I'm looking for a story about a diver's death - can you help?

[ZingDramaQueenOfSheeba]

I read a story on FB 5 years ago about a diver who ignored safety protocols and excercise/training/qualifiying routines in order to progress faster in his career than reasonable.

Some people in the diving community tried to warn him that him challanging himself like that isn't safe: you can't just go deeper and deeper because you want to, you have to do x amount of dives to y depths to practice before going to the next depth.

He ignored everyone, even those cloest to him - he was very ambitious and anyone trying to slow him down was ostracised, so the group around him had no choice but to support him.
Unfortunately as he pushed himself too far, too fast and he died, I'm not even sure if they ever managed to recover his body because of certain circumstances.

The article analysed group behaviour & individual behaviour that ultimately led to this tragedy - and it refers to a book a want to read.

I don't remember any actual details of exactly when or where it happened (definitely before Sept '16, possibly that summer or in '15 or '14 but could've been earlier), nor the diver's name, age, nationality.
I think he did free diving not scuba. He mainly dived alone in terms of practice & events, he was determined to brake records.
There were quite a few posts about him leading up to his last dive and after - but I can't remember if it was part of the article....

Does anyone know who I'm talking about?
It's driving me nuts, I've looked everywhere but without firm details I can't find who he was.
thanks for any help

A Google suggests it may be Nicholas Mevoli. www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/sports/testing-limits-of-a-niche-sport-diver-met-fate-72-meters-down.html

There's a book about him. There's a review here. lareviewofbooks.org/article/icarus-of-the-deep-the-life-and-death-of-freediver-nick-mevoli/

thanks

it definitely wasn't him. Melvoli surfaced alive before he went unconscious and died.

This guy died in the water and they couldn't retrieve the body for some time (if at all?)
I don't think he was young, and he'd only been diving for a few years.

Hang on , I remember something about he had some record breaking attempts?
off to Google

Was it the cave diver?

Stephen Keenan?

I can't believe I found it.
Including "record attempt" in search did it.

His name was Guy Garman. And the phrase I needed was "destructive goal pursuit".

I guess writing it down triggered my memory for more details.
I think I'll ask MNHQ to take thread down as I don't want it to start anything, but here's a screenshot of the @article if you are interested @SugarMouseTown

Thanks for posting.

It rings a bell - I think the guy only had something like 250 dives in total and he’d progressed very rapidly into deeper and deeper dives. Poor sod - didn’t deserve to die though (think most divers that have been around for a while will hold our hands up and admit we’ve all done stupid stuff at some point that could have ended very badly).

There’s a Facebook group “The human Diver: Human Factors in Diving” that breaks down incidents like this for lessons learned and there’s a website/community - have a poke around there and you’ll probably find it.

oops..

Ah cross post!

thanks @Dyme and others

I remember now that when I read about it I kept on thinking about "sunk cost fallacy" and how sometimes you just can't stop a train wreck occurring even YOU can see it coming from a mile but the people close to it won't acknowledge how everything is shaping up to end in a perfect storm.

There are definitely some lessons to be learnt.

There wa a diver in America called Ben something who dived into a cave and never came out. It is a real good one to go down the rabbit hole on. I will come back with the right name.

Ben Mcdaniel
There is an excellent right up on the reddit boards on Unresolved Mysteries.

@Hippywannabe

thanks
unfortunately there are hundreds of diver accidents every year.
I was looking for the specific one about "Doc Deep" because of the psychology analysis of contributing factors that lead to the fatal event.

I couldn't remember the phrase "destructive goal pursuit" when I was telling something to DH - I wanted to make a point that sometimes it could take a person with lack of impulse control to actually break the cone of silence ie when everyone can see a problem but dares to say nothing (because of group expectations, peer pressure, toxic positivity, fear of confrontation etc) a person who is more uninhibited than the others is the likely candidate to speak up.
And that between the 2 of us that'd be me, every time.

It's just ponderings.
But I'm very interested in accident analysis, I'm often forced to explain the problem of "normalisation of deviation" to my kids!
They seem to not understand that just because they get away with something (especially repeatedly!) it doesn't mean that was the right/safe/reasonable/practical/logical/healthy choice.

If you’ve not read it you would enjoy Black Box Thinking, the psychology around an operation that went wrong and plane crashes is really interesting. Similar books by Malcolm Gladwell and Thinking Fast and Slow are others you may enjoy.

The TV series Disappeared had an episode about Ben McDaniel. Very sad but fascinating story.

@DramaAlpaca I shall have a look for that. Thanks

There's a book about climbers & Everest too. About why people lose the ability to reason & plough on regardless. I can't remember the title tho... 🙄

There’s a noticeable lack of women in the support team. Having done lots of diving in the past I’d say this does generally make a difference in decision making.

@Wombat49

There's a book about climbers & Everest too. About why people lose the ability to reason & plough on regardless. I can't remember the title tho... 🙄

@Wombat49

yes, that's the book being referenced in the article "Destructive goal pursuit: the Mt. Everest Disaster".

I couldn't remember the phrase.

@Mocha1978 and @DramaAlpaca

thanks for suggestions.

I'm probably gonna regret bringing it up but reading through articles about the fatal shooting of Halyna on the Rust set someone pointed out that often people who see stuff going wrong don't speak up because of fear of potential loss of job/status.

And that line made me think about omissions bias, sunk cost fallacy and other issues that can lead to such tragic events.
Because it's hardly ever one person or one thing.
A perfect storm has many elements and if only just one or two things had happened differently so many needless deaths could've been avoided, potentially.

And it's so sad that sometimes even if people speak up it's not enough. Because of money, because of politics, because of status and ego.

I remember how shocking the Challenger catastrophe was to see on the news, the day it happened.
And then to find out that the engineers knew about the O-rings issues in cold weather yet their pleading to delay the launch was ignored - that's still incomprehensible. I agree that those deaths were government sanctioned murder. They should never had launched that day.

But how can these tragedies be avoided if people - whose job it is to ensure safety - willingly or reluctantly or through undeliberate failure end up risking human lives because they want to rush ahead?

Anyway, I didn't want to open a can of worms about the accidental shooting on Thursday.
I've been thinking & learning a lot about cognitive biases and because of personal reasons I've been focusing on sunk cost fallacy so my brain's been preoccupied with these things.
But the tragic news and that line I read triggered the diver-related memory.
Safety protocols should never be ignored. Nothing is worth needless loss of life.