Nitrox workshop dings - Divers Alert Network

Rubicon Foundation Archive (http://rubicon-foundation.org)Lang (ed.): DAN Nitrox Workshop, Divers Alert Network, November 2000T. Mount: On the number of dives that IANTD has as nitrox fills there, those are dives that areactually logged and can be traced to a given facility. Many of our facilities log the dives.They are all supposed to. About 30 percent of them did not respond. Basically, they saidthey didn't have logs and would have to guess, which I did not accept. The interesting thingabout it though to me, because of the influence of everyone getting into nitrox since 1998, isthat 800,000 of those nitrox fills were in that short time period. This gives us an idea of howfast this industry is growing. On the decompression sickness rate, zero has been reportedthrough the facilities. I used to run chambers, as did Dick Rutkowski, and admit that thefacilities don't always know when divers get bent, but it's the best reporting I can submit toyou.B. Gilliam: TDI has no way of tracking cylinder fills or logged dives at the certification agencylevel, we did not submit any data there. TDI has no nitrox DCS incidents of any kind duringtraining and we have no knowledge of any other accidents from our certified divers thatwe've been able to track from the sampling that we did. We think those numbers areaccurate.M. Lang: For clarification, does TDI have facilities like PADI and IANTD?B. Gilliam: Yes, we do.E. Betts: The number of nitrox fills is specifically tied to the number of pages completed withthe facility-required mix validation books. One nitrox fill per sign off. There are 25 fills ona page and every ANDI training facility, including educational affiliates such as, forexample, University of California Davis, are required to have a mix validation book. They'rereported quarterly. Only 7.5% were not reported for the current quarter.D. Rutkowski: We started pumping nitrox at Ocean Divers in 1985. Every one of those nitroxfills are logged by the user's name, percentage of oxygen, and maximum depth that mix canbe used to. Those fills are all verifiable by log. However, as Tom said, it's hard for any of usat facilities to know if anybody is really bent or injured. When I operated the Miamichamber for many years, I'd call up a local dive shop and ask if they've ever had anybodybend. They'd respond "Oh no, we never have any diver bend." Well, I've got five of yourpeople in the chamber right now, I'd inform them. That's the story there.B. Wienke: Over the past 10 years, the reported DCS rate at NAUI headquarters is less than onein 100,000 for all air diving, technical diving, and nitrox diving.D. Richardson: PADI has a pretty strong capture mechanism for a couple of simple reasons.One, it's required through our standards that members report any kind of incident. It's alitigious society and they routinely do. That would include any incident, even if they havedual certification, or if they're involved in something that may not be a PADI program. Interms of those DCS numbers, again, there were three in training, not exclusively for PADIenriched air, three working instructors doing multiple dives and the balance were divers. Wefeel confident that if they don't report, they don't have insurance coverage. Typically, that'san accurate reflection of what's been going on since 1996 through our data collection.T. Mount: We can say it's valid, as far as training and working instructors, that there may havebeen no decompression sickness. What both Dick and I were referring to is the Joe Blowwho goes on a boat to dive nitrox, goes home, gets bent and goes to a chamber somewhere.He has no reason to report it. It would be nice if he would so that your guys would have therecord of that, not us.D. Kesling: Those are the numbers UNCW submitted. It is actually the number of dives,23,470. It's hard to estimate the number of fills because in probably 25% of the dives we're70