Puerto Rico Asset Value -- It's all about safety

We squeezed everything we could out of our last day on our second trip to Puerto Rico. While we had to travel across the island to make our flight departing in San Juan, we managed to schedule a meeting with Dr. Arroyo at CentroMedico Hospital, the only location on the island with a three section hyperbaric chamber. A nurse practitioner spent hours going over the procedures they practice in treating between forty to sixty decompressed divers each year. The medical staff’s knowledge regarding the differing levels of injury a fisherman may experience after diving was valuable. We learned that there are two categories they use to describe scuba diving incidents. The first degree of injury is marked by fisherman who feel pains in their joints, have “the bends”, or who have decompression sickness. The second and more severe degree of injury is declared when patients exhibit neurological disorders. Unfortunately, the more times a fisherman is hurt enough to be transported to the chamber, the more susceptible they are to internal issues in the future, should they continue diving.

A major issue the doctors discussed with us is the fact that fisherman, in particular the new and younger ones, feel strongly against going to the chamber despite their medical state. They are either scared of the chamber itself, or worried that they will be held up from fishing the next day. We might expect, a person’s health is more important than money, however; we clearly can see a reversal of these notions in the diving fisherman. In conjunction with their consistent pushing of physical boundaries, the doctors explained that fisherman do not spend enough time above the water between diving cycles, causing their pains to worsen over time. Also, when fishermen surface and feel like they may get the bends, they will return to the water with the thought that the pressure will help them feel better, however; their returning underwater actually increases the amount of nitrogen within their blood and thus increases their chances of becoming extremely sick. We are trying to understand more clearly their reasoning for ignoring dive tables and pushing their bodies to their absolute limit. It is becoming more and more clear that fisherman who are the sole provider for their families feel pressured to continue to dive day in and day out despite the toll their work takes on their personal health.

A major breakthrough was made in meeting Dr. Arroyo, who is working on publishing a paper regarding Puerto Rican fisherman and their dive practices. He has explained to us that useful information such as age, gender, location, and reason for accidents amongst the fisherman will be of access to us via his publication, set to be available in the coming months. It was great to establish a relationship with Dr. Arroyo because he will be an invaluable resource to us and the next semester Asset Value team in decoding the diver’s motivations, activities, and repercussions of their work.