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Yakima County, Washington.

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A Saturday in March, nineteen ninety-seven. A little after noon.

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Two divers are standing by at the mouth of a flooded concrete tunnel, watching the black water.

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Two of their colleagues swam into that tunnel about half an hour ago, to look for two men who are already missing inside it.

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Far down the tunnel, the divers at the mouth can see lights.

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The lights are coming back toward them.

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Then the lights stop.

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

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Today's cave was built by engineers. It is Siphon Four of the Roza Canal.

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Four divers died in it, in a single day.

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The Roza Canal carries irrigation water for ninety-five miles through the Yakima Valley, in central Washington.

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Where the canal meets a canyon, it does not cross on a bridge. It goes under.

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The water drops into a tube down one side of the canyon, runs along the bottom, and climbs the other side.

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Engineers call that an inverted siphon.

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The Roza Canal has seven of them.

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Siphon Four, north of the town of Zillah, is the largest.

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It is two thousand two hundred and ten feet long.

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Nearly half a mile.

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It goes down one wall of the canyon, levels out for about four hundred feet, and comes up the other wall.

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At its lowest point it is about a hundred feet below the surface.

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The opening is about thirteen feet across.

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There is no light in it.

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One diver who went in later said: "This is like being in a hole with your eyes closed."

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And everywhere, there is concrete overhead.

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Cave divers have a name for a place like that. They call it an overhead environment: a place where you cannot swim up to the surface, and must swim the whole way back out.

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Nobody had ever called Siphon Four a cave. But for a diver, that is what it was.

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People dump cars in irrigation canals. Stolen ones, abandoned ones.

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In the Roza Canal, they end up in the siphons.

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So from time to time, the Roza Irrigation District hired divers to go in, hook steel cables to the cars, and let a crew winch them out.

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The district's manager called it a routine operation.

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It had never killed anyone.

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In March of nineteen ninety-seven, there were three cars in Siphon Four.

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The district hired two divers: Marty Rhode, of Zillah, and John Eberle, of Grandview.

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At least one of them had been inside this siphon before.

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But neither of them had ever gone all the way through it.

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Both men held recreational diving certificates.

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Neither was trained as a commercial diver, and neither was trained for diving in a confined space.

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They expected to find the cars close to the mouth of the tube.

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On Saturday, the fifteenth of March, Rhode and Eberle went into the west end of Siphon Four.

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The state's investigators later listed what they did not have.

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No safety line to the surface.

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No way of talking to the crew above.

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No backup divers standing by at the entrance.

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No safety plan worked out before the dive.

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What they did have was an instruction for the crew.

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If they were not back in an hour, call nine one one.

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The cars were not where they expected.

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An unusual volume of water had come through the canal, and it had pushed the cars along the tube.

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They were now at the far end of the siphon, by the east mouth, in only a few feet of water.

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The two divers had gone in at the west.

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To reach the cars from there, a diver had to go down a hundred feet, along the bottom of the canyon, and up the other side.

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In the dark.

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In cold water.

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The hour passed.

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The crew made the call.

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The call went to Yakima County's search and rescue divers. They were volunteers.

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One was Rusty Hauber, a Yakima firefighter.

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The other was Charlie Mestaz, known as J.R., a volunteer firefighter from the town of Moxee, and a mechanic. Two years earlier he had been named East Valley firefighter of the year.

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His fire chief, Adrian Jacobs, remembered what he had told him.

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"Be careful. Those siphons scare the hell out of me."

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Like the two men they were looking for, Hauber and Mestaz held recreational certificates.

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Around noon, they went into the siphon.

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This time, two backup divers stayed at the mouth.

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Each rescuer carried a tank with about an hour of air in it. Mestaz also carried a small emergency tank.

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They were underwater for less than forty minutes.

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The backup divers pulled both of them out at the mouth of the tube.

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Both main tanks were empty.

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So was the emergency tank.

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Rusty Hauber was dead.

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The autopsy found that he had drowned.

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Charlie Mestaz was alive, and in a coma.

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He died in a Yakima hospital three days later, without waking up.

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Then the district did something it had never done since the siphon was built, in nineteen thirty-nine.

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It drained it.

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On Monday afternoon, with the water down, two divers from a rescue team in Kennewick, Mark Allen and Neil Hines, found Marty Rhode and John Eberle.

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They were six hundred and sixty feet from the west mouth.

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They were floating in eight to ten feet of water, with their equipment still on.

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Their aluminum tanks were empty.

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Their depth gauges showed that they had been down to a hundred feet: the bottom of the siphon.

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The three cars were pulled out the same afternoon.

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They had been sitting near the east mouth all along.

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The county's undersheriff, Lane Roberts, said what everyone was asking.

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"We have no idea how four divers with such experience got into this problem."

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The answer, when it came, was arithmetic.

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An outside investigation, by the Pierce County Sheriff's Office, concluded that all four divers had misjudged how much air they needed.

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Here is why that is easy to do.

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The deeper a diver goes, the denser the air he breathes, and the faster the tank empties.

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One expert put it this way for the Seattle Times: for every thirty-three feet a diver descends, the time his air will last is cut in half.

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Cold water makes it worse.

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A tank that means an hour near the surface means far less than an hour at a hundred feet.

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And in a tube, when the air runs low, there is nowhere to go but along.

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As the undersheriff said: "It's dangerous diving. You don't just drop your weight belt to come back up."

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The investigators found that the men had been trained for open water, and had likely judged their air by open-water experience.

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A commercial dive team, one industry expert said, would not have gone into that siphon with scuba gear at all.

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Washington's Department of Labor and Industries investigated the irrigation district as an employer.

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In June, its preliminary findings listed nine violations.

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No safety line with the divers.

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No backup divers at the point of entry.

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No underwater communications.

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No adequate lights or equipment.

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No recompression chamber on hand.

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No dive plan and no safety procedures.

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And no adequate training.

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The proposed fines came to thirty-three thousand seven hundred dollars.

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A spokesman for the department, Roland Lund, was careful about what that number meant.

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"This is not a value placed on human life," he said. "This is occupational safety and health only."

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Cave divers work by a rule about air.

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A third of the tank to go in. A third to come out. A third kept back for a partner in trouble.

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They work by a rule about a line: a continuous guide line, from open water to the diver, always.

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And first of all, they work by a rule about training: do not go beyond it.

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Those rules were written in the nineteen seventies, from the study of how divers die in caves.

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By nineteen ninety-seven they were nearly twenty years old.

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Nobody at Siphon Four was a cave diver. Nobody thought of it as a cave.

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The record cannot say what happened inside the tube. No one who saw it came out.

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It can only say what was found: four sets of empty tanks.

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Two men went in to do a job they had done before.

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Two more went in to bring them back.

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Yakima's fire chief, Al Chronister, had one thing to say about work like this.

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"Who else is going to do that stuff?"

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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.