Pattaya, Thailand's Only British-Owned PADI 5-Star Career Development Center
What Do You Want to Do?
If you’re someone with a background – or simply an interest in – public safety, emergency medicine or rescue work, then Aquanauts has the course for you. Emergency Response Diver 1, from PERT (Professional Emergency Response Training) takes your PADI Rescue Diver skills to a whole new level, making you the best prepared rescue diver out there or even readies you for a job on a public safety dive team.
PERT ERD 1 will introduce you to the basic skills necessary to participate in limited rescue/recovery diving operations. It provides students an orientation to the field of public safety diving and rudimentary skills training for supervised participation in rescue/recovery diving operations.
While PADI’s Rescue Diver course teaches you self-sufficiency and buddy assistance and the Search and Recovery Diver course teaches you to locate commonly lost equipment, the training is for conditions where visibility is fair or better and hazards are few. Those are luxuries most public safety divers don’t experience.
As a Public Safety Diver, your dive environment is likely to be found in rapid moving, dirty or deep water and other places the normal recreational diver would never venture. Such environments usually also harbor a whole host of underwater conditions that make search, rescue and recovery even more difficult.
As a result, ERD 1 is a challenging course that is not for everyone. Its difficulty is designed to help you meet the challenges of the job as a Public Safety Diver. The standards for performance will be much more rigidly enforced than in any recreational course you may have taken. You will get very little understanding and flexibility from your instructor. The instructor will expect from you at least 150% of your capabilities and effort.
You will not be certified until your instructor would be willing to dive with you as the safety diver. (Would you expect any less if you were the diver?) Aquanauts wants you to enjoy the training and to remember that everything you will do has been done before by others like you and those things that you work hardest for are the things you respect and value most.
Upon successful completion of the ERD 1 course, you will be able to operate as a basic team member and support person within a dive team organization, providing that:
Completion of the course also means that you have met the prerequisites for the Emergency Response Diver 2 course and any of the PERT “Tactical Diver” courses. (These courses will be coming to Aquanauts later this year.)
To enroll in the PERT Emergency Response Diver 1 course, you must meet all of the following pre-requisites:
The exact structure of each course depends upon how many students are participating, but generally adheres to the following format:
While PERT training is done within the confines of no decompression limits, the equipment used is a mix of technical and professional diving gear. We recommend you have your own gear for the course, but items below denoted with asterisks (*) can be rented.
Using the Emergency Response Diver student manual, you will work with you instructor to cover a range of academics and theory, including, but not limited to: self rescue, equipment redundancy, physiological and psychological responses to emergency situations, emergency scenarios, dive site assessment, search patterns, and diving injury management.
Once you’ve completed the classroom session, you’ll hit the water for skills development, both in the confined water environment of a swimming pool (or in pool-like conditions in the sea) and then in the open water.
Perhaps the most physically demanding part of the course comes in the swimming pool, where you’ll need to complete all of the following swim tests:
Once done with the swims, you’ll demonstrate self- and buddy-rescue skills, such as rescuing an unconscious diver on the surface and on the bottom and a panicked diver on the surface. You’ll also demonstrate your navigation skills with a “tactile compass” while using a blacked-out mask, complete search patterns,
In the open water training, you’ll demonstrate all the essential dive skills you learned in your recreational dive courses, as well as perform six dives using lines and tethers, various search patterns, recovery simulations and scenarios and dive site assessment.
