Dive Safety Archives - DIVE Magazine https://divemagazine.com/articles/dive-safety Scuba Diving Luxury Travel Magazine Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:56:11 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 https://divemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-square-dive-32x32.jpg Dive Safety Archives - DIVE Magazine https://divemagazine.com/articles/dive-safety 32 32 Survivors of Thai liveaboard DiveRACE Class E fire speak out – part 2 https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/survivors-of-thai-liveaboard-diverace-class-e-fire-speak-out-part-2 Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:50:16 +0000 https://divemagazine.com/?p=21579 The second part of our interviews with survivors of the Thai liveaboard DiveRACE Class E Fire, which burned to the […]

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The second part of our interviews with survivors of the Thai liveaboard DiveRACE Class E Fire, which burned to the waterline in the Similan Islands in April 2025.


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This article was split in two due to its length. Part 1 is here.

Alexandre Guedes, CEO of a Portuguese pharmaceutical company and an experienced diver, was on board DiveRACE Class E the night it caught fire, together with his wife, teenage son Filipe and daughter Mia.

‘We are relatively well physically and psychologically,’ he tells me when we speak, ‘and Filipe and Mia are also slowly getting over the situation, which hasn’t been easy.’

Alexandre, who had previously worked as an airline copilot, was fastidious about liveaboard safety, even if the boats themselves were not.

‘This was our third liveaboard,’ he said, ‘and we have always briefed our children on what to do in the event of a fire – and agreed with them that in a situation like this they would not wait for their parents and would flee to the furthest place from danger, which would eventually be our meeting point.

Alex and his family were interviewed on Portuguese TV after the disaster

Fortunately, they did not become separated, but the lack of alarm meant they remained belowdecks longer than some of the other passengers, who had already made their way outside.

‘We were asleep when we heard someone shouting that there was a fire on board,’ says Alex. ‘There was no light and we couldn’t breathe, so the only thing I could do was leave the room with my wife and my mobile phone, because we needed a light.

‘We chose the light over everything else; equipment, computers, passports, money, everything, and we stayed to put on our life jackets before leaving the room.

‘The problem was the smoke, because when my children left the room we told them to put a towel [soaked] with water over their mouth, but after five metres we couldn’t breathe, and it was a very, very difficult situation.

Alex and his family were able to make their way outside, where he took his daughter and jumped into the water, followed by his wife and son. Raga was already nearby and they were picked up by one of the tenders before being taken to the liveaboard.

Filipe Guedes records the moment he was forced to abandon ship

As with the other survivors, Alex is gravely concerned about the lack of response from the crew, the lack of a fire alarm system and the failure to post a night watchman.

‘Only when we were upstairs on the boat about to jump, only then did we see the crew,’ he said. ‘We did all of this by ourselves, and there was no alarm.

‘The only alarm we had was the Israeli guy [the passenger who also woke Nicole and Joe] who was shouting for everyone.’

‘The problem is that the guys from the crew were all sleeping. If anybody was awake then the problem would have been minimised.’

Importance of the night watch

There is much discussion on the internet on whether or not a night watch is necessary while at anchor but the simple answer is yes, if you’re at sea.

A resolution adopted in 1973 by the United Nation’s International Maritime Organisation (IMO; at that time International Maritime Consultation Organisation, IMCO) clearly states that the ship’s master, while at anchor will ‘ensure that an efficient look-out is maintained’ and ‘ensure that inspection rounds of the vessel are made periodically.’

The lack of a roving night watch was directly blamed for the deaths of 34 people in the Conception disaster of 2019 off the coast of California. A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the cause states that:

The probable cause of the accident on board the SPV CONCEPTION was the failure of [the boat’s owner] to provide effective oversight of its vessel and crewmember operations, including requirements to ensure that a roving patrol was maintained, which allowed a fire of unknown cause to grow, undetected, in the vicinity of the aft salon on the main deck. 

In the end, there’s little argument to be made against the practicality of posting a roving night watch on vessels that contain highly flammable materials, are filled with combustible fluids and potentially volatile electronic equipment, with people on board, miles out to sea, with very little assistance nearby.

In 2019, 34 people died because by the time anybody realised their boat was on fire, it was already too late. The passengers and crew of Class E all survived, but if that one sleepless diver had not been awake to notice, the outcome may have been very tragically different.

The US Coast Guard has since been issued orders to enforce inspection procedures, verifying that proper roving patrols are conducted.

The unforgivable lack of fire detection equipment

Thai authorities reported that the blaze began in one of the generators used to power facilities on board the boat such as the lights and hot water heaters, and the passengers we’ve spoken to said that there had been problems with hot water for the previous few days owing to a generator malfunction.

The Guedes family lost all their belongings in the fire (Video: Filipe Guedes)

A faulty generator at the end of a busy dive season (the Similans National Park closes on 15 May each year) would not be considered out of the ordinary, but according to the vessel’s specifications, it was fitted with two 90 KW Cummins generators.

Some of the passengers believe one of the generators had already failed, and the second was therefore overworked. While this has not been possible to verify, the total lack of power when the fire broke out would indicate that neither was operational.

Either way, the faulty generator represents the first hole in the ‘Swiss-cheese model of safety’. While the name sounds slightly trite, it is a well-known analogy in which each layer of protection against accidents is represented as a slice of Swiss cheese, each with a hole representing a weakness in part of the system.

One or more can fail without serious consequence, but once all the holes are aligned, catastrophic failure becomes inevitable.

The next hole in the safety model, and one of the most neglectful on behalf of the operator, is the lack of any kind of functioning smoke detectors and fire alarm system, which should be mandatory for all vessels on which passengers will be staying overnight.

‘Fire is most likely to occur in the engine room,’ said Chanhyeok ‘Chris’ Kim, who is head of the fire team on board 200,000MT merchant ship on which he is a chief officer, ‘and there should be extinguishing equipment or an alert system for smoke detection. But there was nothing.’

It is a stroke of luck that a sleepless passenger happened to be on deck and noticed the smoke. Had he not been there, the outcome could have been far, far worse.

Inadequate firefighting measures

Once the fire broke out, there did not appear to be an adequate supply of firefighting equipment on board, another hole in the safety model.

The boat’s specifications list 15 fire extinguishers throughout the decks but the lack of muster drill meant passengers hadn’t been shown where they were located and survivor Nicole Yeates – who works for the US Department of the Navy – believes those that were on board were not sufficient to combat a serious fire.

She recalls seeing a member of the crew ‘running around with a fire extinguisher that was about a foot and a half tall.’Alexandre also remembers seeing ‘only one little fire extinguisher’ on the main deck.

‘The flash point of marine diesel is very high,’ said Nicole, ‘but the temperature of the fire is hot enough to burn through anything.

‘By the smell of the smoke we encountered, which was very acrid, the fire was already burning through lube oils and plastics, and that was our first indication there was a problem

‘By that point,’ she added, ‘the fire was already beyond a hand extinguisher.’

Lack of crew preparedness

Both Nicole and Alexandre describe the crew as good people and very competent in the context of running the liveaboard but, apart from the Captain, unprepared to handle an emergency.

Nicole praised the crew’s willingness to help, but said they seemed ‘a little bit frozen.’

‘They just weren’t trained,’ she said. ‘They definitely wanted to help and the captain was very well prepared, he was helping here and there and he was indeed the last one off the ship.

‘He’s a good man, for sure, and when we were at the police station afterwards, he was walking around to all his crew, checking on them. A good man.’

It has been a common story told by survivors of liveaboard disasters, including those of Sea Story, Hurricane, Sea Legend and even Conception – that the boats’ crews were great at everything else, but not well prepared to deal with emergencies.

It is difficult to place the blame for that on any individual crew member – it’s impossible to know how even an experienced person will react in an emergency – but the lack of preparedness among the crew as a team suggests a lack of emergency training.

It fell to passengers and foreign dive staff to prepare the life rafts on Class E, attempt to signal the nearby boat and even rescue the two passengers who had been unable to make their way out of the lower deck.

All the holes aligned

A faulty, possibly overloaded generator; no fire detectors or alarm; insufficient fire suppression systems; untrained crew; no battery backup or emergency VHF radio; no muster drill – the holes in the Swiss cheese model of safety were all aligned.

The Thai Navy didn’t arrive for several hours, and when they did, it was a small patrol boat with an onboard fire hose. The liveaboard burned for seven hours before the firefighting unit arrived on the scene and was able to extinguish the fire, but by then it was too late.

The fire burned for seven hours before Thai Navy firefighters arrived to extinguish the flames

Diverace Class E burned to the waterline, along with all of its passengers’ dive gear, clothing, passports and possessions, before sinking into the depths.

The story has not made international headlines in the same way that Sea Story and Conception did, because nobody died. Had another liveaboard, the MV Raga, not been nearby, however, the story would almost certainly have been tragically different, as passengers would have had to fight rough seas, strong currents, and a night lit only by the fire from their burning boat while they waited to be rescued.

Speaking with Nicole and Alexandre, it is clear that although they escaped with their lives, the trauma of that night has left a lasting impact on them and their families.

We made contact with the Singapore-based owner of Class E, who was genuinely apologetic over the incident. While he was unable to provide any details due to the ongoing investigation into the fire, he issued the following statement:

We have been operating MV DiveRACE Class E since her launch in 2015. She was designed and constructed following Thailand’s marine regulations. The vessel is also inspected every year by the marine authorities to ensure safety and sea worthiness before renewing its licence.

Items such as independent back up batteries, radios and fire extinguishers were available. Procedures such as evacuation and man over board were briefed during the onboarding process.

As investigations are still ongoing, we are unable to give more information until everything is completed please. However, we are working hard with our insurer to finalise the compensation to all affected guests.

DiveRACE will also review and implement additional training for all procedures that will be applied to our new vessel to ensure such an incident will not happen again.

Having spoken directly with the owner, I believe he is sincere in his intention to implement tougher safety measures on board his company’s second boat, which is currently under construction.

The problem, of course, is that these safety features were not present, or not properly implemented on the boat that caught fire, something that has been increasingly recognised as a problem across the liveaboard dive industry

What next for liveaboard safety?

When Jerry Boylan, captain of Conception, was prosecuted for Seaman’s Manslaughter, his defence team tried to mitigate his sentence on the basis that every other boat in the area was guilty of the same lackadaisical approach to safety, and he shouldn’t be blamed for the failings of an entire industry.

One of his crew wrote that his negligence that night ‘was trusting that what had been safe and successful for 30 years all of a sudden wasn’t.’

It appears this attitude is prevalent among many dive operators: there are lots of liveaboards; there are hundreds of thousands of sailings, most of them are just fine, and with so many boats, accidents are bound to happen.

As Alexandre puts it, however, ‘the entire sector needs to undergo a basic reform in terms of safety,’ because if it doesn’t, more people are going to die, and there have already been too many liveaboard deaths.

Until that reform happens, it falls once again to us, as divers, to call out the operators where we see problems, and demand better of them before we board their boats. 

DiveRACE Class E is an excellent example of a fine liveaboard chosen by discerning divers for its good reputation, highly-praised crew and excellent safety record, because for the previous ten years, everything had been safe and successful.

And then all of a sudden, it wasn’t, because without a proper fire alarm system, that boat was not fit to set sail.

This story, for reasons of length, appears in two parts. The first part is available here.

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DIVE Magazine Summer 2025 preview https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/dive-magazine-summer-2025-preview Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:06:29 +0000 https://divemagazine.com/?p=21618 Issue # 38: Hidden treasures DIVE’s Summer ’25 magazine is here! Packed as always with brilliant photography and great writing […]

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Issue # 38: Hidden treasures


DIVE’s Summer ’25 magazine is here! Packed as always with brilliant photography and great writing – subscribe quickly so you don’t miss out on a copy!


You can subscribe to our magazine in both print and digital formats from just £1 but hurry – supplies are limited so you’ll need to subscribe before 25 June to guarantee you receive a copy of this Summer’s print magazine with your subscription

Subscribe for just £1 to get your copy!

Raja Ampat is one of the world’s most sought-after diving destinations but it’s far from being completely explored. Award-winning photographer Jenny Stock dives into the unknown as she visits some previously undiscovered spots on board the Raja Ampat Aggressor, accompanied by some of her fantastic photography of never-before-seen reefs.

The Caribbean Coast of Mexico is home to one of the world’s largest aggregations of whale sharks – and a gathering of giant manta rays follows them. Mark ‘Crowley’ Russell talks to Karen ‘Manza’ Fuentes about her determination to make sure their populations are preserved, and why they may well be the long-awaited third species.

Helen Czerski began studying the science of bubbles at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography when she realised she needed to learn to scuba dive – and fell in love with it. She talks to Jo Caird about combining her passion for the underwater world with a background in physics in her award-winning science book Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World.

Some underwater photographers prefer macro over wide-angle; others big fish or landscapes. Each takes time to learn and perfect, but diving under the Cement Plant Pier in Barbados provides photographers with a single site to practice them all. Award-winning photographer Catherine Holmes gives us her top tips for study and some stunning results of her own.

Lots of people love taking pictures underwater, and there are some super-talented amateurs out there. Most people will only ever see their pictures shared among social media friends – but can you earn an income from sharing them with the world? Colin Marshall shares tips from his 30-year history as a stock agency photographer.

While there some talented amateurs out there among the underwater photo pros, many, many divers pick up a camera and turn into nightmares with bubbles. Mark ‘Crowley’ Russell shares some of his experiences from his time a full-time dive professional, and what steps divers need to take before ever even thinking about taking snapshots!

DIVE’s latest Big Shot underwater photography competition called for images of underwater animals living together – in harmony or, as the case might be, not. Check out the best of the entries from our Big Shot Living Together photo competition as they were meant to be seen – on the pages of a glossy print magazine.

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Survivors of Thai liveaboard DiveRACE Class E fire speak out – part 1 https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/survivors-of-thai-liveaboard-diverace-class-e-fire-speak-out-part-1 Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:10:15 +0000 https://divemagazine.com/?p=21565 On 12 April 2025, the Thai liveaboard DiveRACE Class E caught fire on the final night of a Similan Islands […]

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The terrifying sight of DiveRACE Class E burning in the early hours of the morning (Photo supplied by survivors)

On 12 April 2025, the Thai liveaboard DiveRACE Class E caught fire on the final night of a Similan Islands cruise. Everyone survived, but they were not unscathed, and the fire has brought liveaboard safety failings into question yet again. DIVE spoke to some of the survivors.


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This article was split in two due to its length. Part 2 is here.

In the early hours of 12 April 2025, the Thailand-based luxury liveaboard Dive Race Class E caught fire on the final night of a five-day cruise through the Similan Islands.

All 16 passengers and ten crew survived, but the incident has not been reported in the global media with the same intensity of scrutiny that followed the Sea Story disaster of November 2024, in which eleven people died when their Egyptian Red Sea liveaboard capsized.

While the Class E fire survivors escaped without serious physical injury, the incident has taken a heavy toll on the mental health of those who escaped the inferno, and they are very aware that the litany of safety failures leading up to their rescue could have made their situation far, far worse.

No muster drill

DiveRACE Class E was a well-regarded luxury liveaboard (Photo: supplied)

Nicole Yeates, who works for the US Department of the Navy, and her husband Joe, a serving US Navy Officer, were on a three-week, first-class ‘trip-of-a-lifetime’ to Thailand before Joe headed out to sea for an extended period of duty.

Nicole, a self-confessed ‘big trip planner’ who enjoys researching the minutia of a potential holiday, did plenty of investigation before settling on DiveRACE Class E (from hereon just Class E), a well-appointed 34.5-metre steel-hulled vessel launched in 2015 that came with an excellent safety record and brilliant reviews.

The couple was picked up in the afternoon of 8 April and boarded Class E in the evening with another 14 divers. They set sail soon after arriving, and while the lead guide presented a safety briefing in the saloon, there was no proper muster drill to familiarise the guests with the boat’s emergency equipment and procedures.

‘We got there in the evening of 8 April and got underway,’ Nicole said. ‘There was no safety briefing other than a kind of, “here’s this, there’s that”, you know?

‘They said our life jackets are in the state rooms and the life rafts are on the top deck but there was no drill of any kind.’

Chanhyeok ‘Chris’ Kim, a diver from South Korea enjoying his first liveaboard – and who is also chief officer for a 200,000MT merchant ship – told the same story

‘The lead divemaster gave a short briefing about safety instructions,’ said Chris, ‘however, it was just: life jacket is in your cabin; life raft is on top.

‘They didn’t tell us about other safety equipment, for example, the place of the fire extinguisher or the fire alert system. Also, they didn’t talk about the muster station for fires or the abandon ship situation.’

No smoke detectors or fire alarm

Nicole and Joe on a previous liveaboard

For most of the voyage, everything was almost perfect, and Nicole gives praise to the crew where it’s due. ‘Things were efficient,’ she says; ‘they were well run and everything was well organised. The food was excellent and, overall, it was really well done – no complaints.’

On the last night of the trip, Class E and her passengers were moored over the Boonsong wreck when it became apparent that the vessel they were on was anything but perfect.

‘At about 3.15, 3.20 in the morning, Joe wakes me up and he tells me: “get up”,’ says Nicole. ‘He said: “Do you smell that smoke?”, but I’m half asleep at this point so I kind of take it with a grain of salt.

‘And then I hear somebody yelling, “Evacuate! Evacuate!”’

There were no smoke detectors or fire alarm system on board, and no roving night watch posted by the crew. The alarm was raised by a passenger who, unable to sleep, had been up on deck at the time the fire broke out.

Nicole and her husband left their cabin to investigate, and the nature of the emergency was instantly apparent.

‘As soon as we got into the hallway, there was thick smoke,’ said Nicole. ‘I tried to cover my mouth, but it was too much, and very acrid, so we ducked down and went outside onto the dive deck.

‘The smoke was out there too. We went to the edges to try and get some fresh air but it was already overwhelming the dive deck.’

They did not see any flames at this point, only smoke, so the couple headed out to the dining area on the upper deck, where other passengers were starting to gather.

‘We had about half the passengers at that point,’ said Nicole. ‘The head divemaster and a couple of the other divemasters showed up but then smoke started filling that area too, and it got too rough, so we walked along the side and went up to the front of the boat.’

Not realising the gravity of the situation, none of the assembled passengers had brought their life jackets with them.

‘It all happened too fast,’ said Nicole, ‘and I don’t think anybody realised that when people said “it’s smoky” that they were going to be jumping over the side.’

A couple of the female crew members, apparently unable to swim, had turned up with life rings.

No power, no radio, no battery backup

The fire was burning fiercely as dawn broke (Photo supplied by the survivors)

Approximately 10 minutes after leaving their cabins, the passengers realised the whole boat was without power – and had been for some time.

Another liveaboard, the MV Raga, owned by Smile Dolphin Adventures, was moored nearby but there did not seem to be any attempt by the crew to make contact.

According to Chris – who is in charge of his merchant ship’s firefighting team – Class E’s captain was at the front of the boat, and did not appear to be in control of the situation.

‘He could not speak English and looked panicked,’ he said, ‘so I went to the bridge to use the distress signal.

‘I tried to call by VHF radio, but it was not working because there was no electricity, so I tried to push the distress button, but it was also not working.

‘I tried to find other emergency equipment, but there was nothing,’ Chris continued. ‘The only thing I found was SART [Search and Rescue Transponder, which can be detected by other ships’ radar] but it was not that important in this situation.

‘So I couldn’t do anything because there was no power, and the batteries were also not working.’

DIVE has spoken with the DiveRACE Class E’s Singapore-based owner, who said in a written statement that ‘independent back-up batteries, radios and fire extinguishers were available’.

The simple facts remain, however, that two highly trained maritime officers – one civilian and one military – could not find a working radio on the bridge and, if there was a backup on board, neither the captain nor any of his crew put it to use.

‘The is pretty key to me,’ says Nicole, ‘and very aggravating. They went to the bridge to look for the bridge-to-bridge radio, assuming it had a battery backup. It did not.

‘They went looking for an emergency beacon. No battery backup on that, either, so no way to signal Mayday. Nothing.’

SOS by smartphone

Class E’s liferafts were of good quality and, as can be seen here, properly deployed (Photo: Supplied)

With no way to communicate with the outside world, people started to signal Raga using the flashlights on their mobile phones.

‘They were probably 150 to 200 metres away,’ said Nicole, ‘far enough to circle the anchor chain and not hit us. People were trying to signal SOS with the flashlights on their phones, but [the crew of the other boat] also seemed to be sleeping, and there was nobody on the bridge because we couldn’t get their attention.’

By this time the fire had taken hold on the back deck. Unable to raise a reaction from the other boat, and with no way to signal an emergency, the passengers realised they were probably going to have to abandon ship.

‘At this point we could see a glow in the back of the boat, and it was getting worse and worse,’ says Nicole. We are talking via a video call, and it is clear to see the memory is clearly not easy for her.

‘We heard planks starting to hit the dive deck, and we start hearing air hoses start popping, which is just feeding the fire, and we heard things exploding.’

Somebody was bringing life jackets up to the forward deck, so Nicole and her husband – both strong swimmers and, as US Navy personnel, able to handle emergencies pretty calmly – start passing them out.

Sea conditions worsened as the boat burned – Nicole estimates a 1.5–1.8 metre swell – and a steady drizzle made the decking slippery, causing her to fall and break her sacrum (the triangular bone situated between the two hip bones of the pelvis) as she was helping.

Videos taken by some of the survivors show the ferocity of the blaze and part of the rescue

It also became clear at while they were preparing to abandon ship that two divers were missing. Fortunately, one of the divemasters – a foreign national, not a member of the Thai crew – was able to open the forward emergency hatch, enabling them to escape the lower deck.

The liferafts were deployed – again, not by the crew but by one of the foreign divemasters and a passenger. Sea conditions and current made them difficult to access when people started jumping into the water, but – very importantly – they remained tethered to the vessel while the passengers abandoned ship, rather than drifting away, useless, into the dark.

By this time, the flames and the noise of the small explosions had aroused the attention of Raga’s crew, who deployed their boat’s tenders and weighed anchor to pick up Class E’s survivors.

The first mayday was issued by Raga’s captain at approximately 4.15 am.

This story, for reasons of length, appears in two parts. The second part is available here.

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Body of Wales quarry diver was found 85m underwater https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/body-of-wales-quarry-diver-was-found-85m-underwater Wed, 11 Jun 2025 11:29:33 +0000 https://divemagazine.com/?p=21508 The body of a diver that was recovered from Dorothea Quarry in Gwynedd, North Wales, on 31 May was found […]

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Dorothea Quarry in Gwynedd, North Wales (Photo: Shutterstock)

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The body of a diver that was recovered from Dorothea Quarry in Gwynedd, North Wales, on 31 May was found 85 metres (300ft) underwater, according to a coroner who opened the inquest into the diver’s death.

The man has been named by the inquest, which is being held at Caernarfon Coroner’s Court, as Tim James Waples, a 60-year-old engineer from Hertfordshire.

Senior Coroner Kate Robertson told the inquest that North Wales Police received a call at 1.37 pm on Saturday, 31 May, informing them that a diver had died at the disused slate quarry.

‘It seems that Tim Waples had been diving using equipment when he was found deceased at approximately 85 metres depth within the water,’ Robertson told the hearing. ‘He was confirmed as having passed away a short time later.’

Robertson said that a post-mortem examination had been ordered because she ‘had reason to suspect the death was unnatural.’

Dorothea Quarry – known locally as ‘Dotty’ – is an abandoned slate mine in the Nantlle Valley, situated in the mountains of North Wales. It has several flooded pits and reaches a maximum depth of 106 metres.

The quarry was used as a dive spot during the 1990s and 2000s, but the lack of safety facilities on-site supervision has claimed the lives of at least 25 swimmers and divers over the years. BSAC issued a warning against diving there following the death of a 41-year-old man in 2014.

The quarry reopened for use in 2021, and is now a strictly technical diving site managed by the North Wales Technical Divers Club.

The inquest has been adjourned while further investigations take place.

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Indian expat dies in Dubai training dive https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/indian-expat-dies-in-dubai-scuba-training-dive Mon, 09 Jun 2025 10:56:32 +0000 https://divemagazine.com/?p=21480 A 29-year-old Indian man has died from a cardiac arrest after he began struggling to breathe during an entry-level scuba […]

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Jumeirah Beach is one od Dubai’s most popular tourist areas (Photo: saiko3p/Shutterstock)

A 29-year-old Indian man has died from a cardiac arrest after he began struggling to breathe during an entry-level scuba diving lesson at Jumeirah Beach in Dubai.

Issac Paul Olakkengil, an engineer originally from Kerala in India, was holidaying in Jumeirah during the Eid Al Adha Festival when the incident occurred on 6 June.

Olakkengil’s uncle, David Pyarilos, told local media that Olakkengil was receiving instruction with his wife, Reshma, and younger brother, Ivin, at a designated diver training site when he began struggling to breathe.

Issac Paul Olakkengil (Photo: Issac Paul Olakkengil/LinkedIn)

Pyarilos, who is assisting the family with the repatriation of his nephew’s body to India, told local media that Olakkengil became separated from the group as he struggled, at which point the other group members began to panic.

‘Everybody panicked and was impacted underwater,’ he said. ‘I was told Reshma was rescued to the shore first, followed by the other two.’

Olakkengil was rushed to hospital, but medics were unable to revive him, citing his cause of death as cardiac arrest.

His brother, Ivin, also collapsed, although the circumstances in which he did so are unclear. He is said to be ‘out of danger’ and recovering, but was not notified of his brother’s death until the following day.

Dubai police have launched an investigation into the incident, with which the family is cooperating. The scuba diving equipment used during the training has been seized for analysis.

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