Safe Dive Team Manning Levels

A key contributor to many preventable diving incidents and fatalities, safe dive team manning is specifically addressed in the ADCI's (Association of Diving Contractors International) Consensus Standards for Commercial Diving and Underwater Operations.

In this post, we will discuss required manning levels for diving inside a potable water storage facility. Many fatalities have been recorded by OSHA for this work, and insufficient dive team manning levels are a key contributor to a lot of them.

Think about it: With a three man dive team, there is a diver, a tender/standby diver and a dive supervisor. In an emergency like an injured diver, hypothermia, loss of air supply, etc., what chance does a single tender at the entry hatch on top of a water tower have to recover an injured diver to safety by himself? A fully dressed-in diver can weigh upwards of 240lbs, and if he's not able to climb the internal ladder, a single tender has no chance to pull him up by his umbilical. This is not hypothetical, these small teams are working on water tanks and towers every day, and a tragic incident occurred inside a water tank just a few months ago.

The ADCI addressed this issue last year with a comprehensive rewrite of the Consensus Standards Section 5.36, Potable Water Diving Operations. The standard clearly states:

The minimum number of personnel comprising a dive team working inside a potable water storage facility is never less than four, as follows:

Diver

Standby Diver

Tender

DPIC (Diving Supervisor)

What does this mean for clients? Safer diving operations when they engage a reputable contractor who complies with industry standards. Clients should always protect themselves by looking beyond the lowest bid and asking questions about diver training, equipment maintenance and dive team manning levels. These incidents are preventable, but it requires clients to understand the risks to the contractors and to themselves when they select a low bidder who may not comply with the required safety standards.

In future posts, we will look at some of the common sense tools clients can use to help them identify safe, reputable diving contractors, before the contract is awarded all the way through execution of the project.