Commercial divers are calling for an overhaul of safety standards following the death of a diver working on the salvage of the Costa Concordia. Statistics show commercial diving has a high fatality rate, with around 27 deaths per year globally. Divers associations point to lax regulations and inadequate investigations of accidents as ongoing issues. Improved standards based on lessons from investigations could help reduce risks, but require expertise and buy-in lacking among some authorities currently.

1. Concordia salvage death sparks safety push
Commercial divers highlight dangers and urge overhaul of standards, IHS
Maritime’s Girija Shettar reports
Tom Wingen, a retired commercial diver with experience in salvage operations told IHS
Maritime that although he had not known the late Israel Franco Moreno who was killed
while at work on the Costa Concordia salvage operation in February, he said he would have
been one of the best.
"He was pretty special. I mean, that is the biggest job in salvage ever in the world. They
would have had thousands of applicants, and he would have been picked out of that list of
thousands ... guys don’t just get on that job. Moreno would have had a huge salvage
experience," he said.
After the death of Moreno, 41, the Divers Association told IHS Maritime it wanted an
overhaul of safety standards.
The Diving Association said the fatality highlighted continuing diving safety issues that have
contributed to a high number of commercial diver deaths.
The Association’s nuclear representative, Kyra Richter, maintains a database of worldwide
diving accidents. It reveals a rising trend of fatalities from the year 2000, resulting in
approximately 27 deaths a year – in a small industry (approximately 5,000 working divers in
the UK and 7,000 in the US – statistics from other regions were not available at the time of
going to press).
All incidents recorded by Richter are verified by obituaries, legal documents, and website
reports. They do not include scientific dives, military dives, and dives by firemen and
policemen, or near misses. She said her “conservative” approach to the statistics is “because
I want to be able to use each and every one as part of my irrefutable argument that the
regulations are sorely unenforced, if at all, at present,” said Richter.
Richter said that the one exception is the nuclear diving segment, which successfully raised
its standards in 2003 after the near death of a diver.
“A major part of that change was the attitude: if there’s a safer way to do it and we can’t do
that, we don’t do it at all,” said Richter.
Common flaws in diving operations include: not verifying diver qualifications and
experience; understaffing; inadequate dive plans and hazard assessments; and a “hero”
attitude to “save the day”, which undermines safe practice – an attitude more prevalent in
salvage diving, said Richter.
The Divers Association’s mission is to ‘further the implementation of safe diving practices
throughout the world’. Association member Tom Wingen is a retired salvage and offshore
diver living in Norway. He acts as expert witness in the case of diver fatalities. Most recently,
the Association raised awareness around three diver deaths on European wind farms, where
serious operational flaws were uncovered.

2. “The standards are so lax now that you can’t work with them. In that respect, I would say
that salvage companies probably work to higher than government standards,” Wingen told
IHS Maritime, adding: “But they can always do more. Better standards could help.”
There are multiple diving regulations worldwide and they are not harmonized. “If we cannot
have universal standards, there should be as few as possible,” said Richter, who claimed that
“the many choices lead to manipulation by companies in order to improve the bottom line”.
In Richter’s opinion regulations from the International Marine Contractors Association
“should be global”. But IMCA told IHS Maritime that it represents offshore marine and
underwater engineering companies and does not cover salvage operations, which “require a
specialist set of skills and expertise”.
The regulations also pose confusion at the time of an accident investigation and contribute
to diving accident investigations “being passed around from one authority to the next”.
Wingen agreed. He cited the death of Steven O’Malley (a wind farm diver), whose death was
recorded via a helmet camera, and which Wingen watched and subtitled for the Danish
police and the Danish Maritime Authority.
“The problem we are having is finding an agency that takes full responsibility for the
investigation of diving injuries and fatalities on wind farms and follows through,” said
Wingen.
The problem exists, he said, for three ongoing cases (all wind farm diver fatalities). One was
of Steven O’Malley, who died in the German Exclusive Economic Zone when working from a
ship under the Danish flag.
While the Danish Maritime Authority claimed jurisdiction over the situation, it
simultaneously said it could not investigate the case because the incident was not “directly
in connection with the operations of the ship” (Directive 2009/18/EC of 23 April 2009, art.
3(2) and art. 5 (1) which refer to Resolution MSC.255(84), chapter 2, art. 2(9)). The police
subsequently closed the case, as did the DMA.
As in the US, the European Union has no overarching diving regulations. “Many member
states have regulations,” OSHA spokesperson Birgit Müller told IHS Maritime, but not all.
Greek lawyer Silina Pavlakis recently filed a compensation claim for the widow and two
children of a diver killed during a fully Greek salvage operation in October 2007; a criminal
trial will open in June to try the diving boat owner, and employer of the deceased, accused
of manslaughter by negligence. Her claim cites multiple violations of safety rules and
regulations. But to show this, Pavlakis will need to draw on a raft of international and
European regulations, such as the International Code of Practice for Offshore Diving issued
by the International Marine Contractors Association, the IMO’s Code of Safety for Diving
Systems, Resolution 536(13), and the US Navy’s tables and rules for de-compression.
“These non-Greek rules and regulations and standards were invoked merely to enlighten
points where the Greek legislation is very general and outdated,” Pavlakis told IHS Fairplay.
The death of Israel Franco Moreno in Italy is being investigated by the public prosecutor’s
office in Grosseto because the accident occurred in Italian territorial waters. At the time of
going to press, the Italian authority was not available to speak to IHS Maritime about the
diving regulations under which Moreno would have been working.

3. Richter’s statistics show that shipping has the second highest number of fatalities after
fishing, and within the shipping segment, salvage claims the highest death rate.
The deaths are not justified by the high-risk nature of commercial diving, said Richter and
Wingen.
“Divers are supposed to be diving in an environment that is anything but uncontrolled,” said
Richter. “It is all carefully planned. Hazards are analysed, understood, mitigated, and then
decisions made on how best to do it,” she said.
Wingen warned that the industry is currently wary of regulations being created by
“bureaucrats” lacking dive experience and that the critical information needed to feed in to
effective regulation is lacking due to inadequate accident investigations.
“You can’t write standards out of the clear blue sky. They have to be based on critical
information, and that’s what’s lacking,” he said.
Richter concurred from the US perspective. “I would say there is a lack of expertise in the US
Occupational Safety and Health Authority and the US Coast Guard to investigate diving
incidents,” she said. She showed IHS Maritime a health authority report where the deceased
diver’s occupation was “not reported”. “Tell me how much knowledge went into this,
whoever investigated this?” she asked.
Richter complained that many incidents are reported as “drownings” or “heart attacks” but
fail to provide explanations of the actual cause of death. These are ultimately “inconclusive”
reports, she said.
Commercial expediency can play a role in under- or misreporting incidents: “They don’t
want to lose the contract,” said Richter.
In 1996, Brian Pilkington (23) was killed while inspecting an offshore oil rig in 28ft of water
for a Houston, Texas-based marine company. The initial report blamed Brian for the fatal
accident. It took his father, Peter Pilkington, five years, three formal investigations and over
$1M (a combination of lost work time, travel expenses, hotels, phone calls, time spent in
meetings, interviewing witnesses, reviewing medical records, etc) to clear his son’s name
and uncover the truth – that Brian was killed by an equipment failure.
“Brian’s death was not listed as a commercial diving fatality for four years despite the fact
that he was [working] under US Coast Guard supervision and he was employed by a diving
company owned by the executive director of the Association of Diving Contractors,”
Pilkington told IHS Maritime.
A 1998 study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found commercial divers
subject to 40 times the national average death rate for all workers, with 49 deaths (five per
year) among an estimated 3,000 full-time commercial divers during 1989-1997,
corresponding to a rate of about 180 deaths per 100,000 divers per year.
‘Concordia salvage death sparks safety push’ appeared in HIS Maritime’s Fairplay
magazine 13 March 2014. For more maritime insight see http://www.sea-
web.com/seaweb_welcome.aspx