Death of David Shaw Rebreather Fatality

Death of David Shaw In all rebreather diving, survival is a matter of constant decisions and careful choices.
The wrong choices can unexpectedly turn deadly. Some poor choices are made with the best of intentions but based on faulty or incomplete information. All divers must be concerned with common misconceptions and how they may affect our decisions. A well documented diving fatality involved the well known and record setting Australian diver, David Shaw. The videotape of the last minutes of Davids life has been viewed extensively on the internet. David was an Air Bus pilot for Cathay Pacific. Pilots are immersed in a culture of safety and attention to detail. David recorded detailed plans for the dive to recover the body of a diver who died in the 890 feet (271 meter) deep Boemansgat Cave of South Africa 10-years before. Despite his extensive preparations his dive proved fatal. All who dive should reflect on the risks we take and be willing to call off and revise our dive plans. Deep diving with a rebreather has risks and even minor emergencies at depth can turn deadly especially when physical exertion levels are high. Unlike other types of SCUBA, a rebreather is entirely powered by the respiratory cycle. That means you move the breathing gas through the circuit or Loop, entirely with the power of your respiratory muscles. On a dive to 890 feet, you are exposed to 28 times normal pressure, and breathing gas more than five times denser than normal.
Death of David Shaw The effort involved is enough to dismay some U.S. Navy divers at depths far less than David Shaw intended to dive. Yet in Davids own words, he had previously never had a problem with the effort of breathing. The Mk15.5 (rebreather) breathes beautifully at any depth. WOB (work of breathing) has never been an issue for me. Remember that when at extreme depth I am breathing a very high helium mixture though, which will reduce the gas density problem to a certain extent. He goes on to say, I always use the best quality, fine-grained absorbent on major dives. The extra expense is worth it. I have had 9:40 (9 hrs, 40 min duration) out of the canister and felt it still had more time available, but one needs to qualify that statement with a few other facts. Most of the time on a big dive I am laying quietly on deco (decompression), producing minimal CO2 (carbon dioxide). In those words lie a prescription for disaster. A rebreather scrubber canister contains granular absorbent through which a diver has to breathe. David wanted to use a single rebreather that would accomplish two tasks, provide a long duration gas supply and CO2 absorbing capability for a dive lasting over nine hours, and provide a low work of breathing so he could ventilate adequately at the deepest depth. To ensure the scrubber canister would last as long as possible, he chose the finest grain size available. These two aims are incompatible. He could not have both a long duration sodalime fill and low breathing resistance.
Death of David Shaw The smaller the size of granules youre breathing through, the harder it is to breathe. Think of breathing through a childs ball pit versus breathing through sand. Perhaps if David had maintained a resting work rate throughout the deepest portion of his fatal dive, he might have had a chance of survival. After all, he had done it before. But the unexpected happens. He became fouled and was working far harder to maintain control of the situation than he had anticipated. That meant his need to ventilate, to blow off carbon dioxide from his body, increased precipitously. A sure sign of high breathing effort is that you cannot ventilate as much as is necessary to keep a safe level of carbon dioxide in your blood stream. CO2 can build rapidly in your blood, soon leading to unconsciousness. Had David been fully aware of the insidious nature of carbon dioxide intoxication from hypo-ventilating at depth, he may have chosen to conduct the dive differently. An alternative would be to use a larger granule size absorbent in a rebreather at 100 meters and deeper and to reserve the fine-grain absorbent for use in a separate rebreather shallower than 100 meters. David chose the fine-grain absorbent because of the longer dive duration it made possible. Although fine grains are more difficult to breathe through than large grain absorbent, fine grain absorbent lasts longer than large grain absorbent. But that long duration is only needed during decompression which is accomplished far shallower than the deep portions of the dive. The time spent deep where work of breathing is a threat is
Death of David Shaw relatively short. He did not need the capabilities of a long duration, fine grain absorbent. From the U.S. Navy experience, there are other problems with this dive which might have hastened the end result. A rapid and deep descent causes the oxygen pressure within the rebreather to climb to potentially dangerous levels; a phenomenon called oxygen overshoot. Thus he might have been affected somewhat by oxygen toxicity. A rapid descent might also have induced the High Pressure Nervous Syndrome which would affect manual dexterity. Those contributing factors are speculative. There is the unavoidable certainty that the increased resistance of gas flow through granular absorbent beds worsens at depth with increasing gas density. There was also evidence that a pad placed in the absorbent chamber may have partially narrowed the flow path and contributed to increased work of breathing. Many have offered opinions on what caused Davids accident and there is an official report available on-line. I am not familiar with all of the details other than the report, or with all the theories offered to date. There is a widespread belief that the finest grain absorbents are the best. This is not true for all dives, especially deep dives or dives which will require a high work load and therefore produce more CO2. The diver must be able to ventilate off the CO2 his metabolism produces. Increased WOB during the inhalation phase of respiration may especially lead to a cycle of hypoventilation.

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Death of David Shaw In all rebreather diving, survival is a matter of constant decisions and careful choices.

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