Visitor dies after diving off North West Point
(CNS): A 65-year-old man from Tennessee died Sunday morning following a dive off the coast off the North West Point area at Orange Canyon, in West Bay. Police said emergency services were called to the West Bay dock just before 10:30am on 6 December, where medics administered emergency treatment to the American visitor. Gary Paul Kodman who had been diving with Reef Divers, was taken to the George Town hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Kodman had just arrived in the Cayman Islands with his wife on Saturday 5 December.
A RCIPS spokesperson said that an investigation into the incident is being conducted by the Joint Marine Unit.
Category: Local News
My sincere condolances to the family. However, please also spare a thought for the hard working, highly trained and dedicated crew who would have done all they posibly could for this gentleman. They are having to cope with the traumer of not being able to save him. This will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Whilst true, that diving comes with inherent risks, some companies and key players in the industry have to do more to manage those risks more effectively.
Thankfully the majority of dive operations are well intended, safety minded and run by good honest people who have a love for the sport. However there are some operations who run on the line of complacency, poor management , and in some cases blind negligence.
It is very easy to point fingers at Divemasters in these incidents, however if someone is having a heart attack 100ft below the surface, even an instructor of 30 years can do very little at that point.
The responsibility to make sure that appropriate measures are taken by the dive operator to make sure that the diver is fit and qualified is key, also divers need to stay fit , and be honest, and choose their dive shop wisely.
Bad things happen, but we as an industry need to do as much as we can to try to make sure guests go home from their vacations alive and not just think about the bottom line.
As a former scuba instructor with 31 years of experience in the sport ( started as dive-master in Cayman in 1984 ) and have dived the world over , without bias I’d have to say some of the best trained & experienced scuba professionals in the sport exist both currently & in the past here in our 3 islands. This is due to their excellent training & partly to the exposure they get to the many demographics of tourists in the sport of varying age and ability levels , disabilities and specialised areas of the sport , both free diving and technical aspects . Local dive shops make sure their staff is well trained in a continual progression of gleaning the latest in safety aspects and knowledge of the sport. All this experience however cannot reveal if a diving participant ( despite age, health and medical assurances) has an underlying issue that may be a factor in a persons safety, whilst submerged & engaging in scuba. Either from the clinical position , mental state , overall fitness level. As history has shown, with well documented incident cases here, even young people who should be otherwise in perfect physical condition to engage in the sport ( in their 20’s to 30’s ) have suffered the unfortunate occurrence of a fatality. Ideas expressed here of having Government regulate the sport to instil safety & prevent accidents & fatalities is pure fantasy & laughable. It is a sport that does not come without risks. Riding your bicycle or walking down the roadside also has its risks . Can Government prevent accidents & fatalities by regulating bike riding and walking ?
I don’t dive and know absolutely nothing about diving. However I have a very good memory and don’t remember this many drownings in the waters here in the past. I realise that more persons are diving but there are supposedly more train dive masters as well so everything should be relevant. I think the Environment Minister and his staff should host talks, refreshers courses with new guidelines to try to make our beautiful waters a safer place to dive, snorkels and swim. I have heard that The Cayman Islands is a favorite diving destination so let us do whatever is necessary to keep it so Condolences to the family and friends of Mr. Codman.
Make the dive companies liable for negligence and that they carry $10m or so of insurance.
Gary was my personal friend for 28 years. We have been camping, hiking, boating, skiing, wake boarding for all of those 28 years. Gary had been to diving school several years before and had been certified. This was not his first diving trip to the Cayman islands. While not a multi-year veteran of the sport he knew what he was doing and was not one to take unnecessary risks.
Gary was over 60 of that it is certain. Gary also did not have any known health issues. It may just have been his time to go. An undiagnosed medical condition perhaps. At this point no one knows what really happened.
But stopping people at a certain age from pursuing something they enjoy is not the answer. The time line for anyone is finite. Going out doing something you enjoy is better than wasting away in a nursing home or die in a senseless auto crash. Gary enjoyed diving and he died doing something he enjoyed.
Yes, it will be difficult on his family and friends. I am still in a state of shock that my best friend is now gone. It will be even more difficult as his body is returned to his home state of Tennessee. My only solace in this entire situation is that his last adventure was of his choosing, that he enjoyed, and his death was not from some senseless tragedy.
RIP Mr. Kodman. You will be missed by many.
I am sorry for your loss. 14 visitors have died this way in this year alone. The death rates are far too high. The Government refuses to bring in simple legislation that would save some of these lives because dive companies have to be locally owned and doing so might cost the politicians votes. Tourists don’t vote you see. It is horrible to read these stories every two or three weeks. Nothing is ever done.
It is a shame that people die doing what they love! There have been 14 visitors that have died…..please tell us how many have come to the Island in the same time period. Maybe then you will not think 14 is many. It will barely make a percent!
It will not make a difference who owns the company. Underwater is a great place to be, but it causes pressure to the body as well as other things. Some bodies are just ready to go peacefully, underwater!
Scuba diving places a lot of stress on the body. If you don’t believe me, try it. You are as much as 120 feet from fresh air. You are breathing high pressure air or nitrox. There are many rules to obey, scientific principles to understand and current weather, ocean current situations to understand.
Scuba diving needs to be much more highly regulated. There should be medical cards and refresher courses as a minimum.
Perhaps Cayman could use these tragedies to create massive changes in legislation that actually create a SAFER diving environment? Then we would have even more divers coming here.
Clearly written by someone who not only doesn’t scuba dive but hasn’t got a clue what they’re talking about.
I’ve worked in places where scuba diving was regulated to the point of being totally anal and you know what? It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the incident rates. In fact because the area was seen as being super-safe dive centre staff got complacent, people didn’t conduct simple checks and things went wrong that shouldn’t have done.
If, as happens in one place I went to a few years ago, you make every visiting diver have a medical exam or produce a valid diver medical then also make them do a check dive guess what happens? They go somewhere else.
You start bringing in legislation to regulate diving in the Cayman Islands and it won’t give the impression of a safe diving environment to people who are accustomed to effective self-regulation – it will send out exactly the opposite message.
The Cayman Islands is one of the most benign and stress-free places to dive I’ve ever been to in over 20 years of diving. You start imposing knee-jerk regulation on it and you will kill the industry.
60 Minutes could do a show on the monthly death rate of American tourists diving and snorkelling in Cayman waters.
If the dive industry was a skydiving industry, with the same number of deaths, it would be shut down overnight.
Why are there no investigations into the number of incompetent qualified divemasters operating on Island? I say incompetent because whatever the qualification process is, it is missing some major component in terms of vetting participants in this sport.
I do not like to make comparisons but the difference between the safety record of the dive industry today and the dive industry of 25 years ago, is alarming. I know the numbers have increased but the ratio of deaths to participants does not add up for me, then again I may be wrong. Does anyone have the statistics?
I still cannot believe that no one has ever been charged with negligent homicide to date in any of these deaths. Are we testing for things like bad air in tanks etc.? I am asking because I do not know the answers…..
I was out on another boat at the time but near the site where the incident happened – The current in the ocean wasn’t particularly bad that day round by the sites heading round towards NW point (although it picked up later on). I don’t think negligence can be blamed, especially here in Cayman. We have much higher standards and protocol for equipment/qualification and etiquette than other popular dive destinations around the world. I can give you a list of things that would meet other destinations requirements but are not good enough for cayman. Tanks are usually filled by a company like pure air, and these companies supply nearly all the islands dive operations so I think ‘bad air’ isn’t really a valid concern.
That and as the friend of the victim said above, sometimes your body can just give up. It wasn’t a particularly tough dive, it was around 100 or so feet and as an experienced diver its something I’m sure he was comfortable with doing many times before.
I think people without any knowledge about diving get all sceptical about all the procedures and the complexities seem to jump to conclusions. But the reality is, diving is a pretty easy thing to do and with most people equipped with dive computers nowadays diving is made easier.
I think people suggesting more money on even more in depth procedures in the dive industry are ridiculous. Why not open up the discussion about putting money in for public transport and policing to stop all the drink driving and the deaths of many young Caymanians instead…
There are many variables such as dehydration as well as alcohol consumption, which could be factors in some of these tragedies. I have viewed many times, tourists going on a morning dive after ‘partying’ the night before. Hung over young Dive Masters are prevelant, too.
A little perspective is in order.
It can be difficult to determine how many dives are done in any given geographic area per year, but the best data available (from BSAC and DAN) shows a death rate from scuba diving accidents at 14.4 to 16.4 per 100,000 population. Other studies have cited rates from 3.4 to 34 per 100,000 population. (See Annual Fatality Rates and Associated Risk Factors for Recreational Scuba Diving at pdf link here: http://www.diverbelow.it/attachments/article/52/DAN_Fatalities_8.pdf )
And diving has progressively become safer over the years with declining absolute numbers of fatalities despite and increasing number of dives being done.
By point of comparison the death rate from motor vehicle accidents in the United States in the year 2013 (most recent data from US Dept of Transportation) was 10.3 deaths per 100,000. (See USDOT data cited by the Insurance Institute for highway Safety here: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview )
So diving is riskier than driving, But how does it compare to other activities?
The fatality rate for motorcyclists in 2013 (the safest year cited) was 55.54 fatalities per 100,000 registered motorcycles.
Working as a farmer: 22.8 deaths per 100,000 farm workers.
Working as a police officer: 15 deaths per 100,000 workers
Working as laborer in construction: 17.8 deaths per 100,000
Working as an electrical linesman: 23.9 deaths per 100,000
Scuba diving is not without its risks, but we are not up in arms insisting that people stop farming, policing, or building things and we sure as hell insist that CUC keep our power on despite the risks to the linesmen.
Thank you anon 5 34 and anon 2 49 for your kind well thought out responses to my post. I am more educated and better informed about the safety record of the dive industry in the Cayman Islands now.
From the statistics quoted it appears that the dive industry in Cayman has a safety record that should be the envy of most other jurisdictions that cater to diving and that potential divers should not be deterred from persueing diving in the Cayman Islands.
Least anyone reading my post may have misunderstood my comment and comparison to sky diving, I was not suggesting that we ban diving in Cayman, with the facts that I now have, conversely I will continue to promote diving in Cayman over most diving destinalions in the world.
As a qualified scuba diver I will personally find oppurtunities to get back into the activity as it has been some time since I have donned a tank……….no fear of bad air……thanks Pureair.
My condolences to the family.
There should be the age limit. 60 is for sure. For their own sake
Figuring that I’d had 20 good years of the sport (including working as an instructor in my 40s and 50s) I stopped diving just after my 61st birthday. However, that was my choice and I don’t see any sort of regulation or age limits making sense because at the end of the day if people want to dive they will.
In theory the recreational depth limit for the Cayman Islands is 100′ – you wouldn’t believe how many dives way deeper than that I logged in my 50s without incident. It’s like solo diving. Many of the dive centres on these islands are totally anal about that but when I retired my logbook contained 100s of solo dives including a number of deep wreck penetrations. Bottom line is if people what to do things they will and to heck with regulations.
You can put all the restrictions on the planet into force and it won’t change a thing. I worked in a country where diver medicals are mandatory. In order to start an open water course you need to pass a full physical with a chest x-ray. If you’re over 40 you also need an ECG. Despite all that we had a 37-year-old female student die from a heart attack during shallow water (we didn’t use a pool) training on the second day of her OW course.
Remember that the cause of just about every diving fatality in the Cayman Islands over the past 10 years can be traced back to pre-existing medical conditions that had not been declared on dive centre waivers and a lot of the victims were under 60 – how are you going to deal with that?
These things happens, it’s very hard on the family but this is life.
If there was an area where there could be improvement it might be that dive centres pay a bit more attention to their customers and develop a willingness to say, “I really think you should consider getting a check out before diving,” when things don’t look right. They might also consider the procedures for accepting (and I know it wasn’t the case here) divers pre-booked by the cruise lines.
But there are profits to be made and exclusion clauses to get them to sign.
I don’t know if an age limit should be set really. But I think that just about every death by diving – and snorkeling is always a person over the age of 55 – 60. So this clearly isn’t a coincidence. Maybe people of this age should have it forcefully driven home to them (in a nice way!) when they sign up for the dive, that for their age group it’s a riskier sport – whatever their current state of health.
I’m the original poster on this and unfortunately the thing that has to be forcefully driven home to people is that lying on waivers (and I am not for one second saying that it happened here, just that it does) about health conditions and the meds they’re taking isn’t smart.
I was in the Bahamas a few years ago and discovered when we all went to lunch one day that one of my party was taking six prescription drugs, all for various medical problems that were clearly listed on our waivers. Needless to say he didn’t dive with us again.
While again not wishing to be seen to make any comment on this particular tragedy the common thread amongst most of the watersports deaths on these islands over the past decade is that the deceased had identifiable medical problems that had not been declared. And it’s no good screaming for mandatory medicals or stuff like that because it’s as easy to lie to a doctor as it is to do it on a waiver and just as easy to forge diver medical exam forms.
Bluntly, I think the answer is to add a section on the waivers that makes lying on the form unattractive – like making the diver indemnify the dive centre and the Cayman Islands Government for all expenses incurred following an incident if any of the responses on the form are found to be false. I would also like to see the practice of letting cruise ship staff selling divers pre-booked trips stopped because they’ll sign up anybody who can produce a C-card or something that resembles one.