There should be a law against bringing in and leaving nylon ropes in the cave. If this continues, all the caves are going to be filled with nylons ropes left by previous divers. Do we want these caves, too, to eventually become a garbage dumping ground?
The nylon lines are only a safety system - there's typically a mainline and then only branches off of it. The only time multiple lines are used are at the entrance (the mainline is usually placed 50-100m back to prevent untrained divers from finding it accidentally) or where there are jumps, and in both cases the temporary connections are retrieved when the team of divers exits.
In some higher traffic caves these lines are replaced regularly, however with most caves it's an every couple of year type situation and done by volunteer teams.
As a cave is explored & mapped, line is tied on to the end from the explorer's reels - adding multiple knots and failure points. Once there's sufficient traffic or need usually caretakers will go through and attach more resilient line (usually a spectra or dyneema line) and take out the original line, only leaving the exploration markers (name, date, expedition, etc). These teams also find more permanent attachment points or add them (using silt anchors and sometimes bolts) so that the lines aren't secured to cave features wherever possible.
Adding & removing lines on each dive would actually cause more damage to cave features than keeping a permanent or semi-permanent line in place, and there'd be a much higher risk of line movement and entrapment as the connections would be fewer and further between.
There are conventions in the cave-diving community on how lines are left/maintained/removed, which prevent caves from being strewn with abandoned lines.
Much like the IT community adopt coding-standards for a project, the cave-diving community has line-placement standards. Whilst the standards vary from location to location (and are in general localised to the requirements of the location's environment), they are generally well "policed" and exceptions are addressed.
"I'm not a cave diver, have no emotional attachment to this article, and I don't have even a rudimentary understanding of the culture surrounding cave diving but I made an account just to say I think those people should have arbitrary limits placed on them."
They don't mention anything about the central topic of the article; the man who was stuck in the cave. If they had any sort of emotional reaction to the article, I imagine they would have said something about it.
They don't, no one does, but any one of the three things I listed would have most likely caused someone to contribute something useful to the conversation.
I'd've thought that the majority of these locations will only be being accessed by cave divers, who have a vested interest in A) having the ropes there as a safety mechanism and B) not leaving unnecessary lines in place to avoid confusion. Not my field, but it sounds like the sort of problem that will be self-policing.
