A Passing of the Torch
In this year of Olympic summer games, we’re been preparing for the passing of our own torch of sorts.
Warrior Transition Unit Scuba Camp
The camp saw over 30 soldiers participate in Scuba Discovery and some of those warriors completed their confined water skills. These soldiers suffer from various wounds; from PTSD; bullet/shrapnel; back, hip, leg injuries; and some with TBI’s.
Vancouver’s First Major Artificial Reef
by Rick Wall – Director, Communications – The Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia:
Vancouver BC, 12 May 2015. The Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia (ARSBC) successfully completed its latest project on 4 April, 2015 when the former Canadian warship ANNAPOLIS was finally sunk in the Halkett Bay Marine Provincial Park, creating the first major artificial reef in the Vancouver area.
Since 1989, the ARSBC has sunk more ships to create marine habitat than any other non-profit group in the world. The ANNAPOLIS Project which started in 2008 with the purchase of the former HMCS Annapolis (110 metre helicopter-carrying destroyer-escort) from the Canadian Government turned out, however, to be the most complicated and controversial project ever undertaken by the Reef Society. Financial issues, changing federal government regulations, emerging environmental concerns and legal challenges all forced the Project timelines and costs to be extended. In the end, the work to prepare ANNAPOLIS took almost seven years to complete, involving more than 1,000 volunteers from the local dive community and consuming almost 20,000 person-hours. Once all the federal permits had been issued and legal challenges put aside, a six-week window was identified to complete all the final preparations for the sinking. A dedicated team of specialists agreed to come onboard and complete this work, which included:
- Detailed surveying of the ship to assess the stability of the ship;
- Identifying locations for explosive charges;
- Identifying requirements for venting arrangements;
- Mapping diver access arrangements;
- Preparing towing arrangements for moving the ship to the sink site;
- Preparing anchoring arrangements at the sink site to ensure accurate positioning of the ship; and
- Ensuring safety for all spectators.
Three days before the sink day, the ship was moved to Halkett Bay and positioned over the small shelf that had been designated as her new home and final preparations completed. With tide conditions deemed optimal, an air horn sounded and the bay echoed as fourteen charges were detonated in the ship. Two minutes later, all that could be seen was a cloud of smoke hanging over the water where ANNAPOLIS had been floating. Society President Howie Robins commented:
“This was by far the best executed sinking operation for the Reef Society. Divers are already enjoying the experience”.
Divers started visiting the ship on 6 April, after it had been inspected by the safety divers. To date it is estimated that 95% of the ship`s interior has been explored. Here are some common comments that have come back to us (courtesy of Sea Dragon Charters):
“The Annapolis sits perfectly upright on the bottom at about 105 feet. This is great as it allows for extra bottom time compared to some of the other artificial reefs in BC”
“The Annapolis has a multitude of swim-throughs – all at various deck levels. This is exciting, even if you are not wreck certified. You can safely see inside the wreck without entering”
From Deirdre Forbes McCracken, owner of Ocean Quest Dive Centre, who has made two dives to the ship:
“On our second trip back to the ship, the school shiner perch had grown to be several hundred! Tiny shrimp now hopped along the exterior decks of the ships in numbers far too great to count! On our first dive out, other teams of divers had reported seeing red rock crabs at the base of the stern, and now we find more crabs taking up residence [in the operations room]! In just a few weeks to see so many creatures already finding this new reef home was a very rewarding and emotional moment!”
ANNAPOLIS is the most comprehensively prepared naval ship in the ARSBC fleet of artificial reefs and has been designed for the enjoyment of divers of all skill levels. Equally importantly, though, is that after only one month ANNAPOLIS has already begun its transformation to a viable marine habitat.
Acknowledgements:
This project was truly a team effort, involving a large number of people, without whom it would never had been completed. In addition to the long hours put in by the volunteers from the local dive community in preparing the ship for the various environmental inspections, additional thanks must go out to those specialists who contributed both their time and unique expertise in executing a text-book perfect conclusion to a long and complicated endeavor. Those companies include:
Crosby Marine Services, Gibsons, BC
Reliant Marine Services, Gibsons, BC
Mountain Towing and Recovery, Maple Ridge, BC
Pacific Blasting and Demolition Ltd, Burnaby, BC
Damet Services Ltd, DeWinton, AB
Accurate Energetic Systems, LLC, McEwen, TN
Dyno Nobel Industrial and Mining Explosives Manufacturing
Artificial Reefs International, Key West, FL
Derek W. Davis, Inc. Naval Architect, Victoria, BC
Seaspan Marine Corp, North Vancouver, BC
Sea Dragon Charters, West Vancouver, BC
See photo and video footage here:
Article & aerial pictures
CTV Newscast – 4 Apr 15
Rick Wall – Director, Communications
The Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia
c/o Vancouver Maritime Museum
1905 Ogden Avenue
Vancouver B.C. V6J 1A3
Web site: www.artificialreef.bc.ca
E-mail: rwall@artificialreef.bc.ca
Family Scrapbook
Over the course of the last 20 years, SDI-TDI-ERDI has enjoyed success while being forerunners in the industry with groundbreaking ideas while staying honest in our business tactics and ethical with our approaches to drive new business towards us. However, the number one attraction that our group of organizations has is NOT the lower prices or the modern up-to-date materials. It is the customer service level that takes care of our customers’ needs. It is the other person on the line listening to our members’ situation and trying to work with them, side by side in making it better. It is about the people running the business wishing the utmost success on their customers and dealers so we can, in turn, share that success as well. We are a family, and we want to invite you to take a look at our Family Scrapbook.
How To: Label Your Nitrox Tank
Any time you fill a tank with nitrox, it must be identified as such. This will help to prevent accidents in the event that someone uses a tank filled with nitrox without taking the proper precautions.
Don’t Trust Your Gas Blender – Analyze Every Tank
by Jon Kieren
Photo Courtesy of Andy Phillips
People make mistakes, it’s human nature. I make them all the time. I’m sure that even after this article has been edited several times and published someone out there will find at least a couple of typos and call us out on it. A typo is one thing. However, a simple mistake in the blending process can result in a diver breathing a mix with significantly more or less oxygen than they had expected, causing serious injury or death. If we KNOW that people make simple mistakes so often, then why do so many nitrox divers today NOT analyze their gas before diving? There are two primary reasons: either they don’t understand why it’s so important (a topic that is covered in every nitrox course), or they have just become complacent. This article will discuss both scenarios and how to avoid them.
Why is it so important to analyze your breathing gas? Simply, it can kill you if it’s wrong. If the oxygen content is less than the diver had expected, they can end up with unexpected and unknown decompression obligations.
Example – You make a dive to 30 metres/100 feet assuming you’re breathing 32% nitrox. You spend 39 minutes on the bottom and surface with no decompression obligation. Unfortunately, the nitrox tank you were diving was accidentally filled with air (21% oxygen), and in reality you just blew off 26 minutes of decompression. A significant error that is almost sure to result in Decompression Sickness. This situation can be made significantly worse by conducting repeated dives.
What if the oxygen content is HIGHER than you expected? Should be better off then, right? As far as decompression obligations are concerned, yes. However, a far greater risk in diving nitrox is Oxygen Toxicity and can cause severe convulsions (not a good situation underwater).
Example – Using the same dive as above, assuming you were on 32% nitrox at 30 metres/100 feet, your partial pressure of oxygen (PO2) would be close to its upper limit at about 1.3 ata. If that nitrox mix was in fact a 50% nitrox mix, your PO2 would now be over 2.0 ata and would be considered extremely dangerous.
The examples above are not the only concerns of breathing the wrong gas at the wrong depth; a thorough nitrox course will cover the others, as well as how to avoid them. So if you have to be Nitrox certified to dive nitrox, and the risks and proper procedures for avoiding those risks are covered in the course, why do people still end up breathing the wrong gas? The simple answer is: complacency. Over time, divers become complacent with their gas analysis procedures and start to skip it altogether, which means they end up in the water with absolutely no idea what they are breathing. Pretty scary.
Normalization of deviance is a term used by astronaut Mike Mullane (*Mullane 2014) to describe the process of complacency in safety procedures. In brief, it explains how humans have the tendency to take shortcuts due to different factors including time, peer pressure, etc. Once this shortcut is taken and nothing bad happens, the brain will incorrectly assume that the shortcut is “safe”. This shortcut now becomes the norm, and we have completely eliminated a critical step in a procedure. This applies to diving at every level. How many times have you seen divers jump in the water without doing a proper predive check? It is taught and its importance stressed in every open water course, yet it gets skipped every day because so many divers have “gotten away with it” they assume it’s safe to dive without making predive checks and then eliminate it from their procedure. Unfortunately, it also results in emergencies from divers forgetting to turn on their air and inflate their BCDs.
The same happens to nitrox divers. Maybe one day they are in a rush and forget to analyze their gas at the fill station. They get to the dive site and realize that they forgot to analyze but now do not have access to an analyzer. They are left with two choices, either not dive today or dive without analyzing their gas. The diver has been getting fills from that fill station for years and has never gotten the wrong mix, so they decide to dive anyway and assume the fill is correct. Nothing bad happens, so they now believe this shortcut is safe. “If I get my fills from XZY Dive Center, I know that it will be correct and I do not need to analyze my gas”. They have eliminated the most critical step in diving nitrox, and this is now the norm.
We know people make mistakes, and that’s why we have safety procedures in diving. These procedures help us catch the little mistakes before they create catastrophic emergencies. When diving nitrox, analyze every tank before every dive without exception. It could save your life.
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* Mullane, Mike. (March 2014). Stopping Normalization of Deviance.
Come visit ERDI at FDIC International Tradeshow 04/18/16
Is Your Dive Team Prepared? Come find out at FDIC. Emergency Response Diving International (ERDI) will be at booth #2749
