Darwin misses again -- Kansas man attempts "redneck SCUBA diving," sadly doesn't die

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Coincidentally, I’ve just received my Advanced Open Water Diver certification card in the mail.

Just to be clear, diver’s usually breathe just plain air. Filtered and dry, but still 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. (Other gas mixtures are irrelevant for this discussion.)

The air is carried in a tank. 80 cubic foot tanks that hold air at around 3,000 psi when full are common. Obviously, you can’t breate 3,000 psi air directly from the tank; so you have the regulator 1st stage. This is the bit that clamps onto the tank valve, and it reduces the pressure to about 140 psi. From there, the air goes to the 2nd stage.

The second stage has a diaphragm. The diaphragm is connected to a lever that it connected to the 2nd stage valve. Now, you can’t breathe in while you are under water. The pressure is too great. But you can cause a slight pressure differential by “trying” to breathe. When you do this, the ambient water pressure is greater than the air pressure inside the 2nd stage. The water pushes against the diaphragm (not necessarily directly) which causes the lever to open the air valve. Now you have air coming in at the same pressure as the ambient pressure. Since the pressure is the same, you can breathe “normally”.

I’ll see if I can find someplace that describes it better than I have.

In any case, you cannot inhale through a garden hose if you’re more than about a foot deep.

22

Okay, Rick beat me to it.

Anyway, here’s a link to How Stuff Works. It has a nifty little animated graphic that shows the process.

23

Just need to let you all know - most Kansas people aren’t like this. Sheesh, as if Kansas isn’t bad enoug already now we have this guy to explain! :stuck_out_tongue:

24

I’m so flabbergasted by this response that I didn’t even bother to check whether or not anyone else has answered it.

The theory is not, repeat NOT, “perfectly sound.” Children read this board, as well as unthinking adults, and might be tempted to try it on the basis that “the theory is perfectly sound.”

When your lungs are down a little over 10 ft. they are subjected to an external overpressure (above atmospheric) of about 5 psi. Assuming that the chest walls have an area of about 3 ft[sup]2[/sup] that is an external force of 5 X 3 x *144 = 2160 lb, or 21-1/2 bags of cement, piled on your chest. On the inside of your lungs is atmospheric pressure from the garden hose to the surface.

The main problem for hard-hat divers is the need to keep a very precise balance between the pressure of the water and the pressure of the compressed air that is fed down to the suit. It the air pressure gets to low the diver is “squeezed” and if it get low enough the bury his remains in his helmet.

Need I go further?

25

Note, you can easily avoid CO2 poisoning with a long hose by not exhaling thru the tube. E.g., inhale thru your mouth via the tube, exhale thru your nose. Or remove the tube from your mouth to exhale.*

The unavoidable problem is pressure.

*Then again, if you know enough to do this, then you wouldn’t be trying the stunt in the first place.

26

Then the hose would fill with water.

Unless the air in it was pressurized; in which case you’d have a diving system known as a “hookah” (which still has a regulator, BTW).

27

And the PC Police rule… :rolleyes: Can’t even have a good joke without some know-it-all posting a bunch of crap to spoil it. IT’S A JOKE! Laugh along or go the fuck away! sigh This board sucks since it went to subscription! The only people left are lumps of clay!

28

PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, PC, P-effing-C. There. I’ve officially worn out that term. Never use it again.

29

Somebody should urge the Kansas diver to try it again, only holding a metal detector instead of an anchor.

:stuck_out_tongue:

30

I seriously doubt that YOU, PCBrat will get tired of the term… :wally

31

It isn’t, as others have said. But I don’t think you should die or be sterilized for not knowing that. According to modern theories of genetics, the transmission of knowledge about physical science is not accomplished by heredity, but through education and/or experimentation. I guess I’m just an ultra-PC-liberal pansyass for pointing that out, but I wouldn’t go in for the vasectomy just yet if I were you.

32

Lee’s Summit is a suburb of Kansas City, MO (Home of the Chiefs pro football team). It’s quite a nice little place, really. I have an uncle who makes the best BBQ in the world who lives there…uh oh.

33

Since others have been defending me in my absence, I feel I must point out to you literal types:

  1. The OP title was a joke. Kind of. Get over it.
  2. If you’re going to do something stupid that’s untested, please test it first. For Chrissakes, some of you are defending him. To recap, he tied an anchor to himself and then tried to breathe through a hose. Even if you think this is a “sound theory,” perhaps a little Alpha testing would be in order, yes? Maybe only go 10 feet down…I don’t know, holding a tire or something less heavy? I don’t know…so you don’t accidentally kill yourself?
  3. People who perform scientific experiments like this without testing to make sure side-effects like death won’t occur probably don’t have much to offer our collective gene pool.
  4. On second thought, maybe the OP title wasn’t a joke.
  5. Never mind.
  6. Continue flaming away. :rolleyes:
34

Yep, the guys a dumbass. But Longview Lake is certainly in Missouri. Glad to see the guy is 54 though, my brother is from Lee’s Summit, but he’s only 40. :slight_smile:

35

I just re-read the article. My uncle is 54. And nutty enough to try this. In all fairness, he may have lost his keys off a dock or somesuch (no need to be fooling with your keys in the middle of the lake, now is there?) Thus a presumably nearby bit of hose combined with total ignorance of SCUBA technology would make a tempting snorkel–and the water is probably not more than 10 feet deep if it was by a dock. Keep in mind, dude was clever enough to have a rope tethered to him, again presumably “just in case,” which also suggests he wasn’t in the middle of the lake.

36

I’m fairly sure I would have thought Chastain’s OP made him sound amazingly callous even if I hadn’t paid $4.95. I dunno, maybe it’s me, but I can’t morph “sadly doesn’t die” into a joke no matter how hard I try.

And I don’t think the problem is the board, if6was9. You’ve been posting as if you’ve been breakfasting on pissed-in Cheerios for the last little while. So I’m pretty sure the problem is you.

37

I give up. I absolutely give up. Water 10 ft deep would put his lungs at about 4 ft deep giving a force on the outside of his chest of 770 lb. 8-1/2 bags of cement.

The commercial snorkles you buy are only about 10" long. If you stand on the bottom of a swimming pool with the snorkle sticking out of the water a couple of inches you can just barely breath because of the pressure against your chest.

Try it sometime.

38

If you’re not joking, then you believe in eugenics, which is odd for someone who claims to respect science so much, but certainly your inalienable right. In fact, why don’t you start a thread asking people what they have to offer our “collective gene pool”? Kind of a “Justify Your Existence” thing? You can explain in your OP how your superb genetic profile results in a virtually mistake-free life, and we’ll take it from there.

39

I’m not going to argue for or against the guy’s sense in this but… Are there even enough facts to figure out if he was completely beyond logic? I claim total underwater ignorance, and I can’t say I’d have known that the garden hose wouldn’t have worked. Not that I would have tried it, but I wouldn’t have known myself.

That said;

Nowhere in the article does it say how long the hose is, nor how deep the lake was where he was diving. For all we know, it could have been a cut up length of garden hose.

He made one dive successfully, albeit without retrieving his keys. Doesn’t it stand to reason that he had experienced some sort of success? If he had gotten to the bottom, found he couldn’t breathe, it wouldn’t make sense for him to have reattempted it right away. Obviously, I wasn’t there, so I could be wrong, but it’s just as logical a conclusion as any.

It says he lost the hose, and nearly drowned. It doesn’t say the hose-technique failed him, only that he lost it.

Honestly, I just don’t see enough information for anyone to be drawing conclusions.

40

No, eugenics was the study of improvement of humanity by controlled, selective breeding, which was, in fact, very bad pseudoscience. Cahstain86 was just haivng a joke.

One doesn’t have to have a superb genetic profile, one just has to have a slight advantage over the the next guy that allows one to pass on one’s genes. Unless there were a planet-wide epidemic of car keys being lost underwater over a sufficiently long timespan, there’s no contribution to the survival of the species in this instance. There’s no selection for the capacity to get car keys. The man’s lack of diving education has no genetic link, so his death before procreation is not of any advantage to the species overall.