Nitrox workshop dings - Divers Alert Network

Rubicon Foundation Archive (http://rubicon-foundation.org)Mount: Nitrox's Impact on the Diving IndustryGinnie Springs was (is) filling several thousand sets of doubles with nitrox. These numbers arenot reflected in any surveys, as they are not official fills. However, this practice was, and tosome degree still is, wide spread in much of the world today. If you add these numbers to theabove total and use a little imagination, it is easy to conclude that many more nitrox fills than wehave documented have been made. In fact, I would speculate that the number of fills actuallymade by IANTD Facilities alone would double the figuresthat have been reported to us.There is a large population of Technical and Cave Instructors who make in excess of 300dives a year and all of these dives are on EANx or helium-based mixtures. None of these havehad DCS even though they are doing up to 4 dives per day or two really long dives withextensive decompression stops per day. For instance, I personally have made 750 dives in thelast two years. All of these were on either EANx or helium-based mixtures with a slight majorityof these on CCR with depths as great as 420 fsw and dive durations up to 5 hours. These diveshave been on deep wrecks, in caves and on deep walls with a very few being on shallow reefs. Ihave not experienced DCS nor have the dive partners and students I have been diving with at thetime.From the facilities that reported, no incidence of DCS was returned. This does notnecessarily mean that there were no hits but rather that the facilities have no reports of hits fromtheir divers. From a training perspective, with the tens of thousands of training dives beingmade, many with considerable decompression-stop times involved, we have no incident reportsinvolving DCS.Today there are many divers who never dive air at any depth and I think this is an expectedtrend as air is the most unsafe gas one could dive. Of the divers I do know who haveexperienced DCS hits in the last few years, all were diving on air.43