Solo Diving - Risk Assessment

Risk Assessment

There has been much controversy over the relative safety and merits of solo diving. In 2003, very few statistics existed regarding the impact of solo diving on safety. A 2006 report from the British Sub-Aqua Club (BSAC) concluded that "BSAC currently takes the view that based on evidence from available statistics and risk assessment, the increased risk attendant to allowing planned solo diving is unacceptable". The data underlying the statistics which are used to point to the dangers of solo diving are dubious however. For example, divers who end up dying alone but originally had started out as part of a buddy pair are often considered to be "diving solo" in such statistics.

In actuality, studies show that with buddy diving death incidents, 57% of deaths happened after the buddy pair had separated from one another during the emergency. Again, these cases should be more rightly attributed to failure of the buddy system rather than failure of any solo diving/self sufficient diving system. A further complication in such statistics is that certain more dangerous diving practices (e.g. cave diving) are frequently carried out solo. Therefore it is a question whether a death in such a dive should be attributed at all to solo diving, instead of just to cave diving. Going back to the figures used by BSAC to categorise solo diving as dangerous it turns out that during 2001–2008 all but one of these "solo diving deaths" were in actuality paired buddy divers that became separated in the fatal incident (75%) or else were divers diving far outside of the limits set by both SDI and PADI for the practise of solo diving (20%) (i.e. actually deep divers, rebreather tech-divers, cave divers). Two further "solo-diving deaths" were in actuality not scuba divers at all, but snorkelers.

Without a doubt, two highly competent totally self-sufficient divers diving a specific dive profile as a buddy pair are at lower risk than those same two divers diving exactly the same profile separately, but this raises the question "how often do normal buddy divers both really fit into this particular description?" When considering the risks in solo diving the alternative risks found predominantly in buddy diving need also be considered. The greatest danger to sports divers is inexperience – 60% of all diving fatalities involve divers having less than 20 completed dives. The buddy system itself can be a source of risk – a 2006 survey showed that 52% of buddy divers were at some time actually endangered by a buddy's behaviors or actions.