Advanced 10 minutes
Environmental accidents: current, waves, disorientation, entanglement, and running out of gas
The five situations that make no one sick and are still behind many serious incidents
None of the five situations in this article is an illness. There are no bubbles, no toxic gases, no out-of-range temperature. And yet, together they explain an enormous share of serious diving incidents, because they all share the same property: easy to resolve at the start, and very hard to resolve at the end.
In this article you'll see how environmental incidents chain together, and what procedure applies to each of the five: current drift, waves on entry and exit, disorientation and separation from the group, entanglement in nets or lines, and running out of gas.
Diving accidents rarely have a single cause: they're almost always a chain of small problems piling up until one of them stops having an easy solution. These five scenarios are the most frequent initial links, and all of them have a trainable procedure. This article is educational material and does not replace practical training or the local guide's judgment.
How they chain together
The pattern repeats with uncomfortable regularity. It starts with something minor: an entry harder than expected, a current a bit stronger, visibility worse than the briefing said. That first factor consumes attention and effort, and from there everything else gets a little worse.
With attention compromised, the second link appears: you lose sight of your buddy, forget to check the gauge, build up COâ‚‚ from exertion, lose track of the route. Each of these problems was trivial on its own.
The third link is usually the one that turns the situation into an incident: a rushed response. Swimming hard against the current, wrestling with a fishing line, ascending fast, taking out the regulator. These are instinctive reactions, and all of them make the problem they're trying to solve worse.
From that come the two ideas that organize this article. The first is that the most cost-effective intervention is always at the first link: cancel, move to a different spot, shorten the plan, speak up early. The second is that once you're already inside the situation, the correct procedure almost always starts with stopping: stop, breathe, assess, and only then act.
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