Mandatory Protective Policies for Cave Tubing in Belize
On 24-SEP-2008 a cruise ship of Carnival Cruise Lines dropped anchor at the Belize coast. Their contracted tour operator, Bel-Cruise, offered day trips including a trip with cave tubing on Cave’s Branch River. The river was rather high this day, so the Institute of Archaeology (which is licensing the operators) issued a warning, but did not prohibit the tours. Most local tour companies canceled their trips due to the poor conditions, but not Bel-Cruise. So under the difficult conditions over 300 cruise ship passengers were participating the cave tubing. Almost at the end of the tour, strong currents pushed one tube toward the cave walls and a couple was sucked beneath the water. The man was rescued, his wife could not be reached in time and drowned. The guides attempted CPR but were not able to rescue her.
There are numerous tour operators at Caves’s Branch River. They are all licensed by the Institute of Archaeology, which is responsible for the area. The caves are important archaeologic sites, and the goal of the IOA is the protection of the site, not the enforcement of security regulations. However, they could have stopped the tours but did not. The responsible operators stopped their tours. We have listed only one operator, Cave’s Branch River Lodge on showcaves.com. We can’t actually tell if they are responsible, but we guess so.
Many people on discussion boards on the web tell about safety issues on the Bel-Cruise tours. There are people telling about groups without guides, lost in the cave and crying for help. Actually it is hard to tell if those stories are true.
Cave tubing is probably the most important day trip for Belize, so it is of enormous economic importance for the country. Members of the Belize Tourism Board (BTB), the Ministry of Tourism and Belize’s National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) met to improve safety precautions. The established mandatory protective policies, which are effective 15-OCT-2008, include:
- The guide to guest ratio of 1 guide to 8 guests, as prescribed by law, will be enforced as a policy for use of the caves.
- The Institute of Archaeology will install signs regarding policies that must be adhered to when using the cave system for tours.
- The BTB will work in collaboration with NICH to increase the presence of Tourism Police in the area.
- Staggered entrance to the caves will be implemented by the IOA.
- All tour guides will have to complete a mandatory training course given by the IOA and the BTB before November 2009.
Most important is obviously the last point. The trainings include a 2-3 day theory course which will cover Caves and the Ancient Maya, Cave Safety, Cave Ethics, Cave Geology and Regulations for operating in caves and the penalties that will be levied if policies are not adhered to. A five day course will cover Swift Water Rescue, Advanced First Aid and Cave Rescue. For security reasons the second one is much more important, hopefully this is the mandatory part.
As a matter of fact river caves are always dangerous, cavers know this. Most of the spectacular accidents of the last years happened in connection with flooding caves. So we are not really sure why all this regulations, which are somewhat basic, were not in effect before. On the other hand, they will not prevent further accidents, although they will make them less likely and hopefully optimize the rescue efforts if something happens.
We have listed many dangerous cave trips on showcaves.com, we try our best to warn and we hope our visitors have some common sense to decide what they do. We actually recommend dry trips, which are offered too in Belize. Such tubing experiences are only for physically fit people, which are good swimmers, not for couples from Orlando, Florida, in their fifties, who think it was as comfortable as a boat cruise down the Mississippi on a steamer. At the end, everyone is responsible for his own life, and white water rafting of any kind is definitely a recreational activity where accidents happen, above and below ground.