In this episode of The Dive Locker podcast, we hear from Francois Burman, Director of Underwater and Hyperbaric Safety at Divers Alert Network about the new programs and resources with DAN.

Welcome to The Dive Locker Podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management, and dive business.

I’m your host, Tec Clark. And today we are going to start our series of check-ins. So what is a check-in? Well, imagine this, if you were to go to the DEMA show and you were to walk up to a vendor’s booth (a training agency or whatnot) and say, “Hey, what’s new? What do you guys got going on at this show?” What they are there to tell you about and share with you are what these check-ins are about.

Because so many of you listening to this podcast did not go, had no opportunity to go to the DEMA show or whatever this is for you. And for those of you that did go, maybe it didn’t get all the information from the vendors that you wish to have seen or heard from. So that is what the check-ins are all about. First up is Divers Alert Network. I sat down with Francois Burman, Director of Underwater and Hyperbaric Safety at Divers Alert Network.

He shared with me all the new things that DAN is promoting at this year’s show and into 2020 these include their new Dive Boat Safety eLearning course, as well as their Gas Quality e-learning course. I thought these were fantastic. He also discusses the denial of the right to accept a client. That’s a good one. Now those were seminars that were part of the show, but also the HIRA, the Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment Guide. So I’m going to put all the links to these things in the show notes page so you’ll have them.

But listen to what he’s got to say about this. I found this to be really neat and informative and passionate. I love their passion that they have for dive safety as they, that is Divers Alert Network, continue to promote a “culture of dive safety” that is unsurpassed in our industry. So here we go, my interview with Francois Burman of Divers Alert Network for the DAN check in.

DAN Check-In

TC: Okay. So Francois, welcome to the DAN check-in on the dive locker podcast. Good to have you here.

FB: Thank you Tec, nice to be here with you.

TC: We are at the DEMA show 2019 Orlando, Florida, and your booth is absolutely rocking as it always is. Um, but also are your seminars. You have so many educational seminars going on. You always do every year. This year that was a lineup, there is a lineup that is fantastic and you just have so much going on. Can you tell the dive professionals listening, what are some of the things that you are here showcasing on behalf of DAN at the DEMA show?

FB: Okay, so that’s, it’s a good question. Yes, we do have pretty good lineup most years focusing on diving medicine, the questions professionals have to face when they have clients that present with issues and things that cause accidents, fatalities. And we normally have a pretty good lineup in terms of research programs, and then the instructional side, which is the, the courses, instructor trainer courses and so on.

My particularly area of interest and passion at the Divers Alert Network is safety. Affecting safety throughout the industry starts with the dive operator and the dive professional. We want diving to be safe. We want every dive to be accident and incident free. But the way to do that is to get the instructors on board, the professionals, on board, because they are essentially at the front line responsible for their clients and for the students that they’re training and that’s where the impact will actually be made. So my focus in the things that we are introducing this DEMA, are essentially based on that.

TC: Fantastic. What are some of these things that are being introduced at DEMA here?

Okay, so what’s new at this particular stage are two e-learning modules that are free online. You can access them with the DAN e-learning website. The first one is focused on dive boat safety and this was instigated by the US Coast Guard coming out with the recent news flash/safety flash Recommendations for Dive Boats. The US Coast Guard looks at obviously at all sorts of commercial vessels, but their particular concern has been commercial vessels that are involved in taking people out diving.

Obviously as a, as a service to the larger public. They can’t control private dive boating and diving on boats has certain, a number of fairly unique issues. Um, they’re taking divers clearly, but when divers get in distress, there are certain things that have to be done, there’s certain safety equipment that has to be out there, emergency action plans, a whole range of safety issues that they need to be concerned about. The e-learning market is purely education awareness.

We put a lot of resources on there. Checklists, information links to various other documents of interest. The idea is to inform not only the boat captain and the owner of the boat, but also the dive professional that charters the boat where someone else owns the boat and captains the boat, but that professional’s taking his clients out to go diving with its instructor or just leading a dive.

It’s probably, sadly it came at the right time in terms of recent events in the industry. But we’d started this in the many, many months ago and we tried to help the dive professional understand what the issues are and could prefect to prepare for them. And previously we mentioned emergency action plans. That’s really such an important aspect of identifying what emergencies you can have. We list them in the elearning course and we give some (inaudible) how to put together a plan that election, manage that emergency.

Sometimes you can’t stop things from happening, but you can certainly do much better damage control if you’re prepared and ready for that. So that’s the first elearning course. I say it’s free online and we encourage everybody to take that. The second course is the assurance of the gas that we breathe, that it’s safe for us to breathe. And this one was instigated by a coroner in another country that had had to deal with the pathology of yet another diver dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. And as he did his investigation found a huge amount of ignorance. So most dive operators would check their air every now and again that have a carbon monoxide poisoning. They tried to figure out where it was, but this wasn’t actively translate it into prevention.

So this course is aimed at the 18 year old looking for his first job in the dive industry, goes and works filling cylinders for him or her to understand where can contamination come from, why it’s so important and if it does get out into the cylinder, how we actually deal with it. So the idea is to prevent the diver from being intoxicated by preventing the air from being contaminated at source. So that’s education, checklists, lots of resources for them to read up on and they can go into any amount of depth they want to. They both take between 10 and 15 minutes to do. And the very end you print out your own certificate to say that you’ve taken the course to give your employer. Um, and in the case of any incidents, some assurance that you’ve at least been responsible in educating yourself.

Okay. Here at DEMA we introduced a new topic in terms of what is normally presented. And that’s the denial of the right to accept a client. In other words, can the professional say no to somebody that they feel shouldn’t be diving or should certainly not be diving with them? Again, it all comes down to safety. So what we’re trying to help the professional, the dive operator, the dive leader is when you can say no and how you say now and how you don’t get yourself embroiled in an argument that is personal. So by understanding what are the things that would affect that decision, um, we’re not talking to them about medicine. You’re just talking to them about the things they should be concerned about to construct a procedure or a policy that is proved by whoever’s involved in their dive business. Especially if you’re a public service like an aquarium that that gets vetted by the board of directors. You might want to take some degree of legal advice and then you follow that policy consistently each time you have this issue.

So when the discussion comes up, the policy says if we suspect that you, whatever the particular issue is that you can say that’s my policy. That’s what this company tells me to comply with. It’s not me being personal, but that’s what I’ve been told to do. It’s the same if you have the medical checklist. If you tick a yes, you have some issue that the checklist before the time is defined is a concern. Then I’m not being difficult to see you, you need to take medical advice, go see a DMO and get yourself suit fit to dive. So it’s trying to take out the sting, the thorn, that really leads to uncomfortable situations. Did you get into, you know, a case of, of being sued for being negligent in terms of taking somebody that shouldn’t have gone diving this?

TC: Exactly. Can you give us a common example? What do you, what do you see and hear?

FB: Can we get, it’s really divided into a few categories, but let’s just pick some of the more pertinent ones. The ones that are sometimes difficult to deal with. A diver comes to dive with you and either because they’re under the influence or they just naturally aggressive or they’re bullying somebody (like without being, you know, too minor directional) the husband and wife come in, he wants her to dive. It’s his passion. She really doesn’t want to dive. So this huge amount of peer pressure forcing her to do something that she’s really not comfortable to do. Now that dive instructor is taking an added risk because he now has to teach somebody that doesn’t really want to dive but she’s doing it to please her husband and the possibility of her panicking and things going wrong is magnified. So he, the dive instructor, needs a mechanism to say, look if there’s any suspected aggression and peer pressure, dishonesty influenced by alcohol or whatever, that we’ve got a clear cut way of doing it because of course an aggressive person will tell you he is not aggressive.

You’re on the receiving end and of course for you the perception is different. It’s different. So my boss has told me this policy that I need to follow, that if I am of the opinion that I’m going to find you very difficult to manage, then I need to encourage you to go take your business somewhere else. So that’s one that is difficult to deal with. The medical issues are actually relatively simple because as a dive instructor, you’re not a doctor, you have no medical qualification. So if the form says yes or no and they mark, yes. And they want to say, but you’re not in a position to make the decision. You need to tell them, look, you either can see a medical doctor that’s qualified to declare your fit to dive or I can’t take you diving. So it’s not personal, you know, I can’t make that judgment call.

TC: I think that’s a good point because there’s so many people that feel this personal investment to a) help the person get through this and “Oh, I don’t want to be a roadblock or a barrier to you doing something you’ve always wanted to do” or b), “I’m going to miss out on the revenue if you don’t take my class now”, like in a discover scuba at a resort and we’ve got an issue right now and the window is closing if we have to get a medical signature. And you hear the classic story of the person saying, you know, they’ve checked off asthma and the person’s going, “well tell me about your asthma. When was the last time you had,” “well I only had childhood asthma” and now all of a sudden it becomes this conversation. That conversation should never happen from day one at all because we as dive professionals are not qualified to make that.

And even if somebody who has higher level medical knowledge or training or certification, they’re not doing a proper evaluation on the individual. So, we need to be doing exactly what you’re saying, not engaging in this, “I’m a doctor and I’m going to make this call right now.”  

FB: And that’s really the, the tools that the professionals are asking us and when I’d have done the presentation a few times now, those are the questions that come up and you can see the relief that they say, okay, I can actually engage on this without getting myself hurt. And even when the person’s aggressive, you say, look, that’s our policy. If you have a problem with a policy, that’s a completely separate discussion, but I’m following what I’ve been told to follow. So the third one Tec is the difficult one and I almost hesitate to raise it, but it comes down to people that have disabilities and we know that we are legally very sensitive to this.

And of course disabled people need to have the opportunity to go diving. They, they benefit from the weightlessness, which doesn’t affect them as much as it does when they’re not in the water. It’s a fantastic experience. What needs to be understood is that this is a particular area of skill that needs to be departed upon that disabled person. They are organizations that train them for that and those organizations will then tell them when you go back and go diving, you need to select a dive operator that can accommodate you and you need to take somebody with you that can deal with you in the water, do not expect a regular dive small dive business to understand what your needs are.  And if you do that to them and you threaten them with legal sanction for because of the Americans with Disabilities Act and it’s very prescriptive, sure you could maybe win a lawsuit but this is not worth it and you’re putting that person in a very, very difficult position.

Big organizations, public services, they will make accommodations for that, but the regular dive business, they’re not set up for that. Your making it very difficult for them and your making it unfair for yourself too. Remember in all of this, it’s your safety, the safety of the staff, the safety of other divers and the safety of the public at large if things go wrong, that needs to be borne in mind.

It’s not just about the money. Any dive operator would love to take your dollars. That’s really been a part of what their business model is about. And Tec, if I may just elaborate a little bit on the disabled divers please. The ADA has a service, a public service, you could call them. You have a diver that comes in, they’re insistent, your very uncomfortable, call the ADA in real time, have that discussion with their arbitrators.

They will talk to the disabled person. They’ll talk to you, and they’ll assist you to make a decision that then places you in a position where at least you know from a legal point of view you followed the right procedure.

TC: What a tremendous resource. I did not know about that. Fantastic. I’ll look that up and I’ll put those links in the show notes page as well so that our professionals can go to that. That sounds tremendously helpful.  

FB: And it gives them the peace of mind that they’re not going to be pushed into a corner and bullied into doing something because of fear of legal sanction afterwards. Most divers, most disabled divers, are absolutely aware of their limitations so they want to be safe. They need to go to somebody that can, I know the schools are sometimes few and far between, but they exist and that’s what they specialize in doing.

TC: Fantastic. That’s great to know.

FB: Okay, so that’s one of the unique lectures that we’ve given this year and then the last part of what is relatively new here at DEMA this year is that at the last DEMA we launched the hard copy of our HIRA Hazard Identification Risk Assessment Guide, which is aimed at dive operators and dive professionals. This is a tool, this is education awareness to enable the dive operator and the dive professional to understand what the risks are in their business and not so much when you get into the water or preparing somebody to be a diver.

But from the moment they walk into your shop, from the moment they appoint a member of staff, from the moment they take on that client through to the confined water training area, the classroom, the dive site, boat diving, non-boat diving, the vehicles that belong to you and how you use the vehicles, your workshop where you service equipment, your rental locker, where you rent out equipment, um, right to your compressor filling station.

All of these areas have very specific issues that if you’re aware of the risks, you can mitigate them before they become accidents. And some of the things are pretty well known, such as cylinders exploding and carbon monoxide being in the air and some of them are less obvious, such as occupational injuries and diseases to your staff. And understanding what is a staff member, as many of us think it’s a person that’s appointed permanently to the company. But when it comes to the responsibility for safety, it means anybody that you engage with, casual an illegal immigrant, seasonal worker, a holiday vacation worker, it doesn’t matter. The legal aspect is not the purveyor of your risk assessment. It’s they are on your site and if anything happens to them on your site, you are responsible for them. So not to get involved in, I don’t want to appoint people permanently, that’s not the issue.

But anybody that you use in any form or capacity, you need to make sure that they are safe on your site. Even things like sunburn and losing their eyesight to losing the hearing because of continuous exposure. Things you might not think about. It’s in the guide. It gives you not only what the risk is, but ways to mitigate that risk. It’s not about spending huge amounts of money. It’s about education, awareness and um, being able to, to really understand what it is you’re dealing with. And we actually go into some degree of depth about quantifying risks, which ones are really important and which ones be aware of them. They might turn into an issue, but these are not your areas of concern and you will be surprised to see which ones come out higher on the spectrum, such as taking a diver diving that you shouldn’t be taking because that’s where we have so many of our accidents.

And then other areas that we think are major risks when you analyze them you say, but we haven’t had exposure, we never actually exposed somebody to that hazard. So therefore it’s not a risk. By changing the future but then you keyed into that and the HIRA Guide as we call it is available as a free download through DAN. Get the details a bit later. Please, we encourage you to go and avail yourself of that knowledge.

It’s in English and it’s in Spanish and in the years to come we hope to get into other languages that dive professionals, you know, are conversant with. We try to put in the language that they really understand because when they have to read in another language, you miss the nuances of some of the issues. Again, it’s free. It’s our, we’re passionate about safety and diving and the only way to make that work is to get the professionals to come on board to absorb this culture of safety, this awareness of safety so that we don’t have checklists and things that we have to continuously comply with.

But we know it. We instinctively understand what these issues are.

TC: Yeah, absolutely. The culture of safety that has been the mission for so long is really, really evident. You guys are doing such a remarkable job with us and I love the fact that as a not for profit, you are focusing on disseminating information, really relevant safety information for free. And that is a great resource and as a dive professional we can tap into that. We can tap in and get these resources that make us better at our jobs. We can also tap into the same resources that can help divers understand as well. So you cover both, both gamuts, but I think it’s uh, we are the ones that shoulder the duty to care, and because we shoulder that and we have that burden to be professional and be risk mitigators ourselves, these resources are phenomenal to be able to do that.

And I think this is exciting. I’m really excited to see all of these resources that you’ve pointed out, especially the new ones, the dive boat and the gas quality, the HIRA, all of that. This is, this is just really exciting stuff. How can people get in contact with you? You said a couple of times about that it’s a free download. Point them in that direction.

FB: Okay. So it’s not on our primary website, we need to give you the actual connection details. But essentially you’d visit the website, you pick the, the document that you want to download. There’s a list of free documents, our dive accident reports and the HIRA Guide in English and in Spanish.

TC: It’s the learning site right?

FB: So the elearning covers the courses, the two courses, and then it’s our publication site. We put our publications up, it’s called the publications hyphen library. And you go ahead. We do ask for your details, your name and last name and email address because it’s so important for us. This has nothing to do with marketing Tec. It does not even go to the marketing department. This is purely that if there is reason to communicate that information is changed or there’s a new update, that we just let you know and we don’t expect an answer, you go ahead and download it. It’s been available online for about 10 days now and we’ve had 368 downloads as of Friday last week, so it’s wonderful to see that people are realizing this is an asset that they can use.

If I can go back just very briefly to your comment about culture of safety. I’m always inspired by the dive operator and the dive professional. Take the dive leader.  He or she discovers a new site. They hear about some new wreck or some cave or something that is new, and they start to plan how they’re going to do that.

They go and look at that site. There’s no checklist. In their minds, they look at how am I going to get in the water, how am I going to get out afterwards. If there’s an issue where’s the nearest help? What are the currents like? What’s the search like? What’s the weather like in the area? Is there hazardous Marine life down there? The how deep is the dive? These aren’t questions that you get from a checklist. This is instinctive into the experienced dive leader. That’s a culture of safety. That’s instinctively seeing something before it turns into and we’re trying to build on that. We provide many other resources for damage control to prepare you if something does go wrong, that’s all part of safety. It’s an essential part of safety. Even insurance as much as it’s a grudge purchase is a part of your safety, but let’s prevent the accident in the first place and let’s be prepared if it does happen.

But you know what? If you’re prepared and you’re aware, it’s far less likely that you’re going to have an accident.

TC: Well put. That’s awesome, well put. I’m going to be putting all of these links in the show notes page so that people can go directly to them and hopefully we will get more downloads to happen and the share, also share this information with other dive professionals so that they are aware of that. It’s not just good enough for one dive center, one person in the dive center to own and harbor this information. This needs to be disseminated to everybody in a dive center so that the dive center reflects the same culture of safety that you are promoting in Divers Alert Network.

We have a program called the HIRA program and we can talk about that on another occasion. It’s available for members, professional and business members at this stage, it will be open to everybody at a later stage. It’s called the HIRA Self-Assessment and there are three levels of it. The first level they have online surveys. So you as a member, you sign it and you start the survey. It’s your self assessment. We do not pass or fail you. You answer the questions that are there. They’re not designed as questions that we want your answer to. They are designed questions that you should answer for yourself.

So the HIRA level one there should be no dive professional out there that doesn’t pass HIRA level one. It’s about being able to provide first aid in terms of training and in terms of equipment, having good standard operating procedures, basic emergency action plans for lost diver and injuries whether in the water or not. And considering seriously having a liability, legal liability insurance from whoever you purchase it. That’s not important. The important thing is to know that you have that because we are professionals, we have a, we have a career investment.

We don’t want to lose that because of something that happens that we couldn’t have foreseen. So you get to the end of that and you thought the questions correctly. You can go back, save and continue. Go back and fix things up. You will get a certificate that says you participated in this and we’d love to see you put that up on your wall. And there are three levels, a silver, a gold and a platinum HIRA one, HIRA two and HIRA three. The first two levels are available at present, the HIRA three because the jumps between the levels are significant, we’re not expecting people to be ready for that yet. The HIRA level two is to take your business to that higher level of safety. So now you’re gonna have to do some work.

Yes, it’s extra education requirements, the equipment we even put in their environmental sustainability plan so that you are working with us to keep our dive areas pristine and that there’s a future that our business is assured and we’re not leaving a legacy of destruction of our environment, but it really focuses on emergency action plans for things that are outside of what we normally expect.

Fire on board the vessel, not just staff that are trained, but how to impart that information to your clients that they know how to react. A boat that breaks down. Boat that capsizes. Fires. You get caught in a, you know, we’ve had these terrible fires in the West coast, so anything that you identify. We give you lots of prompts. Did you identify the emergencies that you could face? How to prepare for them? We give you some tools and then we implore you to drill them and practice them because planning is one thing, but if you can’t respond appropriately is something else. So that’s the HIRA level two. And I’m really happy to tell you that I’ve seen dive centers put up their HIRA certificates on the wall part of the advertising and Tec if we can achieve anything, it will be that the divers come to expect to see the HIRA certificates.

Then they know that that dive professional that dive operator has taken their safety seriously. So, so those self-assessments are online. And just to kind of conclude that from what you said before, our email address for any of your questions related to risk, risk mitigation is riskmitigation@dan.org. And we’ll get your email and be sure that we will respond to that with maybe not only an answer but also some resources that will be of benefit to you.

TC: That’s great. That’s fantastic. Well we’ll put all those show notes, we’ll put that link to that email address as well. And Francois, thank you so much for this time together. Thank you so much for sharing everything that’s going on. The new stuff with DAN Divers Alert Network and I just wish you the best of success in the rest of the show.

FB: Thank you.

TC: And, as we move forward into 2020 as well,

FB: But remember we are responding to your passion to dive so we can’t coexist without you. It’s an equal relationship. We are a non-for-profit. But remember that our funding comes from our members. Members who are believing in safety, believing in what we do. Again, you know, joining up as members and that’s we need, everybody needs something to be able to base our programs on. So a big thank you to our members because they are the ones that are not only allowing us to do the work but benefiting the diving industry as a whole.

TC: That’s right. Well thank you very much. We appreciate it.

FB: Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you.

A culture of dive safety. I love how that sounds and I also loved his quotes about “preventing the accident in the first place”. That is so big. That is how I train my staff. If we know everything that can go wrong and how it can go wrong, we can then identify those risks way early. And if we can start to focus on those risks and focus on how to mitigate those risks, we actually can conduct rescues ahead of time.

Again, “let’s be prepared if it does happen” is another thing he said, well, yeah, we’ve got to be reactive if something does happen. But boy, the majority of what we can do as dive professionals and risk management and risk mitigation, is to be proactive. And I love what he said here at the end, “If you’re prepared and you’re aware, it’s far less likely that you’re going to have an accident.”

I love that quote. Thanks so much Francois. I really appreciate the interview and I love the culture of dive safety that you all are promoting.

Thanks For Listening!

Well that’s it for today everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live and please leave a rating. Items talked about in this episode, can be found on the show notes page at scubaguru.com. There you can also click the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care of my friends.

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