January 2009    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 24, No. 1   What's this?

When Bad Air is Pumped into Your Tank

a recent study states it happens more often than you think

from the January, 2009 issue of Undercurrent  

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The risk of getting bad air is low, but it exists and can be fatal. One still finds occasional cases of faulty air compressors that suck in contaminants like engine exhaust, paint fumes and solvent vapors, resulting in a lethal mix. That’s what happened aboard the Maldives liveaboard Baani Adventurer last May. A Russian diver died, two dive instructors were hospitalized and eight other divers had to be treated for carbon monoxide poisoning in their tanks. The police investigation found that a crack in the air pipe leading to the boat’s Bauer compressor was poorly mended with duct tape, allowing contamination in the form of engine exhaust to enter (read the details in our July 2008 article “The Baani Adventurer’s Lethal Air Compressor” online at Undercurrent).

After a chance meeting on a dive trip, Ian Millar, director of hyperbaric medicine at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, and Peter Mouldey, M.D., of Southdown Medical Centre in Mississauga, Canada, agreed there was a widespread lack of knowledge about the potential of contamination within the compression process, and the limitations and failure risks of commonly used filtration systems. There’s little evidence of a widespread problem related to compressor production of carbon monoxide or volatile hydrocarbons. However, after studying unrecognized, unreported deaths by compressed-air contamination, Millar and Mouldey believe that the dive industry could be missing a wider problem, and that there’s a higher potential for these types of fatalities than previously thought. ...