March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Mom touts safety course for divers> Mandatory course could have saved son’s life, Portland woman says

PORTLAND — Critics of the new state law requiring a safety course for urchin and scallop divers should talk to Nancy Maxwell of Portland. She took the course last week and says it could have saved her son’s life.

A registered nurse, Maxwell didn’t need to take the three-day course at Southern Maine Technical College — she only wanted the extra training to pursue her hobby of underwater archaeology.

Her son, David, was 25 when he drowned last Nov. 3 while harvesting urchins in Biddeford Pool. It was only his second commercial dive.

That was one of six diving deaths in Maine in the last year and prompted the Legislature to pass a law making the safety course mandatory for all shellfish divers and tender operators. Only those who have completed the course will receive 1995 licenses from the Department of Marine Resources.

The law has been blasted by many in the industry as unnecessary, inconvenient and, at $170, too expensive.

Maxwell doesn’t buy into those objections. She said Wednesday the course was “extremely thorough and comprehensive. It was very pertinent to everything divers and tenders do, especially the CPR and first aid components. Tenders have a lot of responsibilities out there; this prepares them for anything that could happen. With divers having to go out farther and to dive deeper to find urchins, the information on decompression is very important.”

To those who say they get all the training they need on the job, Maxwell said, “I wish them well. I’m a nurse, I work in a high-risk, highly regulated industry, and I appreciate all the training I can get.”

David Maxwell drowned at Fortunes Rocks in Biddeford Pool after he became entangled in the rope tied to his urchin bag. He tried to swim to the tender, but got caught in heavy surf.

Like most urchin divers, his only training was open-water certification, intended for recreational divers.

“He was very well-trained, he had an excellent instructor, but it just wasn’t adequate for the conditions urchin divers work in,” Maxwell said. “The part of the course emphasizing a dive plan — knowing where the divers will be located, how long they’ll be on the bottom, their proximity to the tender — could have prevented his death.”

Maxwell said many of her classmates came in as skeptics and left as believers. “A lot of them were suspicious at first, but everyone I talked to came away impressed. They covered so much material, everyone learned something valuable.”

The DMR reported early this month that enrollment for the course was shockingly low. Of the nearly 3,000 divers and tenders licensed this year, only 50 had signed up for the course.

John Fetterman, the department’s search and rescue coordinator, said Tuesday word that the DMR intends to enforce the law to the letter has had the desired effect — enrollment has exploded to nearly 1,000 in the past two weeks.

The increased enrollment has allowed the DMR to answer one criticism of the program, that the course locations at technical college campuses are inconvenient.

“We’ve said all along that we’ll be able to add sections and locations as enrollment picks up, and that’s just what we’re doing,” Fetterman said.


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