Nitrox workshop dings - Divers Alert Network

Rubicon Foundation Archive (http://rubicon-foundation.org)Lang (ed.): DANNitrox Workshop, Divers Alert Network, November 2000population. The Sea Hunter population, with two vessels operating at Costa Rica's CocosIsland, where Medevac is almost not even a consideration, look what it's done to theirnumbers. Finally, most of their rebreather dives have nitrox gas that's being used.M. Lang: Avi Klapfer and Peter Kragh are believers in nitrox diving as can be evidenced by theSEA HUNTER and UNDERSEA HUNTER's consumption of oxygen, by far the most cubicfootage in the entire country of Costa Rica.D. Rutkowski: Our philosophy at Ocean Divers is a little different because we have bettercontrol of our divers. People come to Ocean Divers, they want to breathe nitrox and they'regoing to dive the wreck. They get one tank on the wreck. The tank duration on nitroxdoesn't last them any longer than it would if it were air. We encourage everybody to use that32 mix on the wreck on their air tables or their air computer. Once they do that, everythingthey learned for air diving applies. When the divers come to me, they analyze the gas, theysign out for the mix by percent. They also sign out for the mix by the maximum depth theycan dive that mix to. If they're going to use it as air, I say, take the tank offshore, breathe in,breathe out and bring the tank back. That's all they really have to know. That's where thatstatement came from. They can only get one tank and they use it as air.M. Lang: I would like to engage the group in discussion of how much compressed air versusnitrox diving is going on within these groups. Some of you mentioned this, but it has notbeen consistent throughout the discussions.B. Wienke: For NAUI, it's probably a four to five percent nitrox use versus air.D. Richardson: The only numbers I would have for PADI to address that would be certificationbased. Enriched air is approximately two percent of our total certification base and for thatsame period, about .14 percent of reported DCS.J. Hardy: SSI doesn't have a handle on these numbers, they don't have records on that. I wouldlike to make a point to Drew. What the number 17 there is showing is the significant size ofPADI compared to all these other organizations and also the good recordkeeping andreporting system. I happen to have the opportunity to serve as a defense expert for NAUI,PADI and SSI. I realize that oftentimes PADI's getting a report that actually happened in oneof the other agency's instructor programs. I would like to reinforce what Drew's been saying.This shows the significant size of PADI and the thoroughness of their reporting andrecordkeeping system and their influence where an instructor of another agency may actuallyhave PADI insurance.T. Mount: I don't have anything to add right now.B. Gilliam: Nothing here.E. Betts: The only comment I would make is that we have several very large resorts, especiallyin Israel. Eilat, for example, where one of our facilities does somewhere around a thousandfills in a day seems remarkable, in addition to being responsible for administering andoperating the hyperbaric chamber. These people are very attuned to identifying any DCSsymptoms. This does not fall in the category of a dive center that doesn't see their divers atthe end of the dive day. Pursuant to that, it's interesting to note that they have substantialnumbers of cases of DCS from air diving and have yet to have a single case of DCSassociated with enriched air diving. Although I can accept comments made regarding thevalidity of data, there still is some variation in the numbers that needs to be looked at. I don'tthink it's fair to say that there is less DCS reported with nitrox diving only because there is74