I’m on a phone so it’s not convenient, but the first study I found showed like 3 cave diving deaths in 2007 (most recent year they showed), although the trend seemed to be for it to get lower. Still, this year we are at 6 already just from this incident, so let’s purposely overestimate and say 6 per year. As for the total number of dives, there are extremely famous caves all around the world that get year round activity. It’s hard to find hard data, but if we play it conservatively we can estimate and say 10 per day, that’s like 3650 per year. So 6/3650 -> 0.16 divers die in each cave dive.
There might be unreported deaths, but there’s also a lot of unreported dives in caves people don’t really know of and in remote areas. This dive might have gone unreported if not for the deaths (it was illegal for them to be there at that depth). And it’s important to remember, if early reports are accurate, these people were clearly not qualified to be diving at 50m, much less in a cave.
Now free diving:
Number of fatalities in 2007 was 42, and the number seems to have increased slightly (52 in 2017). Data is easier to find for some reason, and plenty resources seem to indicate that the rate of death in recreational free divers is 1/500, so 0.2 deaths per each dive.
So despite inflated number for cave diving deaths, and low estimate of cave dives in a year, free diving is still more deadly.
It’s not too hard to figure out why. It’s still scuba. When cave diving you can recover from mistakes. You have information on how much air you have left, and multiple of everything you need as redundancy, and so you can sort any problems you have. There are drills you do in case you lose the guide line, for example. In free diving you are just going by feeling. If you miscalculate how much air there is in your lungs and how long it will take you to resurface, you’ll pass out and probably drown.
To be clear, I’m not saying cave diving is without risk. I myself have no interest in it because caves are boring to me, and so it’s not worth the risk which does exist. I just don’t like the over the top fear mongering I see whenever there is a story like this.
I’m on a phone so it’s not convenient, but the first study I found showed like 3 cave diving deaths in 2007 (most recent year they showed), although the trend seemed to be for it to get lower. Still, this year we are at 6 already just from this incident, so let’s purposely overestimate and say 6 per year. As for the total number of dives, there are extremely famous caves all around the world that get year round activity. It’s hard to find hard data, but if we play it conservatively we can estimate and say 10 per day, that’s like 3650 per year. So 6/3650 -> 0.16 divers die in each cave dive.
There might be unreported deaths, but there’s also a lot of unreported dives in caves people don’t really know of and in remote areas. This dive might have gone unreported if not for the deaths (it was illegal for them to be there at that depth). And it’s important to remember, if early reports are accurate, these people were clearly not qualified to be diving at 50m, much less in a cave.
Now free diving: Number of fatalities in 2007 was 42, and the number seems to have increased slightly (52 in 2017). Data is easier to find for some reason, and plenty resources seem to indicate that the rate of death in recreational free divers is 1/500, so 0.2 deaths per each dive.
So despite inflated number for cave diving deaths, and low estimate of cave dives in a year, free diving is still more deadly.
It’s not too hard to figure out why. It’s still scuba. When cave diving you can recover from mistakes. You have information on how much air you have left, and multiple of everything you need as redundancy, and so you can sort any problems you have. There are drills you do in case you lose the guide line, for example. In free diving you are just going by feeling. If you miscalculate how much air there is in your lungs and how long it will take you to resurface, you’ll pass out and probably drown.
To be clear, I’m not saying cave diving is without risk. I myself have no interest in it because caves are boring to me, and so it’s not worth the risk which does exist. I just don’t like the over the top fear mongering I see whenever there is a story like this.