Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by samwilliams 3697 days ago
Take 100 divers, each performing 100 divers in their lifetime. One of those people will encounter double regulator failure. I am not a diver, so I am not sure whether this is a definitely fatal scenario. However, if that is the case it would imply that 1% of divers that perform 100 dives will die from this one mode of failure.

Given that I am sure there are many other ways that one could die in submerged caves like these, as the people in the article did, I imagine that the actual 'lifetime probably' of death in frequent cave divers is much higher.
2 comments
lamontcg 3696 days ago
With 2 dives and 4 regulators on the team, it takes 3 failures to reduce the whole team down to 1 regulator -- and even then there's ways to survive and get out of the cave.

So more like 100^3 to start with, and then the failure rate in practice is lower than that (I've done 200 cave dives and I've had 1 failure -- and I know many other cave divers with similar levels of experience that have had none).

link
philbarr 3697 days ago
I ran out of air once, which obviously has the same effect as "double regulator failure" and I was fine. If you have failures like this you're taught to share air with your "buddy".
link
eggy 3697 days ago
I worked for 5 years, and part of my job was inspecting, maintaining, and making emergency repairs on underwater hydraulic and electrical systems aside from the structural work. Running out of air in recreational diving is one thing, but in the tight, dark spaces of a cave, or under a moving piece of machinery it is another.

The one guy, Huotarinen, in the article died while trying to switch mouthpieces, and he was an experienced cave diver, not recreational diver.

link
anro 3696 days ago
He died at 130m stuck in a tight restriction, breathing a rebreather and after many attempts on freeing him self he died when he tried to switch to bailout gas. The reason why he didn't manage to do such an easy task is most likely related to the fact that he had been breathing heavily from the rebreather and because of that most likely suffered from hypercapnia (to much Co2)...
link