Diving Risk Management: Part 1 – by Al Hornsby, owner, Al Hornsby Productions, Singapore Al, recently retired after more than 42 years as a senior executive with PADI, is regarded as one of the industry’s most experienced risk management and dive liti- gation executives. From having managed PADI’s first professional member insurance programs and their associated litigation, plus serving as a strategist, fact and expert witness for those and other dive cases, he is exceedingly familiar with the scope and breadth of dive industry lawsuits, their typical causes and their historical defenses. Concurrently, he was one of the creators and a multi-term President of the RSTC, and served on the committee that converted DEMA from a manufac- turers’ organization to the industry-wide organization it is today, plus served as its President for 6 years. Al was also one of the originators of Project AWARE and its Executive Director for its first 10 years. Additionally, his writing background is extensive, having authored 3 books and co-authored another; written hun- dreds of dive and travel magazine articles; and having served as Editorial Director, and ultimately Publisher, of Skin Diver magazine for 4 years. BUSINESS EDU
Hello, and welcome to Scuba Diving Industry Magazine’s new column, to which I’ve been fortunate to be in- vited to contribute on a regular basis. Diving has an impressive compara- tive-safety record, it is inherently a risky activity, with there being no
some strong, though rather simple, opinions regarding the chief dangers and risks of diving to its participants, and the related liability risks to the businesses and professional par- ticipants involved. Overall, through the decades, diving’s safety record is impressive by any measure. Though certainly one can’t make true, one-to-one comparisons with other sport- ing/recreational activities, diving’s long-held fatality history (from a number of diving and governmental sources) of ap- prox. 3 per 100,000 participants is typically less than the com- parable rates reported for swimming, boating, and even jogging. There are a number of upsides for diving when comparing such ratios – standardized (and generally compulsory) train- ing and activity-supervision guidelines, as well as fairly con- sistent, well-developed health medical condition requirements (and with a high degree of industry participation and enforce-
possibility of eliminating all the risk or reducing that risk to zero. Fortunately, as the dive community has proven over the decades, through well-developed standards of practice, careful attention to procedures, and an overriding sense of awareness as to the utter importance of dive safety, diving’s safety record is actually quite impressive when compared to many other outdoor activities. This is critical, not only to the continued survival of the industry, but, even more importantly, to the overall health and well-being of both our consumer con- stituents and our industry’s working profes- sionals.
ment, all for which diving should feel a great deal of pride). These institutionalized guide- lines, on a broad scale, do have significant,sta- tistical effect as compared to someone feeling ‘out of shape’ independently deciding to jog down the road-side and becoming a part of that statistic) or someone deciding to casually jump into a lake or to try operating a small boat or off-road vehicle. So, with all this, why are there as many dive
So, then, where and how does it some- times go wrong? For my input as a partici- pant in this column, I’ll draw from my experience gained as a fulltime dive profes- sional since becoming a dive instructor in the mid-1970’s, and an executive for PADI in 1978. In my PADI roles, since the onset I was involved in standards’ development, review
and enforcement (i.e. quality management), and for the in- dustry overall as one of the original developers of the RSTC and its initial industry training standards. I was also involved in the introduction and management of PADI’s diving pro- fessional liability and store insurance programs in the early 1980’s, my roles soon expanded to regular participation in the defense of litigation against the industry’s participants – dive instructors and guides, dive resorts, boats, training organiza- tions and manufacturers – as an analyst, strategist and expert witness. From these activities over nearly 40 years, I’ve developed
accidents as there are, and why is the litigation record as dif- ficult as it is? From the legal side of things, the defense of lit- igation involving fairly little-understood/publicly perceived as high risk activities is always difficult, especially when there is a significant perception that inexperienced participants and/or students are utterly dependent upon their dive instructors/guides. For the dive industry, in my humble opin-
ion from the incident and litigation records I have reviewed over the many years, in large part the answer is likely a rather simple one... (as we’ll discuss next issue).
email Al
PAGE ELEVEN | SCUBA DIVING INDUSTRY
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker