“Fear doesn’t avoid the danger” so we need more awareness about a particular type of risk and how it can be prevented.
This article is the continuation of the section About. It explain in more detail how I came, from being the owner of a brazilian jiu-jitsu academy and freediver, a developper of a method to prevent accidents, first in freediving and then for anytype of risks within an organisation.
After I had a canyoning accidents in 2016, I almost miraculously recovered. I had multiple fractures on both ankles and fortunately, doing sport regularly help me a lot in the recovery, wich was very fast.
I felt the need to go learn and went back to university. By chance there were a new cursus in the Sports Magement department of the University : I was accepted within the laboratory of Vulnerabilities, Innovation and Health, under the guidance of Bastien Soulé (director of the Lab). It was even the ideal cursus leading to a doctorate.
The core of the study was to learn the scientific approach and it was what I was looking for. It couldn’t be better and also I could choose my topic. It could be related to freediving, marine life, martial arts… I could spend one intensive year and get and my master degree fast, but instead it took me 2 years to complete my work : create a method to prevent freediving accidents. I learned first the scientific approach, or methodology. Read everything I could about the subject and did my own investigation to know more about freediving accidents. I was in constent contact by phone along this time with different persons in charge at this moment of the areas I was investigating in : Olivia Friecker president of the freediving commission within the french diving federation (FFESSM) and also captain of the french freediving team, Olivier Drevon responsible of the national maritime rescue center (CROSS), Neal Pollock responsible of the DAN database for accident reports and other scientist who collaborate in freediving studies within or in partnership with DAN and AIDA (Association Internationale pour le Développement de l’Apnée) such as Frédéric Lemaitre, Mary Schirrer, Peter Lindholm, Zelko Dujic…
Nothing was done at this time about that subject, except some isolate actions. AIDA has constently published reports, but concerning the way to capture return of experience (or REX) nothing was developped and let to the discretion to the clubs and participants to report intentionaly any accidents. DAN was more specialized into scuba diving and breath hold accidents. Thes last ones were including any tye of freediving, when it matters in fact to separate each type of accidents. So I chose to develop a method around deep freediving accidents. Inspite we have quite a few example of tragical accidents in deep freediving, this remain in reality quite a few within many practitionners worldwide. To make the story short came to the conclusion that incidents were indeed more informative because they are on the path of than accident without the dramatic end. Also they are numerous, almost countless and easy to capture if we developp a sort of culture of reporting incidents. It is an habit to implement within a practice or an organisation. I was lucky also that the Lab where took place my research (L-VIS, University Claude Bernard) gave me the tool that was developped to prevent mountain accidents. I haven’t invented anything. Everything was almost done. I had just to adapt an exissting tool that was succesful to prevent freediving accidents. However you need datas to get results, so I built my study around the 18 freediving cases I could find. Fortunately it is not that much…
This tool was originally develloped in Danmark to prevent accidents within the fish industry. It was adapted to mountain accidents, freediving accidents… and then to all organisation as long as you get the datas related to a particular risk, from little businesses to medium and larger companies. This tool is called Storybuilder, it is a freeware. However it took me all this time to be able to use it, to understand and adapt it.
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