AIBU to question recovering divers’ bodies

[SP2024]

The case of the divers who have perished underwater is very sad. The company clearly didn’t have the right equipment. Went too deep and couldn’t get back. However I can’t understand why they risked other lives - and someone did die - trying to recover the bodies. Why not leave them to nature like ship wrecks and those who fall overboard from the small boats? It surely cost loads as well. What am I not understanding?

That their families wanted to give them a dignified funeral?

I don't know if people do just leave the bodies of those poor souls who fall overboard from small boats but that you think it's acceptable is fairly shocking

It’s tragic. A diver died trying to recover the bodies, as a diver also died in 2005 recovering a fellow diver’s body in S Africa.

If I meet an accidental end in difficult conditions I definitely do not wanting anyone to put themselves at risk for a body I no longer need.

Other people dive that cave. I suppose they had to remove the bodies as they may attract sharks and also so their families can bury them.

I doubt they tried to recover the bodies in the knowledge that others would die, it must’ve been a miscalculation of risk or unknown factor?

there are no circumstances under which you risk a life to recover a dead body. It’s unpalatable but it is right.

There are big searches by air and boat for anyone lost from small boats! And the big majority are recovered (because of the buoyancy jackets)

But if missing bodies are not spotted it is hardly feasible to send divers out across the channel searching for bodies.

If I died, I definitely wouldn't want anyone to take a risk to try to recover my body. I don't need my body once I'm dead but alive people definitely need theirs. So I don't think asking the question is inherently disrespectful; clearly some people feel it's very important to them and others don't.

My SIL is still missing. The police believe she is dead, but without a body we haven’t even been able to have a funeral.

While the police did try to find a body in SIL’s case, they failed. Ask my DH whether he wished they’d spent more time diving to find her body in conditions not nearly as difficult.

Closure isn’t just therapy-speak and I hope you never have to find that out for yourself.

I genuinely don’t understand this point (communicated by yourself and a poster above in quits an abrupt offended way tbh) your DH wouldn’t have wanted a police officer to die recovering his sisters body just so he could have closure, would he?

So it’s ok that someone else had to die to try and do that?! Jesus.

The navy diver died from the bends - which can happen even in very shallow, safe dives if you ascend too quickly, or don’t decompress properly. Nobody would have been expecting him to die on that dive.

Diving as a sport has a very altruistic ethos - it is drummed into you that you never leave your buddy, and you must always help others in difficulty. Likely because the first divers were navy divers, and the team spirit carried over. People will see it as their duty to recover a fellow diver’s body for their family and allow them a decent burial.

As far as I know, the specialist diving team from Finland had volunteered to go and recover the bodies. Extremely dangerous mission but I guess they were confident in their skill. Very admirable and impressive.

I can’t help but think how eerie it must have been when they located the bodies in the hard to access cave chamber.

It’s interesting to hear these points. I didn’t know that they would dive to try and recover bodies from ship wrecks or small boats if a land/surface search didn’t find them, so that’s something I have learned. I absolutely feel for the families involved and why people want a funeral and closure. I just don’t think if I was undertaking a seriously risky trip that I’d want other people to risk their lives trying to recover my body so my family could have a funeral. Maybe others feel differently, and that’s fine we’re all different people. I was just surprised the official response would have taken that risk. On another note… How do things like this get paid for? Is there specialist insurance?

Lots of reasons. Partly for the comfort of the family. It's hugely important for families to have a body to bury and to say goodbye to. It's also legally extremely complicated to have anyone declared dead without a body.

But probably the main reason is so we know what happened. We now have a pretty likely theory on what happened to the five divers who died, which is actually not what you said - they didn't have the right equipment and they did go too deep, but they died because they took a wrong turn in the cave because their correct path back was obscured by a sandbank. This is useful information that can serve as a warning to divers in future and helps us understand dangers, as well as fulfilling legal requirements in determining a cause of death at inquest. It also means we know it wasn't simple equipment failure which would have myriad safety implications.

@Backedoffhackedoff ODFOD.

Clearly he wouldn’t want someone to die, but try asking anyone in that situation whether they wouldn’t want every reasonable effort to be made and you’ll get the same answer.

It comes down to whether the risk is reasonable, and the diver has to make that call. In the meantime, I’m trying to work out a computer vision algorithm to identify human remains in deep water. Because that’s how much pain it has caused and there is currently no solution but divers.

Thread like this got pulled the other week as some people just kept coming on and being rude and sarcastic.

No one knew that would happen though

It’s also the circumstances. They were breaking the law, did not have permits or permission to dive that deep, did not have all the equipment they should have had. Recovered GoPro footage suggests that even though they were experienced divers, they made very simple errors that led to the tragedy.

Reports are saying that the prosecutor’s office in Rome has opened a culpable homicide investigation due to the circumstances/law breaking.

Diver here
it’s just something we do as part of the dive community. Where possible we want to get bodies back to their families, and their dive watches/ computers provide information /footage of what went wrong so we can learn from it. A bit like a black box in a plane crash. The recovery divers all volunteer to do so and are incredibly skilled and experienced.

As someone whos family was involved in cave rescue there is very much an ethos of not leaving someone underground and rescuers do risk their lives to bring the deceased back to their families. I had a good friend who died trying to recover a body off the West Coast of Ireland that was a suicide. The full inshore rescue was employed even though it was suicide and it was a recovery not a rescue. Still they went to get the body back for the family. which cost her her life. So bring bodies back to families is a very strong part of those that dedicate their lives to this. Not always possible as the Mossdale Scar tragedy shows. They had to leave 6 there and created an official tomb and designated burial place.

That is how divers are. Especially cave divers.

The Finnish team were among the best. They would have needed no money, instruction, or pressure to do this.

Divers stick together.

Nobody should be diving to 60m on air! Cave or not, it is ridiculously dangerous and if you want to dive that deep you need to go off and learn how to use trimix safely. Using air for a dive that deep is the equivalent of deciding to head down the M1 on a Lime scooter.

Add in “entering a cave without the right kit” and that is just the cherry on top of a very risky cake. It is baffling that a load of apparently experienced divers chose to do it, but once they did, it was highly likely there would be an accident of some sort.

Hmm what about airplane crashes into the sea with somefimes hundreds of bodies

I do actually think you have a point

If I was one of the deceased it wouldn't bother me but some people are funny about stuff like that

They do also try to recover them too! Along with the black box. Usually too deep for divers though, so robotic subs I think.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o

Yes but why? Half the time plane crash bodies are not even in one piece. Seems pointless to me.

The black boxes are useful