An Introduction to Emergency Response Diving

A sailboat with three people aboard capsizes and sinks during a summer squall...

A SUV carrying a family of four home for the holidays hits a patch of ice and plunges off a bridge, into a freezing river...

Two inexperienced divers get lost and stranded in an air pocket in a submarine cavern…

For most, scenarios like these are the stuff of nightmares. But for Public Safety Divers, it’s real life. Also known as Emergency Response Divers, these highly-trained professionals are often the only hope for people involved in water-involved accidents. Their training far exceeds what’s expected of a recreational diving professional because, in their line of work, lives depend upon the success of every dive.

If a career as a Public Safety Diver -- or even just this level of intensive training – appeals to you, then Aquanauts Dive Centre has the program for you. Aquanauts is Asia’s only Professional Emergency Response Team training center. PERT training will prepare you to join a professional public safety diving team, equipping you with the skills to handle search, rescue and recovery dives in all kinds of conditions, including freezing water, zero visibility situations and rescues at night.

What Is Emergency Response Diving?

Emergency Response or Public Safety Diving is not quite like any other form of diving.

Recreational divers, such as those in the PADI system, are trained in such a manner so as to ensure maximum enjoyment from diving with minimal risk.  Basically, a recreational scuba diving course teaches you to avoid hazardous situations and common emergencies.  Obviously, emergency response divers don’t have that option.

Emergency response diving also differs from technical diving.  Many in the diving industry strive to separate technical diving from recreational diving but, in the end, there is very little difference.  Technical divers may push depth limitations and bottom times, they may dives in caves or in shipwrecks, but they are still diving for pleasure and in situations in which there are very controlled and calculated amounts of risk.

Commercial diving is perhaps the segment of the diving industry that most resembles emergency response diving.  Commercial divers find themselves diving in adverse circumstances, very dark water, and on schedules that are dictated to them. It’s at this point, however, that the similarities end.  Commercial divers have the benefit of on-site decompression chambers, adequate support personnel and various other amenities that the public safety diver can only dream of. 

Emergency response dives are made with the equipment hauled in on a truck, on virtually no prior notice; a combination that dramatically limits any potential support structure.

This doesn’t mean that emergency response diving is harder, better or higher in stature than recreational, technical or commercial diving. Each segment of the industry faces its own unique challenges and offers its own training programs to meet those challenges. Aquanauts, for example, has been training PADI divemasters and professionals through its PADI Professional internship program for many years and now, in response to industry demand, now offers a program to meet the requirements of the public safety diving industry.

You can take any of the PERT courses individually in addition to your PADI Professional Training or exclusively choose to enroll in a PERT Internship, comprised of all the PERT pre-requisite and main courses.

Recreational vs. Emergency Response Diving

For most divers, PADI’s Rescue Diver course is where they learn true self-sufficiency and buddy assistance and, for its target audience, it offers excellent training.  Likewise, PADI’s Search and Recovery Diver program will teach a person to locate a weight belt, mask, or other commonly lost piece of equipment.  However, all of this training still prepares divers for these activities in water where visibility is optimal and hazards are minimal. These programs provide a good basis of learning, but do not compare with the everyday diving a Public Safety Diver must do.

As a Public Safety Diver, your dive environment is likely to be found in rapid moving, dirty or deep water, and other places the normal recreational diver would never venture. Such environments usually also harbor a whole host of underwater conditions that make search, rescue and recovery even more difficult. Emergency Response Divers frequently dive in visibility so poor that the hand disappears in front of the face, where underwater entanglements abound, where chemical or biological pollutants pose more unseen threats and even the temperature of the water poses a threat of hypothermia.

Another difference between recreational and emergency response diving is the solo nature of emergency response diving.  Throughout your recreational scuba training, your instructor constantly reminded you to never dive alone.  Most emergency response diving, however, is solo.  The diver has a tether attached to a harness or held in his hand and swims a pattern as directed by the person on shore. This shore-based person is referred to as the “tender”  or “shore technician” and is considered the diver’s buddy. 

The tender must maintain constant communication with the diver via the tether and pull signals or other underwater electronic communication devices.  Alone and attached to a tether, the ERD must be capable of comfortably diving in zero visibility water, avoiding or dealing with entanglements, and perform a search for the desired object in this environment.  The ERD must be able to search, locate, document and properly recover the objects as the mission dictates.  Properly and safely accomplishing these simple sounding goals is much more difficult than it sounds and this is why ERD training is so important. (Read more on the differences between ERD and recreational diving here.)

About Aquanauts Public Safety Diving Courses

Before enrolling for the Public Safety Diving program, it’s important you understand the expectations and content of the course.  The courses will be more difficult than any recreational courses you have taken.  Their difficulty is designed to help you meet the challenges of the job you have to do.  The standards for performance will be much more rigidly enforced than in any recreational course you may have taken.  But you should remember that our test could never match the challenges Mother Nature can throw at you.  The biggest difference is that here you merely fail; there you may die or, worse, leave a buddy to die. 

You will get very little understanding and flexibility from your instructor.  The instructor will expect from you at least 150% of your capabilities and effort.  You will not be certified until your instructor would be willing to dive with you as the safety diver.  (Would you expect any less if you were the diver?)  Aquanauts wants you to enjoy the training, but remember that everything you will do has been done before by others like you and those things that you work hardest for are the things you respect and value most.