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Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

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March, nineteen seventy-six.

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A state police diver is deep inside a flooded cave.

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Nobody has ever explored it.

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He is carrying a flashlight rated at one hundred thousand candlepower.

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He points it across the chamber.

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He cannot see the other side.

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He points it down.

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He cannot see the bottom.

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Somewhere in this cave are two student divers, who swam in, and did not come back.

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This is Caving Stories: Cave Diving. True stories from flooded caves, told from the record.

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Today, the Blue Hole of Santa Rosa, and what lies behind its grate.

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Three divers have died in this cave.

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Santa Rosa sits in the dry country of eastern New Mexico, about four thousand six hundred feet above sea level.

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At the edge of town there is a pool of water so clear, and so blue, that it looks painted.

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This is the Blue Hole.

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At the surface it is eighty feet across.

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It widens as it goes down, like a bell, until it is a hundred and thirty feet across at the bottom.

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The main pool is a little over eighty feet deep.

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It is an artesian spring. Water rises into it from the western edge of the Ogallala Aquifer, at about three thousand gallons every minute.

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That is enough to replace all the water in the pool every six hours.

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And the water stays at sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit, summer and winter.

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In nineteen thirty-two the pool became a federal fish hatchery. In the nineteen seventies it became a recreation area, and something else: a place to learn to dive.

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Clear water, a constant temperature, a known depth.

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The Blue Hole was, and still is, a classroom.

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But the water has to come in from somewhere.

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At the bottom of the bell, in the rock, there is a small opening.

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The spring flows out of it.

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And behind it, the cave begins.

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On the tenth of March, nineteen seventy-six, a group of student divers from Oklahoma was training at the Blue Hole.

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By one account, eight divers went into the water that day.

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Two of them were Mike Godard and David Gregg.

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According to the foundation that later surveyed the cave, the two left their open-water certification class, and entered the passages of the cave system.

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An open-water class teaches a diver to work in water with nothing overhead. If something goes wrong, the surface is straight up.

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In a cave, there is rock overhead.

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The only way out is the way you came in.

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And you have to be able to find it.

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Godard and Gregg did not come back.

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A diving team from the New Mexico State Police was called in.

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They worked out where the two had gone: into a cave that had never been explored, and whose depth nobody knew.

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The police divers went in after them.

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The entrance was so narrow that some of the divers had to take off their equipment to swim through it.

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Within a day, in the first chamber, they found the body of David Gregg.

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Mike Godard was not there.

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So they went deeper.

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The second chamber, the police team reported, had a ceiling of shafts, cracks and crevasses.

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Another room they named the Tee-Pee Room.

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Its ceiling, in the words of the report, looked as though thousands of ice cream cones were hanging upside down.

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And then the cave began to come down on them.

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Every breath a scuba diver lets out rises as bubbles. In this cave, the bubbles from the searchers loosened rock in the ceilings of the chambers.

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There were cave-ins.

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One of the divers, Tom Hawkins, was hit by a falling rock three feet across.

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It nearly trapped him.

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The largest room they found was about seventeen feet high.

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During the recovery, it collapsed.

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It was Hawkins who carried the big flashlight into the third chamber.

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This is how he described it.

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"I could see easily in the chamber," he said, "but I couldn't see to the other side, or the bottom."

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The divers' gauges read two hundred and twenty-five feet.

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Santa Rosa is nearly a mile above the sea, and at altitude a depth gauge reads deep. Corrected, the true figure was probably closer to a hundred and ninety.

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They kept searching those passages for six weeks.

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Then they found Mike Godard.

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When the search was over, the city of Santa Rosa made a decision.

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The opening at the bottom of the Blue Hole was sealed with a steel grate.

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Then the United States Army Corps of Engineers dumped at least two truckloads of rock on top of it.

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The spring still flowed. Divers still came to train in the pool above.

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But the cave was closed.

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And the only record of it was a set of rough sketches made by the police divers in nineteen seventy-six.

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It stayed that way for thirty-seven years.

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In twenty thirteen, the city's tourism director, Richard Delgado, put it simply.

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"We really have no idea," he said, "what exists beyond the grate."

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In September of twenty thirteen, the city let someone look.

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The ADM Exploration Foundation, a group of survey divers led by Curt Bowen, was given the first authorized access to the cave since it was closed.

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Their plan was to map it properly: measured lines, high-definition video, and a cartographer to turn it all into a survey.

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They did not get far.

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The rock dumped in nineteen seventy-six was still there, blocking the way beyond ninety-one feet.

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The team hauled out debris. With enough of it gone, more water came through the opening, and the pool above ran clearer.

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But one large boulder blocked the way on. They could not get past it.

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Over the next three years, with help from police divers, the remaining debris was dredged out.

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And in March of twenty sixteen, the foundation came back to finish the map.

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It was Easter weekend.

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Forty years, and sixteen days, since Godard and Gregg.

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One of the divers on the team was Shane Thompson, of San Diego. He was a Navy veteran, with more than twenty years of diving behind him.

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This was not a student who had wandered out of a class.

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This was an experienced diver, on an authorized expedition, with a partner.

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On Saturday, the twenty-sixth of March, Thompson and his partner, Mike Young, were exploring the passages.

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The published account is short.

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The tether between the two men broke, and they were separated.

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The visibility was low.

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Thompson took a wrong turn.

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He ended up in a passage with no way out, a hundred and sixty feet below the surface.

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By the time Young found him, Shane Thompson had drowned.

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A local newspaper described a chaotic series of events, in which Young himself nearly died.

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The next day, Easter Sunday, Young went back into the cave, and brought his partner out.

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The expedition did finish its work.

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The divers explored the system down to a hundred and ninety-four feet.

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That is the real depth of the cave that the police gauges had put at two hundred and twenty-five.

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At the bottom, they found where the spring comes from. The water filters up through tons of broken rock.

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There is no passage to follow beyond it.

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Everything a diver can reach has now been explored and mapped.

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And the team's recommendation to the city was the same decision the city had made in nineteen seventy-six.

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Keep it closed.

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Before they left, the divers put the cover back over the entrance.

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In April of twenty twenty-four, divers from local dive shops, working with a city crane, replaced that cover with a new grate, because the old one was trapping debris and choking the spring.

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Three years after the search at the Blue Hole, a Florida cave diver named Sheck Exley published a short book.

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He called it Basic Cave Diving: A Blueprint for Survival.

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Exley had studied how divers die in caves, and he found the same few causes again and again.

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Out of that came five rules that cave divers still learn today.

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One. Training. Do not go beyond what you have been trained to do.

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Two. A continuous guide line, from open water outside the cave, all the way to the lead diver.

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Because a cave floor is often silt, and silt, once stirred, can take the visibility to nothing in seconds.

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The line is how you find the way out when you cannot see it.

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Three. Depth. Do not go deeper than the plan.

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Four. Air. One third of your supply to go in, one third to come out, and one third held back for a partner in trouble.

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Five. Lights. At least three of them, each independent of the others.

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The majority of divers who have died in caves had no cave training, or the wrong equipment.

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And the most frequent cause of death, among untrained divers who go into caves, is the lack of that continuous line to open water.

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An open-water class does not issue a guide line.

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The record of this cave is thin in one place, and it is the place that matters most.

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Nobody saw what happened to Mike Godard and David Gregg.

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The record says where they were found, and how long it took. It does not say why they went in, or what went wrong.

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What it does say is what they were.

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They were students in an open-water class, in a cave.

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And it says that training alone does not make this cave safe. Forty years later, it took a diver with two decades of experience.

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The Blue Hole is still open.

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The pool, that is: eighty feet of clear water, at sixty-two degrees.

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The cave under it is not.

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The sources for every fact in this episode are in the show notes.

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This has been Caving Stories: Cave Diving.

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Thank you for listening.