SH281: HMS Scylla Wreck Penetration Tragedy: Two Perspectives on Learning
About this episode
This episode examines the HMS Scylla wreck diving tragedy through a human factors lens to improve safety in diving.
This episode looks at the 2021 wreck diving tragedy on HMS Scylla, where three experienced divers entered the wreck and only one survived. It first examines the kind of reaction often seen on social media, where the incident is explained as a series of obvious mistakes made by individuals. It then explores the same event using a human factors and systems approach called LEODSI, which looks at how people, environment, equipment, tasks, organisational culture, and time interact to shape decisions and outcomes. Instead of asking “who failed?”, this perspective asks how normal behaviour, built on experience, trust, and familiar conditions, can combine with changing environments, increasing stress, and limited time to slowly reduce safety margins. By understanding how these factors interacted to produce the outcome, the aim is to help the diving community learn in a deeper way and improve the overall system so that safer decisions become easier and tragedies like this are less likely to happen. Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/post/scylla-wreck-penetration-leodsi Links: Interview with Adam on the Deep Wreck Diver Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMYKjZocins…
More episodes of Counter-Errorism in Diving: Applying Human Factors to Diving
- SH283: You're Accountable. You're Responsible. You're It!
- SH282: Isolation Amplifies Drift: When Remote Operations Make Small Deviations Invisible
- SH280: This Could Happen to Any Dive Operator: What We Can Really Learn From The Perth Diving Academy Incident
- SH279: The Tower Was Already Full of Holes
- SH278: Be Curious, Not Judgemental
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