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The article made it sound like they were using recreational diving rules. That doesn't make much sense. How exactly did they plan to decompress? I think it could have been more thorough. I think they were mixing various diving concepts.
Also, plus 1 on the idea of using drones.
This is so sad. Rest in peace, all of you.
I'm a diver but not that qualified, and far from an expert, but the fact that five (supposedly experienced) divers died, and now even a rescue diver has died, tells me this is in big part to do with the location itself rather than failure in the divers part.
I don't remember the names, but some caves have water currents pulling in, and others pushing out. Out are the safest ones because it's easier to get out. In are the most dangerous, because you might be going further than you realize and to come back you have to swim against the current - you won't have enough air to make it back. That said, usually even experienced cave divers stay far from those caves, precisely because they know how dangerous they are. Also, if you are diving in a foreign place, you should really go with a dive guide who knows the area. AFAIK, there was no guide.
So even then, there was probably some type of mess up on the driver's side. Because it seems they should not have been performing that dive, much less with no dive guide.
And statistically, the majority of victims of cave diving deaths were people who are not certified cave divers.
I'm saying all this because I've seen so many people talk about how dangerous it is, but statistically if you are qualified it's safer than free diving. But no one complaints about that being dangerous.
EDIT: I should also mention I could not read the article, I got paywalled. I'm having to go just by the title.
do they use ropes and connection points or anything? It seemed like they did for the soccer team that got stranded. I would think that is what would be used to get out in the push inward scenario?
I don't know much about rescue procedures like that. In cave diving you do always have a guide line, but that's so you have a way to find the exit if you can't see anything, but it's not used to pull anyone. What your saying seems different, but I don't know about it.
I'd like a source for that "it's safer than free diving comment." By any measure cave diving is very dangerous. If free diving is statistically more dangerous I would guess those are untrained free divers as well.
I'm on a phone so it's not convenient, but the first study I found showed like 3 cave diving deaths in 2007 (most recent year they showed), although the trend seemed to be for it to get lower. Still, this year we are at 6 already just from this incident, so let's purposely overestimate and say 6 per year. As for the total number of dives, there are extremely famous caves all around the world that get year round activity. It's hard to find hard data, but if we play it conservatively we can estimate and say 10 per day, that's like 3650 per year. So 6/3650 -> 0.16 divers die in each cave dive.
There might be unreported deaths, but there's also a lot of unreported dives in caves people don't really know of and in remote areas. This dive might have gone unreported if not for the deaths (it was illegal for them to be there at that depth). And it's important to remember, if early reports are accurate, these people were clearly not qualified to be diving at 50m, much less in a cave.
Now free diving: Number of fatalities in 2007 was 42, and the number seems to have increased slightly (52 in 2017). Data is easier to find for some reason, and plenty resources seem to indicate that the rate of death in recreational free divers is 1/500, so 0.2 deaths per each dive.
So despite inflated number for cave diving deaths, and low estimate of cave dives in a year, free diving is still more deadly.
It's not too hard to figure out why. It's still scuba. When cave diving you can recover from mistakes. You have information on how much air you have left, and multiple of everything you need as redundancy, and so you can sort any problems you have. There are drills you do in case you lose the guide line, for example. In free diving you are just going by feeling. If you miscalculate how much air there is in your lungs and how long it will take you to resurface, you'll pass out and probably drown.
To be clear, I'm not saying cave diving is without risk. I myself have no interest in it because caves are boring to me, and so it's not worth the risk which does exist. I just don't like the over the top fear mongering I see whenever there is a story like this.
Cave diving is pretty dangerous. It’s as dangerous as diving, as well as caving.
It depends on what you mean by dangerous. Of course it is by definition a dangerous sport, but if you have the proper training, you prepare properly, and you don't go being your skill or what you planned for, the chances of death are actually not high.
Like, rock climbing is dangerous. If you go scale a huge mountain with no training or proper gear you'll die. But with training and proper gear and planning you should be fine.
Plan for your level, and dive the plan. Like I said in the other comment, most deaths are from people who didn't have the training.
I watch a lot of Scary Interesting on YouTube, friend. I do want to go cave diving, one day, but by this point I’ve seen hundreds of videos of experts getting lost in silt outs, getting stuck under falling rocks, getting lost after guide ropes snap, nitrogen narcosis, … so much shit. If you have to breath helium to survive, you’re somewhere the Earth doesn’t want you to be bro.
Right, there are a lot of accidents and deaths, but it's still unlikely to happen. Both things are true. And a lot of those deaths are from unqualified people who dived into a cave anyway. It's sort of like saying "flying a plane is dangerous, I've seen a lot of videos about crashes and people dying - people were not made to fly". As long as the pilot has proper training and the equipment is in proper condition, it's not really that dangerous.
There are a lot more deaths caused by free diving (even in percentile), for example, but those stories aren't as interesting and don't make for good videos, so they don't get talked about much.
When the margin of error between life and death is small, it’s dangerous. That’s all I’ve gotta say. The margin is a lot thinner with cave diving than with flying, no matter how you put it. I like the idea of doing it, but I also respect that it can kill me. In that environment, it’s much more likely for something outside my control to kill me. Even more likely, that I accidentally kill myself somehow.
How’s the fatality rate between free diving and cave diving, rather than the raw numbers?
It's hard to find hard data for cave diving, but you can make some estimates. I talked a bit more about this in another comment, but a high estimate I got is 0.16 deaths per each cave dive. For free diving there's several places I found saying there's 1 death for each 500 recreational free dives, so 0.2 deaths per dive.
Cave divers have multiplies of everything because they know redundancy is important, and they have protocols to deal with different problems. In free diving you just hold your breath and try to estimate how much time you have. If you mess up you pass out and probably drown.
To be clear, I'm not saying cave diving is without risk. I myself have no interest in it because caves are boring to me, and so it's not worth the risk which does exist. I just don't like the over the top fear mongering I see whenever there is a story like this.
Condolences. :(
And please, people, this is what drones are for.
Bravery is commendable, but darkness, floating sediment, high pressure (immediate ascent not possible - this got Mohamed Mahudhee) and working under a time limit imposed by oxygen reserves in an environment where one can get lost: these are not conditions suitable for a human being.
Please send a machine, it has no life, has a sonar, the operator on a ship won't panic, if fiber stops working, acoustic communication is still possible, a drone can work for days without running out of anything, etc.
Damn. Didn't even die trying to save a life but to recover their bodies.
Getting anxious just thinking about it.
I was just freaking out from reading into the Nutty Putty Cave situation from many years back, how awful!
It sounds like diving at that depth is already very dangerous, and that's before you add going into a cave into the mix.
It will be very interesting to read any incident report that comes out.