The Shaft: Eight Went Down, Four Came Up
Near Mount Gambier, South Australia, 28 May 1973. Eight divers descend through a three-foot hole in a paddock into one of the largest flooded chambers in the country, with no guide line and no dive plan. At about 180 feet, four of them keep going. It takes more than ten months to bring the last of them back, and the accident changes cave diving in Australia. Told from the published record.
Chapters
0:00 Torches under the ceiling
0:47 A hole in a paddock
2:18 The party
3:30 The first dive
4:06 One hundred and eighty feet
5:24 What the survivors saw
6:15 Ten months
8:28 The coroner
9:31 What changed
10:48 The Shaft today
Sources
Wikipedia: 1973 Mount Gambier cave diving accident (with its references: W. B. Budd, "Police Diving: The Shaft", Australian Police, 1991; Lewis & Stace, Summary of Cave Diving Deaths in Australia, CDAA, 1977; P. Horne, South Australian Diving Fatalities 1950-1982): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Mount_Gambier_cave_diving_accident
Wikipedia: Cave diving (the five rules; nitrogen narcosis in caves): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_diving
Wikipedia: Nitrogen narcosis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_narcosis
Full transcript:
https://pub-413c1fc5107e439dbec7a1f1c322ed45.r2.dev/diving/transcripts/ep03.vtt
Caving Stories on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@caving_stories
Follow the show in your podcast app to get each new episode as soon as it is out.
Produced by Caving Stories.
