The SCUBA tragedy in the Maldives has another interesting turn, and one that actually supports my belief that the divers were diving far beyond their training, equipment and experience. The bodies of the four missing divers have been recovered, and they were located in the third chamber of the cave at a depth of 200 feet.
The Italian tour operator that manages the Maldives diving trip denied authorizing or knowing about the deep dive that violated local limits, its lawyer told Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Saturday, according to an AP report.
Orietta Stella, representing Albatros Top Boat, said the operator “did not know” the group planned to descend beyond 30 meters. Crossing that threshold requires special permission from Maldivian maritime authorities and the tour operator “would have never allowed it,” she said.
I want you to look at this short video of the equipment that the dive team is using to recover the bodies.
This setup is called a rebreather. It works by having the diver rebreathe the air in his lungs over and over again. The device removes CO2 from the exhaled air and adds oxygen as needed to maintain a safe mixture. These devices are the gold standard for diving at the edge of human physiology. This is closed circuit diving, and rebreathers are specialized equipment, costing tens of thousands of dollars for each.
Now consider what the divers who died were equipped with:
The Italian divers were experienced, but the equipment used appeared to be standard recreational gear rather than technical equipment suited for deep-cave diving, she said.
This is the part that I can’t confirm, but this is reportedly the cave where the group was diving. Even if it isn’t the exact same cave, this is what it would look like. These caves are covered in fine silt, and one wrong move, one errant fin kick sends that silt up into the water of the cave, reducing visibility to zero.
One of the things you do in an area where visibility is potentially poor is use guidelines. A guideline is a rope that leads you back to the exit. Firefighters, rescue personnel, and cave divers are all familiar with this. The line has markers on it to indicate direction so you don’t accidentally follow the line in the wrong direction. It looks like this:
The round markers are called cookies, and the arrows are called, well, arrows. These shapes are easy to identify by feel in cases where there is no visibility. The arrow is placed on the line so it points to the exit. Unlike arrows, which explicitly point toward the nearest exit, cookies are round and do not point anywhere. They are used to mark other things. For example, if a cave branches off in different directions, the guideline will as well. So you use a cookie to mark which of the guidelines the team followed to go deeper into the cave.
In this case, it is evident that the divers didn’t use guidelines. They weren’t equipped for deep or decompression diving, and none of the divers involved were trained for this.
When that visibility is zero, you are weightless, it’s very disorienting. If you don’t know what you are doing in a cave, this is a death sentence. You have about 3 minutes to figure it out, or you and everyone with you in this cave is dead. That’s how 5 divers can die all at once. My guess is that this is what happened, and one of the divers managed to make it as far as the cave entrance before his air ran out. This has been my belief all along, and nothing I have seen to date contradicts my belief.
Now that the bodies have been located, the plan is to recover two of them tomorrow, and the final two on Wednesday.
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