In search of a global and humane definition of diving safety, IDSSC adheres to the vision of its Executive Director Alejandro García Arias.
According to him, diving is like crossing an avenue. Is it safe or risk free to cross it? Well, it depends on several factors. For example, if the avenue we want to cross is in the big city or in the suburbs. The schedule and the state of lighting is also very important, since at regular entry and exit times of the works and schools and at noon, the movement of vehicles increases and the risk, as well as not it is the same to do it day or night.
These factors would be like environmental factors and dive planning, for example, depths and times of the dive, water visibility, underwater lighting, currents, waves and temperature.
We have the personal factors of those who are going to go through it, such as the rush or pressure to reach a destination, if they are concentrated and emotionally balanced or dispersed and with some conflict.
We can relate it to the pressure sometimes to do a job or to do it before a storm hits, or dive when we are with a personal or family problem where our psychological resources are saturated and we have less attention and clear vision of situations.
We must also bear in mind, if we cross the street accompanying the elderly or children, that we must have greater observation and care. This would be the same as diving with people who are less experienced and who need more supervision, which leads to more concentration and consequently more burnout on the person supervising.
And the environmental technical factors such as if the traffic light is working well or faulty, if the signals on the pedestrian paths are clear, if there is police traffic control on site and here we see how these variables can be related to personal factors, the status of our teams, emergency teams, boats and the level of training and leadership of the work team.
Is it safe to dive then? We can say that it depends on many factors and fundamentally on the personal factor of the diver and her team, which will evaluate the other variables and act accordingly. The goal is to always work as a team and thus reduce the fronts of insecurity inherent to the activity. There are no lonely heroes here.
