Saipan has just updated its Safety Diving Act to include new powers for police and tighter regulation of the diving industry. The new laws will allow police to enforce laws requiring scuba instructors and businesses to meet legal requirements. Even more interestingly, the new laws call for a governmental assessment of the level of difficulty of dive sites and consequently for restrictions to be implemented that will ensure diver safety.

Saipan is not the first jurisdiction to implement some form of governmental control of the scuba diving industry. Queensland in Australia has very tight restrictions on everything involving diving all the way down to how dives should be logged by operators and how many lights must be carried by divers in the late afternoon. Egypt regulates the experience level required by divers to dive certain protected sites, although whether these standards are properly enforced is open to debate. There are also many locations where the diving industry self regulates its activities and in most cases this works quite well.

I feel that the assessment of dive site difficulty and restriction of divers according to experience is an excellent idea and could make a real contribution to safety, but this will require local operators to act in the spirit of those regulations. What do you think? To what level should governments be involved in regulating scuba diving?