking for her, the other divers on the boat were locked into the kitchen area for 3 and a half hours, and not once did one of the crew members come to speak to us about what was wrong. Not a single sentence. We were all scared and confused and I was feeling very crammed and getting a bit claustrophobic by the end. I understand that this was a major accident, and the crew was panicking, but it was COMPLETELY unprofessional to leave us down there.

The girl who had the accident was found dead, and what's worst is that I now know that they deleted all of the pictures that had been taken on the boat before they could give it to the girl's family or police.

“We lost our friend on this boat”

What was supposed to be a dream trip turned into the worst possible nightmare. We will not go into detail about what happened but we would like to address the way the crew dealt with the situation.

All passengers were locked in downstairs without being told what had happened, including myself and my friend, when we were directly involved.
The full reviews can be found here
  
So what should we make of these reports from three separate locations around the world? In truth we’re not sure. We know full well that there are a multitude of reputable, experienced and highly professional operators out there. But that doesn’t really help does it? After all how do you tell the good from the bad? Melanie Stoddart was a trained diving instructor herself and the Coroner noted that she had signed on with a reputable company, yet can anyone honestly say that the procedures in place for dealing with a suspected case of decompression sickness were adequate? And what of Roger Pieper? Again he was an experienced diver and yet again questions remain over events and the dive operators response. And finally there is Bethany Farrell, who was simply taking part in a try-out dive. How does a complete diving novice get separated from the person who was supposed to be taking care of her? Why did the other student refuse to dive? Why did the crew lock other passengers in the Galley? And why did staff apparently delete all the photographs they had taken?

Those who have read our other posts will know that we are not exactly big on Health and Safety. We’ve always maintained that your personal safety is your own responsibility. We say this because we tend to find that Health and Safety procedures really are nothing more than a tick-box exercise. Stick up a few procedures on the back of the toilet door, have a quick ten minute brief, stick a diver down flag in the water and away you go, all boxes ticked and everyone’s safe right?

When we go in the water to do some of the silly stuff we do, it’s on our own responsibility. We don’t expect anyone to come to our aid and we plan for that accordingly. But importantly we do not ask people to pay us money to take them snorkelling; we don’t run a diving business either.

Finally there is something that we’ve been banging on about for ages, which is our belief that a certain type of diving instructor is infesting the world of sport diving, a type that we call Brad. Brad equates being a diving instructor to being an SAS soldier, which of course it isn’t. Brad doesn’t understand that being an instructor is about educating others, it’s about imparting knowledge and more importantly imparting experience but then Brad is barely out of his twenties, wears camouflage clothing with lots of “Dive Master” badges or other such silly emblems sewn on and of course has very little experience.

So lets go back to our newly trained diver planning that trip of a lifetime what should they do? Who should they give their money to? How do they spot the good operators from the cowboys? How they differentiate between Brad, who wears all the same badges and has all the same affiliations to diving organisations as the good instructors? We really don’t know the answer to this but we think the world of sport diving, particularly the diving organisations, need to seriously start looking for one. Diving charters and companies around the world are asking divers of all abilities to put their trust in them, to put their very lives in their hands. But as these incidents show, we’re not sure that’s something anyone should do.