The cave divers who went back for their friends
bbc.com
bbc.com
> Having the bodies would help the families grieve, and would also help to prevent lengthy delays to insurance and inheritance settlements.
Risking lives to recover dead bodies does not sound logical and yet it's the norm on underwater accidents. One of the multiple examples of a recovery gone wrong is the case of David Shaw [1], particularly famous because there's footage of the recovery accident.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shaw_(diver)#Last_dive
The downside of still systems is that any silt you stir up can kill the visibility for hours / days, which would cause problems for light-based beacons.
You're a green-blooded, heartless monster, Mr. Spock ...
- Something related to body identification and insurance.
- Human life is cheaper than ROVs.
- There are tasks that ROVs can't accomplish.
Finland was unusual in the context of WWII that all bodies of dead soldiers were retrieved if at all possible, and sent back home, not just buried at a local military graveyard. This diving thing (Finnish divers in a Norwegian cave) has echoes of the same.
I always assumed the "no man left behind" spoke more about the excessive abilities of the group. (We are so powerful that we can even overcome our enemy to retrieve our fallen men.)
'No man left behind' is practical, both for the propaganda reason above and unit morale, not about showing off. But like most things in military life I never heard anyone ever bombast about 'no man left behind' like they do in the movies.
In fact, when for instance Taliban or Daesh look at things, the enemy bodies are not plentiful at all. I think it is extremely rare for an American, British or NATO partner soldier's body to fall in their hands. The Western losses in those wars are very small by historical standards, almost negligible, and evacuation is extremely efficient.
For instance, take the current Afghanistan war. Wikipedia: "As of October 1, 2015, there have been 2,326 U.S. military deaths in the War in Afghanistan. 1,856 of these deaths have been the result of hostile action."
1,856 casualties from enemy action in about 15 years. That is about the same number of casualties as Omaha Beach took in a single day. It's half of what my father's brigade inflicted in a single day against one single Russian infantry regiment in February 1942. It is one thousandth of what German Feldheer suffered in all of WWII, and one five-thousandth of what the Soviet army suffered in their "great patriotic war" during four years.
Casualty numbers in modern wars where Western troops attend are very small, when compared to historical wars.
The current Syrian civil war is then another matter. Its casualty numbers are not big when compared to WWII, but they are much bigger than Afghan or Iraq wars.
It's basically "we are all in the same boat", which is true (sometimes literally) when you're engaged in high-risk activities. Note that high-risk in this case doesn't mean that you might get killed, but that there is a low margin for error leading to catastrophic failure. Special operations are not about being a fair fight, it's about using your advantage and once you loose that you're often in big trouble.
Say you're doing recon on enemy territory and calling in airstrikes. You're a small mobile force that is hard to find having disproportionate impact on the battle, which is good. Then someone drop a glove or breaks his leg or anything else that compromises the mission and now you're just a small force soon to be a disproportionate loss, which is bad.
You can just chalk it up to culture, but there is also a logic to it that is every bit as logical as the "leave my meat where it falls" crowd: if you have a culture of retrieving the bodies of the fallen, no matter the difficulty, then that means that you won't leave behind the wounded to save your own skin. This, in turn, makes it easier to trust and to risk your life for your comrades -- they'll take care of you in turn, living or dead.
How can you explaing phenomena like this withouth group selection? From selfish gene point of view, a brain that is even capable to think about risking life to fetch dead body of friend* should be strongly selected against.
* (and therefore some individuals might act on it very occasionally)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection#Group_selectio...
>Since the 1990s, group selection models have seen a resurgence.
I really do get why people cave dive and do dangerous things. It's a lot of fun. But really, at the end of the day, they did this because it was a rush. There's no other rational reason to do something to risk your life doing someone your friends just died doing for no other reason than it was exciting.
lol, go ahead and downvote. I do a lot of adrenaline rush type activities, but I've never tried to pretend it was anything other than just dumb, life risking adrenaline pumping distraction from life.
sorry for my bad english and for feeding a troll.
I say this as someone who 100% agree with the first part of your comment.
Also I think that these sport are about more than just adrenalin. There is joy in mastering the difficulty without getting a rush.
Diving isn't really compatible with "a rush", especially not cave or other technical diving. You have to be focused, methodical and patient. It's more meditative than anything, you can't even breath too quickly without risk. While still having to keep track of a lot of things. In "rush" type of activities it's the sensation of almost losing control that is fulfilling, while in technical activities like this it's rather the sensation of being in control.
For cave divers, I am convinced that the other divers would quickly dispose of a team member who looks like he (or she) is not acting super calm.
I no longer skydive. I switched because I find the joy in exploring the underwater, a place that most people never get to see. And exploring caves is something that VERY few people ever see, and that is a truly amazing experience.
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/
That link is a blog length summary of a book, but the ultra-short version is: if local predators get a taste for human flesh from a corpse, they'll come after the living and humans singing and dancing in unision can give the appearance of one large animal to scare off predators.
Actually everything in this thread is a just-so story. It's pretty silly to pick out one specific rare behavior as even relevant to evolutionary fitness. How would any of this be tested?
Basically intelligence + long distance running = ability to track prey.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/58/64/15/586415bb9...
Why do grandparents love their grandchildren? Something noble about human nature and love? Or is it evolutionary advantageous?
Because old cave-people aren't as good at hunting and gathering, and can be better used as child-care cavepeople.
I think that's the main idea at issue here: Are they still those people? Or are they just, to oversimplify a little, just some old meat?
It's kind of a dumb philosophical argument though. We all know what's really going on, so it's pointless to argue over words.
Still, though, I've got strong opinions about how I want to be "disposed of" when I die. Burial evokes strong emotions for me, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Even in games like Fallout, I try not to leave corpses just lying in a river or in a shrub or something, even if it was somebody who was just trying to knife-murder me. I accept that it isn't a person anymore, like I said in my previous comment, but I still have a sentimental attachment to the... husk.
1) Speed up post-death admin (insurance etc) 2) Unblock the route for future use, they did not want to see the system closed.
The dead body allows for death, in all its unknown shock, to be visualized and thus integrated into human experience. A link from the living to the gone, that allows grieving to heal the social wound of a death.
Surely you mean -50m, right? :) Which system was that? It sounds lovely.
Check here: http://www.scintilena.com/speleoit/atlas/molise/pdn.gif
I got until the first P80. People camp close to this place few days to explore the part after that - here (remember, at -500m): https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bancaca....
Edit. Uhm, I think the guy in the middle is my father like 15/20 years ago, I have to ask him.
I recommend finding one in your area if you can (not all areas are great for caves unfortunately) and are up for some unique experiences.
http://divingintotheunknown.com/en
There was also an excellent article about the dive (with lots of pictures and videos that they recorded during the dive and interactive map) at the biggest newspaper in Finland, unfortunately only in finnish.
It's a sport that requires a lot of preparation, planning, risk estimation and counter-measures. My hobby cave dives are nothing like such explorations, but the principles are the same.
In the end, when you go diving, the level of risk is close to 0: one regulator may fail (risk around 1/100 if well checked), two won't fail during the same dive (risk of two failures 1/100 x 1/100 = 1/10000 which is negligible--if I got the figure right, I didn't double check! EDIT: it's rather 1/1000 x 1/1000 = 1/1.000.000). And we use two independent air tanks, and with air reserves managed with one regulator fault in mind, as well as the 'little' panic induce by the regulator fault. That's called the 1/4 rule, we use it in France in FFESSM diving organisation.
(maybe I was a little bit off, it's more likely that the risk of failure is 1/1000, so sum is 1/1.000.000)
but the point is, it's more risky to drive back home after the weekend than to recreational cave dive, especially with dive fatigue!
I think that's the same issue with risk assessment and mixing up probability and impact: A problem when driving home is not a 100% certain death sentence, and it is not something you could not mitigate. You can drive slower, try to avoid dangerous streets etc. And even in the event of an accident you have systems that might save you (airbag etc).
In particular, with something like cave diving and mountain climbing the "bad" outcome is going to be death of the individual or their friends and it will likely be the result of a series of bad decisions under stress (each of which makes the situation more dire) rather than an exceedingly rare multiple systems failure.
Your chance of certain death is 1.
It's only a question of when.
More than one death per 100 million miles gives worse than 1:10 000 odds per 10 000 miles. If you do not want to take 1/10 000 death risks, you would need to limit your lifetime car travels to way less than 10 000 miles.
Having said that, I don't own or drive a car ;)
And particularly, don't share roads with any drivers doing any of the above.
And, given so small probabilities, even if you tell yourself that you are mitigating the risk by not drinking&driving, it is virtually impossible for you to know that you do not have some other habit that increases your death probability to the average levels or above. Are your reaction times slower (or faster) than other peoples? Do you hitch a hike always in a car that is properly taken care of? Etc.
And if you do not own a car, your lifetime cycling quota in the US cycling environment is less than 2 000 miles[0]. Even less mitigating other peoples' mistakes than in a car.
[0] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...
Without knowing anything about car accidents, I would say you're very off on that assumption.
Everytime there's an accident involving more than one car, it's unlikely that all drivers involved were at fault.
I think the real difference is not necessarily how safe or dangerous one or the other is, but one is a risk that is practically necessary to function in society while the other is not.
A lot of the risks are mitigated by proper gear and training, just like driving.
Don't dive too deep on air to avoid nitrogen narcosis (similar to don't drink and drive).
Dive with a buddy.
Dive with team and individual redundancy.
Do not silt out the cave (the way you kick and your proficiency in the water has a lot to do with this).
Always have a continuous guideline to the surface.
Reserve at least 1/3 of your gas for emergencies.
And in practice there's other rules -- like you should always sight-see or use cameras/videos on the way into the cave. On the exit you should be more efficient (effectively this usually means you use 1/3rd of your gas to enter, and only 1/4 of your gas to exit, which means you have a higher buffer should anything go wrong).
The redundancy figures quoted are also low. I've done around 200 cave dives. I've had one hose blow on me in a cave and therefore lost a regulator. I can't think of any other local divers who have had a similar situation where they've actually needed to exit a cave with a failed regulator. I would say the failure rate is most likely closer to 1 in 1000. But even taking 1 in 200 as the failure rate, the chances of three failures are 1 in 8,000,000 and even then you can buddy breathe off of a single remaining regulator and you should still have gas supply to exit (the remaining third is there for that kind of situation).
And now I'm more careful to not only get my regulator serviced but to be more aware of changing out hoses and to do so before cave trips if there's signs of wear.
Generally with cave fatalities there are blatant issues, such as failure to maintain a continuous guideline leading to navigation errors leading to simply running out of gas because nobody was paying any attention.
There's only one known cave diving fatality where all the rules were followed and diver still died, which was the cave diving fatality that killed Parker Turner.
Given that I am sure there are many other ways that one could die in submerged caves like these, as the people in the article did, I imagine that the actual 'lifetime probably' of death in frequent cave divers is much higher.
The one guy, Huotarinen, in the article died while trying to switch mouthpieces, and he was an experienced cave diver, not recreational diver.
So more like 100^3 to start with, and then the failure rate in practice is lower than that (I've done 200 cave dives and I've had 1 failure -- and I know many other cave divers with similar levels of experience that have had none).
But it's also verifiably one of the more dangerous sporting activities known.
> more than 11 hours after setting off on a dive that was supposed to take five hours.
I mean this is just insane. I can't even imagine trying to do something in which any mistake could instantly cause my death for 11 hours straight.
> "There are lots of questions - the original questions - about where the cave goes, and where the water comes from, and they are still there," he says. "And I am not afraid of the cave."
I appreciate this attitude, but I'm wondering if it would diminish the sport at all to have autonomous vehicles explore the cave before a dive.
It doesn't remove the physical challenge of the sport itself, but it could help divers prepare for tough portions of the dive.
e.g. at 110m depth, narrow passage. Single file proceeding with X minutes budgeted for issues.
The story of Chris McCandless[1] (Into The Wild) spoke to me so strongly, I made the trek[2] into the wilderness where he passed away, an old bus on the side of a trail in Alaska.
Chris' is a very controversial story, with many people believing he was an idiot for wandering in there "unprepared" and many thinking he is inspirational. I wound up spending 4 years living in the North, exploring the far corners of Yukon and Alaska.
I feel strongly there are some personality types that just need to get "off the map" and I love the part of Jon Krakauer's book Into The Wild where he suggests having a piece of wilderness on the earth that literally has no map. People can choose to go in there to explore. They'll (likely) find mountains, rivers, lakes, caves, etc. but nothing will be mapped, everything is to be discovered. When they return, they can't talk specifics, or show photos.
Some of us want to go places that have been unexplored, and we accept that risk.
Some questions.
1) What did you eat and drink?
2) Where did you sleep?
3) What was an average day like?
4) How did you deal with days like christmas day, new years eve, your birthday, the solstice and any other special day to you.
5) Did you see or find anything curious? Something that made you pause and wonder?
6) Is that sort of adventure a man thing? Did you ever hear of a woman doing something similar by choice?
Also in the UK is is very easy to have an adventurous experience if you want. The Brecons, the Highlands, etc are well beyond civilization.
The thing that pissed me off the most was when he burned his money instead of donating it to charity.
>he was intentionally not optimizing for survival
That's a good way to say it. In all honesty - when I optimize for survival I actually find life too boring, easy and mundane. I want more excitement and adventure than that, so I understand why Chris did what he did.
>who made bad decision after bad decision.
It's very easy to armchair quaterback. Have you hiked into the middle of nowhere in Alaska and tried to survive? Have you hunted your own food? Have you struggled to cross glacier-melt rivers?
I have, and a lot more. I've seen friends go underwater at -35C 100km from anywhere, had snowmobiles not start at -50C well over 200km from anywhere, had severe hypothermia where I thought I was hot, lost feeling in my fingers for hours, jumped up and down on the spot for hours in an attempt to warm up, etc. etc.) Anyone that does as well as Chris did is not an idiot.
Most people wouldn't last a week, let alone 3 months.
Not even the native people of the area could have done it. Hunting for sustenance isn't a solo activity. Hunting large game is high reward with high uncertainty. You probably need a group of at least five people. With multiple hunters only one of them has to land a kill to feed the group. And it means there is the manpower present to process or eat all of the meat before it spoils. Which is what happened to McCandless. He was a skilled hunter to bring down a moose with a .22 but he only got a few meals from the carcass before it rotted, wasting hundreds of pounds of meat.
I can point you to a record from 1770-ish of a native american woman who managed to survive for six months alone in far north Canada, after escaping from her slavers. The party who discovered her was shocked she could even be alive and none of them had ever heard of such a thing. (Samuel Hearne's journals)
edit: Bagging a single moose during the season isn't "sustenance". It is sport. If it ends up in a chest freezer, then it doesn't count for this discussion. Sustenance means 100% of your calories come from hunted game. And sustenance-hunters at that latitude, even with a group, can go a week without seeing any animals.
Scaling up what I've seen people do with white tailed deer, 5 people could probably process 800 pounds of moose in two days if they already had stockpiled all the wood. Groups of 100 could eat it all. And groups that large were common for moving across the land.
That's not even close to the truth. I can tell you've never hunted your own large game.
Quite a few of my friends go and get a bull moose solo every year... paddle down a river for a week, shoot it, skin, quarter, load into canoe and keep paddling.
One of them is 65, still doing it :)
I always just go with one friend, moose and bison each time.
> eat all of the meat before it spoils
You think 5 people will eat >800lbs of meat before it spoils? Not even close.
Sure, McCandless didn't do a good job smoking it, but he sure as hell tried, and he learned a lot that would have worked better next time. I guarantee you won't meet a single person living in Yukon/Alaska that didn't f-up some aspect of large game hunting when they started out (me included).
McCandless did what all people moving North do - he threw himself in and tried to learn as fast as possible. The main difference is he didn't give himself any margin for error, because that would have made it less interesting/exciting.
I'll answer those questions as they apply to Alaksa->Argentina. Let me know if you meant something else, or want me to expand.
>1) What did you eat and drink?
I bought bottled water for the entire trip - it was easy to get 20L of filter water everywhere and fill up my container. I tried to cook all my own food on my little camp stove, rice, beans, pasta. etc. Then cooked food was very cheap in South America, so I was buying it at markets, etc. It was around $1USD for a huge plate.
>2) Where did you sleep?
In my ground tent about 3/4 of the nights, the rest in hostels or cheaper hotels. I always tried to "wild camp" for free - off the side of gravel roads, etc. I never had a single problem or bad encounter doing that.
>3) What was an average day like? Wake up with the sun, eat breakfast, exercise, break camp, drive about 1-2 hours, then find something to do for the rest of the day - swimming, hiking, markets, cities, reading, chatting to people, walking on the beach etc. then find somewhere to camp (free, hopefully!)
> 4) How did you deal with days like christmas day, new years eve, your birthday, the solstice and any other special day to you.
A couple were lonely and I was a bit sad, for others I had friends fly in, and even my whole family came to Buenos Aires for Christmas.
> 5) Did you see or find anything curious? Something that made you pause and wonder?
Yep. The energy at the magic bus is something I still wonder about. It should be a sad place, but it's actually an extremely energizing, happy place. Something is going on there I don't understand. (I'm not religious... but... I dunno)
> 6) Is that sort of adventure a man thing? Did you ever hear of a woman doing something similar by choice?
Absolutely women do it too! A female friend just drove AK->Argentina solo, and another is setting out in the next couple of years. I met hundreds of solo female backpackers too, having the time of their lives.
At first I didn't understand what happened, but this article made everything understandable.
They could use some kind of haptic feedback system working to communicate between each other through RF waves. If one person presses a button, the other members feel a vibration or some similar haptic feedback. This would allow people to signal danger more easily. It would also make sense to have a notification signaling when any member is outside of the RF range.
Having such a tech would have allowed Gronqvist to have directly been alerted when Huotarinen became stuck either by Huotarinen alerting him or by the notification that Huotarinen was outside of the RF range (which would probably not carry very far in that situation). If other members had been alerted faster, Huotarinen would have had less time to start panicking and would maybe not have needed that cylinder of gaz.
So, maybe I'm incredibly naive and there's a good reason but it seems stupid and dangerous to rely on a torch to signal distress (which is often not going to be visible to members in front of the group).
So the problem wasn't really a communication problem, but they didn't follow good cave diving practice and thats most likely whats killed them. Normal cave dives starts and ends in the same opening, so you will never be at a point where you cant exit the same entrance as you started. When you do a more complex dive like a traverse as the Finnish did you always make sure you have dived ALL of the cave you want to traverse before! Normally you will do a setup dive from the other side of the system, and place a "cookie" (non directional marker) on the line where you turn. If you reach the cookie from the other side you can, if you up for it, continue to the other entrance. By doing so you ensure that everybody know of hazards like small and tight restrictions and that they dont catch you by surprise when you have passed the point of no return. (when you dont have gas/scrubber time to exit the entrance you started from)
That's also a good point regarding the point of no return and preparation, the comments from the English divers did hint that preparation had been lacking but the article didn't really explain what could have been done better.
I've always been fascinated by cave diving but I've got asthma and I doubt I could ever do it due to that.
> The Plurdalen Valley
Which is funny because the -en in Norwegian means 'the' and 'dal' means valley. So in a way it says 'The the Plura valley valley'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_(landform)
It's there in English too.
At least one of the top riders is a family man, he brings his wife and kids to the island every year.
There is an excellent documentary about the races [0] which I highly recommend. The wives of these people seem very accepting of what they do.
The bereaved wife of a TT racer is featured quite prominently in that film. She is very philosophical about the whole thing, basically saying that his obsession was so great that it wouldn't have been reasonable to ask him to stop.
We seem to be Ok, with people, risking their life to protect the interests of the country and thus protect our interests, but not ok if they risk their lives for themselves?
I very much understand the sense of duty that pulls people toward the military, and I know it's frequently a complicated situation. But I don't think I'll never understand these guys who marry a woman, have a kid or three in between deployments, then just go running back into a war zone.
What should the divers have done to avoid this? Were they just not experienced enough for a dive of this magnitude? One mentions they should have done a practice run, but what does that mean? How do you practice for a dive?
> But after descending about 85m Kankanen returned. Looking upset, he explains in the film that he slept badly and is simply not in the right frame of mind for the operation.
This happened on the retrial mission, but it hints very softly at the culture in which this group of people went cave diving.
I interpret the comment about not having to have died in the first place, as meaning that cave diving is extremely dangerous, and so planning and execution need to be perfect and require a great deal of mental control.
The first person died after he got entangled by some cord, and then after panicking being unable to switch to a fresh air supply. Why the second diver died is unclear. So maybe they weren't in the right frame of mind to deal well enough with running into dangerous problems at depth.
It contains numerous case studies of diving screwups that either ended in death or near-death and what can be learned from them to avoid those situations.