Why didn’t Yuri Lipski inflate his BCD?
I saw the footage of the fatal diving accident of Yuri Lipski. One thing I wonder is what really happened. He doesn’t seem to try to inflate his Buoyancy Control Device (BCD) to get back up.
Did he have a failure ?
Link to the video of his fatal dive, please be warned that this can be disturbing: Yuri Lipski’s Fatal Diving Accident Footage (YouTube).
(I read the comments below the video, they seem to be speculative. I was hoping that there was some source of information I am not aware of or a proper investigation).
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I did a bit more research and Omar Tarek, the man who recovered Yuri’s body had an article in Spiegel.
The article mentions that Omar believes that there were three issues
he had too much lead, 12kg apparently
his vest burst open, he tried to add air when it was full (rather than dropping his belt)
ultimately he probably had oxygen poisoning which usually leads to convulsions and dropping the regulator
Also it is very likely that: - since he was on air, he probably suffered increasingly from narcosis after 30m
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The significant part of the Blue Hole is a cave dive — and at significant depth. It may be that he got disoriented due to darkness and nitrogen narcosis and thus did not know where he was.
In cave diving and wreck diving, you’re taught not to use your BCD to bail out unless you absolute know what’s overhead. The reason being it’s very easy to get trapped in an underwater cave or structure or cables with an inflated bcd.
Yuri was a dive instructor so I rule out inexperience [as far as his ability to operate his basic dive equipment; he may have been contextually or situationally inexperienced].
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It is always difficult commenting on what exactly happened and what was going through someone's mind. And in the end it is speculation.
There is a good chance that he was overloaded and as he descended he started to panic which causes many physical and psychological changes such as perceptual narrowing. All of these leads to you making irrational decisions, like removing your own regulator.
In the end the biggest killer is lack of knowledge and lack of experience. In technical diving we do a lot of planning and research before we dive a new site and we setup a lot of redundancy in our gear so that no single failure causes problems. When we use new equipment we first test things in a pool and shallow dives.
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