Aqualung Recall Redux – What's up with that.
NEWS is supposed to be current. Back in July (2008) we reported about a recall of Aqualung Titan/Conshelf DIN adapters, which had a minor chance of breakage if the service technician had overtightened the part during servicing (details here).
We were suprised when we started to see 10 times the news stories we saw in July regarding this issue. Additionally many of the stories this time around have added panic inducing headlines with words like “Drowning Risk.” A quick call to Aqualung confirmed that this is NOT A NEW RECALL and no one has drowned due to this issue.
Here is the rest of the story. According Jacquie Edelman an Aqualung media representive, there have been no incidents of actual failure involving this adapter. She gave the following explaination to ScubaGadget for the likely reason that so many more news feeds are running with what seemed like old news now. After Aqualung issued the recall to the media and dealers in July they were informed by the CPSC (US Consumer Product Safety Commission) that they needed to re-issue it throught the CPSC channels again in August.
Why more hype on this round? It seems that some news outlets have an urge to spice up their story and/or headlines in hopes of getting more attention. And they do, because it is common that many other news outlets and blogs just copy and paste the hyped stories without checking the background from the source. On every occasion when we have contacted the source we have found more interesting detail than was printed in other sources.