Regarding your Apr. 21 item on scuba litigation: Scuba Diving magazine regularly carries articles such as this one, which relates the story of a successful lawsuit by the survivors of a "tag-along" diver on an instructional dive who failed to secure a "buddy" as the instructors insisted and met with a fatal accident; the judge permitted the plaintiff's lawyer to introduce questionable assertions about the standard of care expected of instructors under those circumstances.
If you are unfamiliar with diving, I would claim that it is a very safe activity, as long as you follow a simple set of rules. Unfortunately, deviation from the rules can have very severe consequences, a fact that certain people have trouble understanding. Also unfortunately, these are the type of people that tend to blame everyone around them.
In this and in other court cases, instructors have been held to owe a duty of care to anyone around them in the water, even if they aren't diving with that person, and no matter how much that person's negligence has contributed to his or her problem. I find this ludicrous: instructors are not public safety personnel like police, and shouldn't be required to provide (potentially dangerous) help to anyone around them, even when 1) the instructors are not at the time acting as instructors and 2) the instructors aren't diving with the person in question.
I'm a former SCUBA instructor with hundreds of hours of logged bottom time. Incidents like this -- specifically the idea that I should be required to render potentially dangerous assistance to all and sundry (for free, no less) -- and the skyrocketing price of insurance led me to give up my instructor's license. I know that I'm not the only one to have done so; a number of diving buddies used to teach part time on weekends because they loved the sport. This has directly contributed to a fall in the number of available instructors and increased prices for instruction. Basically, it had gotten to the point where I would have had to spend three or four weekends teaching just to break even with the insurance bill, not to mention all the other costs of instruction. The cheapest insurance available runs about $500 / year now; it used to be less than $200. The lawyers are coming; the only thing that will slow them is the industry largely lacks the necessary deep pockets for them to steal from. -- Earl Hathaway
Posted by Walter Olson at July 26, 2004 12:10 AM