divEr 66
O
N 11 MAY, 1996,five people died
near the summit of Mt Everest.
Two were expedition-leaders, one
was a professional guide and two were
their clients. The events were first
recounted in the book Into Thin Airby
journalist Jon Krakauer, who was up on
the mountain that day with the people
who died.
The clients died mainly because the
professionals persisted with the attempt
to help them reach the summit, despite
the fact that they had passed their
turnaround time; that is, the point in the
day at which any attempt on the summit
had to be aborted on safety grounds.
The concept of establishing a
turnaround time and sticking to it had
been a major factor contributing to the
professionals’ hitherto exceptional safety
record on Everest.
Krakauer concluded that, perhaps out
of a desire to please their clients, burnish
their reputation or because they thought
they were “bullet-proof ”, the professionals
had got their priorities confused.
They knew very well where the real
danger lies in climbing any mountain.
Indeed, one of the expedition-leaders who
lost his life that day was fond of telling
people that “with enough determination,
any bloody idiot can get up this hill. The
trick is to get back down alive”.
People who sign up for Everest
expeditions are, in the main, not
mountaineers or hard-core climbers.
They are folk with a little climbing
experience, plenty of money, plenty of
guts and a dream.If you asked, they would probably tell
you that their dream was to stand at the
top of the world’s highest mountain but,
if you pressed them a little further, they
would almost certainly add that the
dream also involved surviving to tell the
tale, and showing their friends the picture
of them perched on the summit.
I was reminded of this recently when
stories began to appear in the media of
climbers dying on the slopes of an
overcrowded Everest; most of the deaths
occurring not at the top of the mountain,
but on the way down.What does all this have to do with scuba-
diving? When I read the quote about any
bloody idiot getting up this hill, it
reminded me of one of the most
frequently highlighted and re-quoted
paragraphs in Scuba Confidential:
“In scuba-diving, going down and
staying down are not the difficult bits
(a brick can do that). Coming up again is
the part that requires skill.”
A couple of tragic tales from the world
of technical diving illustrate the issue.
In the mid-1990s, a diver in Florida was
working her way through the technical-
diving levels with the aim of one day
accomplishing a 90m dive. She signed up
for a full trimix-diver course, and soon
found herself joining her instructor and a
number of qualified trimix divers on the
dive that would fulfil her dream.
The descent was uneventful. The group
reached the seabed at just over 90m, andthe instructor and the other divers all
gathered around and shook the new deep
diver’s hand in congratulation.
They later told reporters that she had
looked extremely happy. A big smile was
clearly visible behind her mask.
They then began their ascent through
blue water. On the way up, everybody
switched to their first deco gas. The new
diver copied her experienced colleagues
and, by all accounts, was doing just fine.
After a while, however, the other divers
noticed that she had drifted some
distance away from them and seemed to
be having buoyancy issues. They tried to
get her attention by waving, but her face
was turned away from them.
She was still breathing steadily, but
began to drop deeper and deeper.
Sensing that something might be badly
wrong, one of the divers tried to swim
down to help her but, by then, she was
sinking fast. He eventually had to give up
the chase, worried about depleting his
breathing gas reserves and increasing his
decompression burden.
All the group could do was watch,
uselessly and helplessly, as the diver just
fell away, down through the murky blue
sea, until she disappeared out of sight.
They hung there, eyes fixed on the
stream of bubbles that still rose past them
from the depths, each hoping against all
hope and logic that somehow she would
emerge from the darkness and rise
towards them, flashing an OK sign.
Then the bubbles stopped coming.
Another dive-team recovered her body
a few days later.TECHNICAL DIVE 1
A BRICK CAN DO THAT!
What can happen when
scuba-divers get their
priorities wrong? The
same thing that can
happen to mountain-
climbers, says
SIMON PRIDMORE – disasterAbove:The dive isn’t over
until you’re back on the
beach or boat.ANDREY BIZYUKINdivErNEt.com