Unified Team Diving

I have been thinking about this lately as winter is coming up in Canada and the possibility of going to a warmer climate for diving this winter is here. A bunch of us were reviewing a series of coroner's reports on diving deaths and many of them report the Heart Attack as the cause of death. Unfortunately, many police agencies do not test for CO upon arriving at a diving death scene and by the time you get to the autopsy, it is impossible to determine if the death was CO related. A friend of mine was diving in Roatan last year and used a Draeger tube to test for humidity in the tank air. He determined that there was too much humidity in the air and that as a result the CO filters would not work. When he advised the resort of this, they emptied all the tanks and replaced the filters and they were fine. However two boats had already left the resort and the divers on those boats were seriously sick all week and could not dive due to bad gas. I guess they were lucky and could have just as easily died.
So the point of all of this is that since DIR diving is all about safety, redundancy etc. I have not read anything about checking breathing gas for purity. What do people do to check that their air is safe ? Has anyone ever used Draeger tubes or do you use a CO analyzer ?

thanks

Christian L.
Gatineau, Quebec
CANADA

Tags: air, carbon, checking, co, monoxide, testing

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

I have CO analyzer that I have used in MX. They are challenging to calibrate and can read high in the temps down there. Your best analyzer is your own taste/nose and selecting fill stations carefully. Cuzel's (in Puerto Aventuras, MX) actually posts their gas analysis results which is inspiring that they care about gas quality and recognize they safety concerns.

Asking station operators lots of questions about fill and filter practices, along with asking to see analytical results can tell you alot. Be prepared to walk away from a fill operator giving you waffly or evasive answers.

Reply to This

Reply to This

RSS

UTD Equipment


Online Store

European Online Store

UTD on the Net



Free Newsletter

Groups

Badge

Loading…

© 2010   Created by Unified Team Diving.

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service

Sign in to chat!
Web Analytics