I understand the desire to hide main lines from scuba divers - but if possible I would be nice for an exiting cave diver to just see enough light from an exit at the end of the primary line.
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I understand the desire to hide main lines from scuba divers - but if possible I would be nice for an exiting cave diver to just see enough light from an exit at the end of the primary line.
Every link in the chain of the fatality is significant. Some are within the community's reach to fix (line and marking issues). Others are behavioral and therefore more difficult to alter universally. For the later, all we can do is preach: don't take off jumps after separating, be very cautious with casual photography - have a designated navigator who has no role in the photo shoot, etc. Why would you focus on only one side of the chain of events?Originally Posted by bent
I disagree with this. In the chain of events like in Kalimba and IMHO in most if not all other cases I have heard about, the first part would have been easily preventable... once you're already up #### creek it's much harder to make the right decisions. Ideally you wanna avoid making decisions when you're under stress.
If they had survived because of a line going further into the cavern with one breath left, it would have been a movie-like hail marry working out. That's something you shouldn't waste your time thinking about... it's usually not going to happen.
I mean is anyone doubting that they missed when they hit return pressure? It's also highly likely that filming contributed to this. Do I know this for a fact? No, but it's probably pretty close to the truth.
There is a tec instructor who I wont mention (I dont wann dredge this up again) who wrote about doing circuits on SB without setting them up or verifying them because they were 'well known'. It's stuff like that, when you break rules or make an aggressive gas plan for no reason you are paddeling up #### creek. That stuff needs to stop and you wont ever need any hail mary unplaned traverses.
And for crying out loud, leave these effing gopros at home, there are way too many shitty youtube and facebook videos anyways.
I don't see the camera use as a root cause, or possibly a cause at all. Just pure, somewhat made-up speculation. Should you be careful when using a camera in a cave? Of course. But that is true for anything you are doing that could cause you to be distracted. Just looking around can do that. If we assign blame to the use of a camera, then we can assign blame to every piece of gear they were using as a possible cause. And we can then start to formulate rules/suggestions around those. Were they in wetsuits? Well, they probably got cold and had cognitive decline from it, and also breathed more and had a hard time swimming. That's all pure made up bullsh*t speculation, but so is the use of a camera as a cause. Looking for things we "want" to be the cause, like the camera, doesn't make it so. And, before people do the whole "so you don't think use of a camera is distracting?" argument, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying people, intelligent people from what I can tell, are making sht up because it could fit as a cause. That becomes dangerous. We assign some blame to the use of a camera. Now every accident where a camera is a piece of gear can point to that as a cause because it's been, possibly very incorrectly, pointed to in the past as a cause. And, the actual cause is not investigated any further. "Oh, they had a camera? That caused them to get distracted and they got lost. Plane and simple." But it's not plane and simple. Next thing you know, Ginnie is going to require a cave camera cert card because of this stuff.
It's similar, if I'm not mistaken, to police investigating a crime and really just following the leads that they think fit the story they have in their head. Sometimes it works and is correct. Sometimes it leads to innocent people being arrested and possibly convicted of a crime they didn't commit, and the actual criminal running around free and clear, because of that bias.
We all need to understand that we have biases and that they get in the way sometimes. Just because something fits in my biased story, doesn't make it correct.
Chris
Last edited by cmalinowski; 05-04-2022 at 08:50 AM. Reason: for smiles
Huh? Have you even read the report? Sound like you haven't.
What's are more likely explanation?
Often it is plane an simple. Diving isn't that complicated or complex. They aren't that many factors to consider. It's not space exploration. You swim into a cave with an air tanks.
I think you're might be watching TV too much. Plot twists don't happen nearly as much in real life as in the movies.
Yes. And, while filming was mentioned here and there, it appears (speculation, but more reasonable I guess) that one of them violated thirds. Blaming that on filming is a reach. Had they gotten back to their stages, they would have had ample gas since they dilly dallied on the swim in. What took them 29 mins on the way in, should take 1/2 that on the way out. They got lost. They had a gas failure. They made poor decisions all around. But the fact that the camera is somehow "singled out" to some extent, to me, is a stretch and very, very speculative.
We don't know what caused them to make the poor decisions they appear to have made, so it's obviously not plane and simple that the camera and filming was actually a contributing factor. It's just what someone speculated. The only plane and simple part is that they didn't get to their stages, and most likely didn't plan correctly, or execute the plan they had correctly.
We all have inherent biases. Nothing to do with plot twists or watching too much TV. It has to do with people stating stuff like it's factual or relevant, and others perpetuating that because they want it to be true, even though there is nothing factual (nobody knows that the camera was a contributing factor) about it. And nobody can be sure it was even relevant. That's all I'm saying. Downplaying our biases that can cause us to be wrong is dangerous and inhibits us from getting good, factual reports. Otherwise, they are just stories that people believe, not a statement of facts.
I do think that healthy discussions on possible causes, and what could be done if that a particular scenario was the root cause, are helpful. But treating them like they are anything more than "what if" scenarios is not good in my opinion. Facts are facts. Everything else is not.
I will say the people who did put that report together did a phenomenal job, and I thank them for their hard work. And even they tend to indicate where stuff is speculative, but there could also be other stuff that either they missed, or their speculation could be completely wrong. But since it was wrapped in a thorough, very well-put-together report, people treat speculation more as fact. And I'm guessing that is also not what those who wrote the report want.
Stay safe.
Chris
BTW, this is both a healthy and dangerous question. If you were asking because you were truly looking for another option, or to continue to find facts and possible scenarios, it's healthy. If, as it appears, you are using it to dismiss me, it's dangerous to finding truth. Just because I don't have a better scenario doesn't mean that the one put forth is factual or correct. Along the lines of "Well, if nobody comes up with a better story, we'll treat this story as a factual account" even though it is not actually factual. And, honestly, the "camera being a contributing factor" was seeming perpetuated more after the report.
I use this video when I teach certain courses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
We all have a finite amount of bandwidth between our ears. When we are task loaded, we may miss things due to perceptual narrowing. If you missed the thing in the video while you were sitting in the comfort of your chair reading this forum on your computer, imagine what could happen while you are task loaded underwater.
Four or five years ago two of my former students tried to kill themselves in Little River. One of them was a professional photographer and taught photography. He was a few months out of full cave and excited about the sport, he wanted to share the beautiful things he was seeing with the world. The other one was also a few months out of full cave and enthusiastic, he wanted to help (and be a model in the process). They decided to take photos in the cave from the Florida Room out and missed the big white pointy thing where the Serpentine and Merry-Go-Round meet up. The continued past it and merrily swam all the way back to the Florida room (while passing several contradictory line arrows in the process). It could have easily been a bad day, but thankfully it ended well.
A camera won't "kill a person" by itself. It is an inanimate object that does nothing until you press a button. But the task loading associated with using a camera (or carrying a stage, or collecting survey, etc) could lead to someone missing something important, like a navigational decision or their turn pressure. There have been a few fatalities involving people conducting "working dives", some of the ones that spring to mind involve survey, but photography was also involved in at least two that I can think of. Task loading probably played a role in the chain of events in those working dives.
Now my rant.
I've been involved in seven body recoveries. It is easily one of the most thankless jobs anyone could ever do underwater. Every single time I was involved in one of those, I had to put my life on hold - take PTO from work, tell my students I couldn't teach them today, tell my wife I had to go do a thing, until the job was done. I've had three classes get cancelled / postponed so I could do one of these, I've had to leave my day job twice.
I leaked the information on the last one I was involved with (Jan 2021), but prior to that I always kept the "omerta" principle of keeping silent. Invariably, every single time a person died, I would be contacted by dozens of people wanting to know what happened and until the January 2021 incident, I always told them I didn't know.
The worst one of those phone calls from rubber neckers happened after I cancelled a class to pull a person out of Ginnie that ran out of gas.
That evening, after the job was done, I received a phone call from a guy demanding I tell him what happened. My wife and I were at dinner, I was nursing a whiskey and trying to process what had happened that day, and this guy started throwing down the "I was trained by the IUCRR you have to tell me, I deserve to know" card. I told him to call the IUCRR coordinator and leave me alone.
Thirty minutes later the same jackass called me back and said "well, I found out what happened from X, he told me the whole story." OK then, don't bother me.
I can assure you, trying to keep quiet while rampant speculation is going on and people are calling you, sucks.
In one case in particular, there was rampant speculation on a fatality that the coroner eventually ruled a widowmaker heart attack. Watching a friend of mine get shredded on social media by people that weren't there and didn't understand how impossible the situation was, sucked. Being worried that my friend might be called into a lawsuit because a cave instructor that was the training director for a cave training organization (a guy who has since been discredited in a court of law, but whatever) was spouting off that he could have saved the victim, sucked. Knowing that I had information that would have ended the speculation about whether the victim could have survived or not, but that I was being told by an attorney and investigator to keep quiet no matter what, sucked.
That is some of the thanks you get when you pull a dead person out of a cave. You get to take time away from work and your family, not getting to do things you may prefer to do. You get to watch #### fly all over social media and fend off calls from people wanting to know what happened. It's a thankless task, but the people that do it do it for the families of the victim - it's a lousy job that simply needs to be done.
I think if a statement of facts were released in a timely manner, that would tamp down the speculation and whispering in the community. Not opinion, just facts. There were two fatalities in the past few weeks, one involved a lot of speculation and noise due to the lack of facts surrounding the event, the other didn't because facts were released quickly.
Last edited by kensuf; 05-04-2022 at 06:51 PM.
Ken Sallot
It's about what could have happened. Obviously we cant know for sure as nobody is here to report it.
I go by what's known, how and where the divers were found and think about what could have let to this outcome. Call it speculation if you will but most dive accident analysis is gonna have a degree if uncertainty.
If you dont have another likely or more likely story, I really dont know what your point is.
The lesson that filming requires extra attention and planing is better than not getting any lesson from it (and it seems you're not seeing any lesson here)... whether it is exactly what happened or not.
That whole scenario sounds horrible. I, personally, and I am sure others, appreciate the effort and the patience you have shown over time on these things. It has to be extremely hard, and I'm not sure I'd have the patience to deal with it.
I think this was mentioned previously as well, and would be super welcome.
I think it's okay to say that the camera could have caused them to be task loaded and make mistakes. It's when it starts to become mixed in with definite cause, something we will never know, that I consider it an issue and I want to push back. When that happens, people want to put rules around restricting things. That's my point. Examining possible causes and identifying situation where something like this could have happened is healthy. Specifying with certainty that such and such (the use of camera in this case) was the cause is not. Even without a more likely story. And I'm glad you used that term, story, because that's all it would be: Made-up scenario that could have been the cause.
I am not saying that speculation on possible scenarios is bad. It's necessary in my opinion. Just not as actually defining what happened when what actually happened is not actually known. There were probably myriad other pieces of gear these two had that could have somehow played a part, but because they weren't in the report, it's not focused on. In my opinion, as mentioned above and previously, putting out the facts, and only the facts, is good and healthy for learning and speculation, even if the speculation is not actually the cause of the accident. So, do I think it's a good opportunity to evaluate working dives, like video use, because it could have been a contributor to this accident? Yes. Do I think saying that it was, in fate, a contributor to this accident is correct? Absolutely not, because we just don't know. But we're in agreement that most dive accident analysis will have uncertainty. But, I think there is a lot unless there is an actual witness, and even that would have some uncertainty. My only concern is when we try to fix that uncertainty with speculation to fill in the blanks and then treat it like certainty. Once again, treating it like an educational opportunity of "one possible scenario is x, and here is what we can learn from that scenario" versus "one possible scenario is x, and without further stories coming forward, we'll just start making that the cause." That also stifles additional learning opportunities because people start to focus on that.
I think it's a bit odd that the report assumes that all navigational decisions and protocols were followed because some were still in place. For all we know, they were not all followed. In Mexico is easy to miss a jump or get lost in places. White line on limestone with right-angle line continuation and a jump ahead of you (where the line you are following turns, but there is a jump five feet ahead to another line) is an easy thing to miss... says someone who watched someone miss one. But we don't know that all of those jumps/navigational items were actually in place. We take it for truth because someone speculated on it in a report. They may have good reason to believe it, but it may not be known. Maybe the video showed all of the jumps in place, but I don't remember that in the report. If I was decently passed thirds, for whatever reason (emergency? Stuck? etc.), I wouldn't spend the time to necessarily pick up all of my jumps. I'd be high-tailing it out of that cave to my get to my stage ASAP. And if that mindset is also assumed for these divers, then maybe all of the nav aids weren't in place. But, even if they were in this case (we don't know that with certainty if I recall), we can speculate that they weren't and learn from it.
I do appreciate the discussion, and contrary to how my messages may come across, I don't really want to argue, and I think we all have the same desire: To learn things from these tragedies.
Chris
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