Clearing a flooded demand valve is both a routine procedure and an emergency procedure. It is an emergency procedure because if the DV is not cleared, the diver could aspirate water and choke, but it can easily happen, and will happen when a diver switches to a different gas supply delivered through a different DV, and there are two easy ways to deal with it, so it should not be a problem on a dive which runs according to plan. Routine scuba diving procedures (order may vary slightly, and some are also relevant to surface supplied diving, though details may vary):  Routine Surface-supplied diving procedures:  Routine wet bell procedures (some of these procedures also apply to closed bell operations, though details will differ):  Routine closed bell procedures:  These are the procedures that the diver is expected to be able to follow in the event of a reasonably foreseeable contingency. Some occur quite often such as the loss of grip on the mouthpiece in scuba diving, and are therefore usually well practiced. Others, like bailing out to emergency gas supply, should never happen if the equipment does not fail and the dive is carried out according to a good plan, and must be practiced as an exercise to maintain the skill or as part of pre-dive checks to ensure that the equipment is functioning correctly, as failure to perform correctly could be fatal. Emergency procedures are procedures to recover from a contingency that could be life-threatening if not responded to promptly and correctly. Some are trivially easy for a skilled diver. They include regulator recovery, clearing a flooded mask or helmet, bailout to emergency gas supply, emergency swimming ascent (for scuba), bell abandonment, shedding of weights (scuba), breathing off the pneumofathometer hose (SSDE), and switching over to onboard gas (bell diving). In cave or wreck diving, finding a lost guideline and finding the other end of a broken line are also emergency procedures. Scuba emergency procedures:  Surface supplied diving emergency procedures:  Wet bell emergency procedures:  Closed bell emergency procedures:  These are procedures that the professional standby diver must execute when deployed to go to the assistance of the working diver in an emergency, or the buddy or dive-team member in a recreational or technical dive should use if another member of the team is unable to manage an emergency themselves. They are also emergency procedures, but for another person's benefit. It is fairly common for a diver never to need to apply one of these procedures for real, and they too should be practiced to maintain skill levels.