Brain Coral

Getting from ‘What’ to ‘Why’ SCUBA Diving Accidents Happen

© Gareth Lock. Used with permission.
© Gareth Lock. Used with permission.

There is a project underway by PhD candidate Gareth Lock to develop a model for examining SCUBA diving accidents that is intended to get from ‘what happened’ to ‘why it happened’.

If better understanding of accident analysis and prevention is something you’re interested in please keep reading but Gareth could use the help of the diving community. He needs to raise money to keep this research going – consider making a donation here!

Imagine yourself having access to a tool that made practical sense of why diving accidents happen and what behaviors you could change to improve the safety of your next dive!

I am a safety fanatic so any tools that make diving more safe in a practical way interest me. Gareth’s project page describes the relevancy of his project, his experience, the methodology he’s using  etc.

Gareth makes a compelling argument supporting the value of understanding, on the front end, why dive accidents happen vs. back-end analysis of an accident.

The truth is that if our current 20/20 hindsight approach to accident analysis was effective in preventing dive accidents then issue after issue of diving related magazines would not have stories where a preventable accident occurred. Divers aren’t stupid; we’re not generally adrenaline junkies out pushing the envelope to get that last drop of living out of life. We’re regular people with a fantastic hobby (the lucky ones get to call it their profession) and every single accident is one too many. As a community, we have an opportunity to support research designed to develop a tool that would give us a substantially different method of viewing accident data. His methodology is based on a proven system used to process data from aircraft related accidents and modified for use in SCUBA.

You can visit Gareth’s project page on experiment.com below.

https://experiment.com/projects/the-role-of-human-factors-in-scuba-diving-incidents-and-accidents

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing the results of Gareth’s research.

If you’re looking for a more in depth discussion the following 37 minute presentation really explains what he’s up to and why is matters!

Gareth’s YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/CognitasIncident?feature=watch

The surface interval is over… get out there and dive!

SKuba Steve

© Stephen Krausse 2014. All rights reserved.

Leave a Reply