Thursday, 28 March 2002

Bad Dive Practices in Singapore

A friend of mine almost died on a dive trip last week. A sweet young girl in her twenties, at the prime of her life, excitedly going on the second dive trip of her life … a trip that almost became the last one she will ever take. As I write this, I find myself quivering… not with fear, not with restraint sadness and relief.. but with anger. With anger at the people who made her think she was ready to go diving, but who didn’t make sure she was mentally, physically, theoretically and technically trained for it… and who didn’t make sure she would be safe... the stupid, incompetent and ill-trained people who make diving, this great love of mine appear dangerous to the rest of the world...this was what happened... (and i will write about what the correct practice should have been in italics..)

an inexperienced diver (probably on her third or fourth actual open water dive), she was nonetheless made on the first dive of her trip to dive with someone who was obviously not very experienced as well (judging from his wrong/non-reactions and almost zero help rendered to her throughout her whole ordeal) - durrh??? and to dive to a ridiculously deep level of 28metres (when she was by right only allowed to dive, based on her qualification and experience, and since this was the first dive of the trip - what we would normally term a "check-out dive" - to dive to no more than 18metres). As she was descending, she apparently felt herself descending too quickly to the bottom. She then rose to the surface again and then descended again. For some reason, she felt herself descending too fast again and came up again and went down again. (I don't know how quickly she descended (cos quick descends are not really a problem - the maximum allowed is 30m a minutes - which i doubt she exceeded - though what she did was really really stupid - almost amounting to suicide. In diving, one of the biggest dangers to divers is this condition known as "Decompression Sickness" (or DCS) which is caused by sudden ascents giving little time for nitrogen that is dissolved into body tissues (due to increased pressure at descend) to leave the tissues and to reenter the blood stream safely. What happens hence are that these nitrogen bubbles form in the tissues and can cause disorders - the worst of which are paralysis and death. Going up and down repeatedly is like an insane practice in pumping nitrogen in and out of the body tissues..

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