DIVING

3. Diving Incident Reporting System
Section 3. Diving Incident Reporting System (DIRS)
Peter Buzzacott
The Diving Incident Reporting System (DIRS) collects volunteered diving incident reports through the DAN website. Divers
are encouraged to report any unintended outcome an unwanted adverse event that occurred during diving. Reports
of fatalities are re-directed to the diving fatality investigation team. The DIRS project commenced in late 2012. There
were eight incidents reported in 2012 followed by 66 in 2013. The majority of the reports (n=57, 77%) were made in
English, the rest (n=17, 23%) in Portuguese. The victim of the incident being reported made the report first hand in 41
cases (55%) and reports involving third parties accounted for the remaining 33 cases (45%). The monthly distribution of
reports for 2013 is shown in Figure 3-1.
14
12
10
Number of Incidents
8
6
4
2
0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Month
Figure 3-1 Month distribution of diving incident reports in 2013
Fifty-four incidents (73%) were reported during the same year in which they had occurred and another 13 (18%) incidents
had occurred during the previous calendar year. The remainder (n=7, 9%) occurred more than one year before they
were reported to DAN. The majority of incidents happened on the first day in a diving series, as shown in Figure 3.2.
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Annual Diving Report – 2012-2015 Edition