April 2012    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 27, No. 4   What's this?

Death Due to Poor Gear Maintenance

are you more careful than this Virginia police department?

from the April, 2012 issue of Undercurrent  

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I have friends who religiously service all their gear after every dive trip, and others who just rinse it and put it away. Most have had some minor gear problems while diving, but never fatal ones. So I found the following events shocking. It's hard to imagine that a police department would be so lax in its dive equipment maintenance that it would lead to a diver's death. But it's also hard to imagine that someone as experienced as this diver would die under the circumstances described. - - Ben Davison

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Two pieces of a police officer's diving equipment failed during a December dive team training exercise, leading to the drowning death of 41-year-old Timothy Schock in a lake in Greenbrier, VA. Adding to the tragedy, no boat was on hand at Oak Grove Lake Park to respond when Schock went diving and failed to surface. Nor were emergency responders standing by to help him the moment he went into distress, according to findings released by Police Chief Kelvin Wright.

Schock's troubles began when a button on his power inflator fell off, but he went underwater with no problems, and he could manually inflate or deflate the vest. Later, when he went back down with his buddy to continue training, the power inflator stopped working and the vest wouldn't hold air. Then, when he tried to release the weights from the vest by pulling on a ripcord, it didn't work, Wright said. In fact, in testing afterwards, the weight releases of the other 12 divers were tested and they all failed. "I can't explain why," Wright said....