18
|
FALL 2012
Left: DAN
President Dan
Orr at Aquarius
Reef Base, Key
Largo, Fla.
Below: Orr and
Dick Rutkowski,
recipients of
the 2012 DEMA
Reaching Out
Awards.
D
edication to diver safety
and well-being; that
summarizes the service of
two men who spent their
entire adult lives on the cutting edge of
diving and recreational-diver training.
Between them, they may have saved
more divers from serious injury, at least
indirectly, than any other two people in
the dive community.
Each year the Diving Equipment
and Marketing Association (DEMA)
announces the winners of its Reaching
Out Awards, which recognize individuals
who have made a significant contribution
to the sport of diving by “reaching out in
some special way to improve the sport
for everyone.” The awards, considered
DEMA’s Hall of Fame, are presented at
the annual DEMA trade show. The 2012
award recipients are Dan Orr and Dick
Rutkowski.
Orr is best known for his current
role as the president of Divers Alert
Network® (DAN®). However, it is the
totality of his experiences leading to
that appointment that have made a
big impact on the sport of diving. He
was DAN’s first director of training,
developing DAN’s original Oxygen First
Aid for Scuba Diving Injuries course
in 1991, but even that was preceded
by nearly 30 years of diving and diver
training.
Orr was an aircrew rescue swimmer
in the U.S. Navy and went on to
become a dive instructor for the
YMCA, the Professional Association
of Diving Instructors (PADI) and the
National Association of Underwater
Instructors (NAUI). He did everything
from teaching individual certification
classes to serving as the founding
chairman of the NAUI Technical
Advisory Group. As the director of
underwater education at Ohio’s Wright
State University, he created a self-
sustaining diving program that taught
scuba classes for academic credit. The
program was partially funded through
donations and proceeds generated by
an annual “scuba fea market,” which
was Orr’s brainchild as well.
Orr eventually joined the faculty
of Florida State University, where he
became involved in cave and research
diving and worked with Disney’s Living
Seas Pavilion at Epcot. He began
working at DAN in 1991.
Rutkowski, who made his first
recreational scuba dive in 1953, worked
in government service for 33 years,
joining the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
in 1970, the year it was founded. He
was a meteorologist in the Arctic and
the Antarctic and later was a NOAA
diver and scientific technician. Early
on, Rutkowski worked on the NOAA
tables for nitrox use in scientific
research. He was a NOAA Aquanaut
in the undersea lab in the Bahamas
and later was NOAA’s director of diver
training. He also established the NOAA
recompression chamber for Miami and
Central and South America.
After retiring fromNOAA, Rutkowski
started several companies related to
scuba diving including Hyperbarics
International Inc. in Key Largo, Fla.,
which sets up chambers and trains
hyperbaric physicians and technicians.
He has trained more than 7,000
medical personnel in hyperbaric
medicine.
Rutkowski introduced nitrox to the
recreational diving community and
was the founder of American Nitrox
Divers International (ANDI) and, later,
the International Association of Nitrox
and Technical Divers (IANTD). To
this day he is known as the “Father of
Recreational Technical Diving.”
Orr and Rutkowski have changed
the face of recreational diving.
Through education and science, they
have helped make diving the safe,
exhilarating sport it is today.
—
Sandy Sondrol
DIVE SLATE
//
Pioneers
of Dive
Safety
TIM GROLLIMUND
TIM GROLLIMUND