The day-to-day tasks of injury monitoring at Divers Alert Network include tracking dive fatalities by sifting through emails, news alerts, and social media to collect information about recent events. Our goal is to report to the dive community our findings on what people report to us or what we encounter in our research.
Some first-stage scuba regulators have a shared low-pressure hub. Purging the second-stage regulator to release pressure from all hoses before disassembling gear causes gas in the other hoses to move backward toward the first stage. The gas could carry debris from the other low-pressure hoses and possibly through the first-stage regulator into the hose being used to vent the system. Performing regular maintenance, checking your hoses and noting any difficulty in breathing or inflation during your predive check should prevent hose degeneration from causing an underwater incident.
Certified divers learned to do predive safety checks during training, but do they perform one every time they dive? It is one of the easiest ways to prevent oversights, gear malfunctions and forgotten pieces of equipment. But predive safety checks often aren’t as thorough as they should be. Complacency and skipping your predive safety check or buddy check are entirely preventable factors in dive accidents. Complete all your checks before every dive.
