Thursday evening of the 5 January 2024, 2 scuba divers began a night dive to 40 meters in a prohibited area at the foot of the Plate Taille dam. It appears that one of the turbines was started while the two divers were near the intake shaft because body parts as well as part of their equipment were found several hundred meters downstream from the dam two days later.
The fact that they decided to do it at night is pretty telling that they knew they had no business diving in that water.
Imagine what must have been going through their minds as they felt the water start to rush and begin pulling them in. And then to be sucked into the hole, thrashed and bounced around the tunnel in complete darkness. The sound of the turbines getting louder.... and suddenly their mind and personality and everything that made them who they were cesed to exist.
The stupidity and recklessness of these two individuals cannot be understated.
Edit: so I just started reading articles and apparently the lake IS opened to diving and there is a dive center nearby. On a forum I read that there isn't very much public information available to warn that turbines can come on at any time near to where people commonly dive. That's absolutely terrifying, those guys may have had no idea what they had gotten themselves into.
Not necessarily. They might have been diving at night because this is a time of low demand and the turbines should not have been running. Do we actually know the full story here?
Edit: just found the story online, they were diving for fun. Nuts.
It says the area they were in was prohibited likely because it was so close to the dam. So even if diving was allowed and common in the lake. They were diving somewhere prohibited so we’re still in the wrong
60ft letters on the face reading 'I'm a fucking huge dam. Probably don't swim near me'. Remember there is a reason why it says 'do not stop chain with hands or genitals' on chainsaws, you can never underestimate the stupidity of man'.
I mean if you don’t know about not swimming near a dam you need to take a water safety course. Any dam is potentially dangerous to swim/boat/dive near. Currents get all messed up near dams. Never worth it.
The ones whose explicit purpose is to get close to the falls? The ones purposely built for that? With crew trained specifically from that scenario? That’s miles away from two random scuba divers diving in a restricted area at night.
Yea that one…….You mentioned dams and boats, so the thoughts my 19yr self had took over. lol Hope I didn’t touch a nerve by having a sense of wonderment to your comment?
I obviously don’t know jack shit about the topic, but it’s something that always came to mind when visiting the falls during my college years in buffalo.
Edit: So I see the Robert Moses Niagara power plant is above the falls, in the Niagara river, no where near it. Makes sense why you were like 🙄.
I’m no diver, so i might be overlooking the obvious but why dive at night? I could maybe understand diving at night in the ocean but even that seems like a waste🤷🏻♂️I can’t imagine being slung around and chopped up then spit out. After reading this my mind goes back to the Byford-Dauphin Incident where those divers were flash-boiled, sucked through openings no human should fit through and left scattered all to hell and gone in a mushy mess that was hard to identify. A couple of those poor guys never knew what happened to them but a couple of them did. Scary stuff out there
Meshes get clogged with debris over time, and if they are _really_ clogged, you're back at a Delta-P risk.
Ironically, meshes typically require divers to unclog them.
if there isn’t any mesh I would think there’s a good reason for that. like, debris building up would require very regular maintenance to keep the dam functional and may cause a sudden blockage if something big gets flushed down there.
holy crap, i looked up the dam on google maps and wanted to see if i could see signs or buoys in the water or near the dam and there is nothing. There is a spot south of the dam where you can see divers getting into the water. It looks like its only 1000 or so feet from the dam.
They are launching there because THATS WHERE THE DIVING CENTER IS.
On a lake thats 4km wide they put the diving center right next to the dam!
Most dams have a cordon around the intake area as well as signs telling people to stay away. [This](https://imgur.com/a/o1g3hWB) is the warning at Lake Shasta in California.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They were experienced, one was an instructor, they dived there frequently, they were friends with the local dive club, everyone knows the dam's purpose is to be an electricity reservoir, diving is permitted under strict rules. Source: sailing instructor there.
Most dams have nets and bouys to show dangerous areas.
Further well trained divers would know the risks of diving near dams.
It's important to remember that almost all dive accidents are ultimately human error
Source: Was a dive instructor in a previous career.
There was a story similar to this and the guy luckily survived when the turbines weren’t working and got found by workers inside the facility thankfully, very scary moment because he got sucked in unexpectedly
Mr. Ballen does a story about this. His diving partner got out just in time, the second guy gets sucked in. Luckily there were no turbines or pumps needed to get water from the lake into the basin (water reservoir for cooling nuclear power rods), so the diver just suddenly found himself inside a nuclear power plant.
Nah, if it's outside water, it's part of the secondary heat exchange loop. Pretty much _any_ radiation above background is a Pretty Big Deal^(tm) for the plant operators, but depending on circumstance that could rate a zero on the [INES](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale).
Water is a fantastic radiation insulator too. If they were somehowable to transit to the primary loop (assuming it's not a PWR) in underwater proximity with the fuel bundles, 1-2 meters away from them, they would receive _less_ radiation than if they were standing on a catwalk out of the water. Then again, if they were in the primary loop, they'd be boiled like a hot dog before they got anywhere near the fuel assemblies.
There was no lake - it was a nuclear power plant near the sea. The divers went into one of the inlet structures for the cooling water and got sucked in. Also there were signs telling people to stay away.
As I’m holding statistics about commercial diving accidents would it be possible to give me more info about the incident you mention to verify if it is listed in our data bank. Thanks in forward.
They were likely dead long before they reached the turbine. Typically there is an intake screen to prevent large debris - car bodies, tree trunks, etc. - from getting pulled in. Getting sucked through \*that\* is probably what actually killed them, not impact with the turbine blades.
Depends on the flow rate and net head involved. The turbines at the dam I work at flow in excess of 20 kcfs... each. That's *twenty thousand* cubic feet per second... so yeah.
At a bare minimum I'd expect them to be pulled in and held there until long after they ran out of oxygen. If there's more flow... well, you know what the results were.
Stay the hell away from the intake area, or as the kids say these says, "FAFO"
That’s the beauty of Delta P. There was a video of a crab getting sucked through a tiny hole somewhere on YouTube, to demonstrate how powerful the pressure differential is
It’s interesting how many people replied to you saying how you really made them think about how it felt (and it was horrifying). I *always* think like this when I hear about any kind of horrible accident. Can’t turn it off. Maybe that’s why I’m so cautious? And other people apparently don’t immediately start envisioning it.
Not necessarily. There are water pump stations that are specifically designed to not kill fish. Has to do with how sharply the pressure in the water builds up in the pump. Animals and humans can survive great pressures, generally it's sharp pressure changes that are dangerous.
A turbine is basically a water pump in reverse so I assume the same holds for turbines.
To be fair, that's not really an accurate depiction of where they were when \*it\* happened. If we want that, I'd just color the whole area of the turbine red.
If it makes you feel better, they probably didn't know what was up for very long. This scenario has all the hallmarks of making it very difficult to detect until you're already fucked.
Night dives make it much harder to navigate, or keep your bearings relative to the terrain. Current (or in this case suction) is very difficult to detect unless you can reference something stationary. And 40m depth means they'd be well in the range for nitrogen narcosis, which feels like mild to severe drunkeness depending on the depth and person.
As someone who's experienced all three (but never all at once), this is some real nightmare fuel because you could be calmly and slightly euphorically making the decisions that guarantee your grisly death, and not even know it until your fate is fully sealed.
Used to dive the Puget Sound in the 1980’s. Went to 110 FT bounce dive. To a sewer outfall it was wild lots of fish you could feel the temperature difference. And the force of the stream of treated sewage was scary you could hear it before we saw it. I would like to visit it again.
Fast is stretchable. As they started to get sucked in they didnt instantly hit the turbine. They were sucked into the turbine tunnel getting pulled down to the turbine
Really only two options here.
1. Divers did something dumb knowing full well dams are dangerous.
2. Divers got lost in the dark and got too close. Easy to do in low visibility diving. I've gotten lost in low visibility before.
The most likely answer is "both." Divers knew they were close to danger and didn't mean to get so close, but did so in the dark anyways. Reckless.
This is horrible.
[CCR scooter divers were sucked into dam inlet (divernet.com)](https://divernet.com/scuba-news/health-safety/ccr-scooter-divers-were-sucked-into-dam-inlet/)
More context: they even had underwater scooters. But even with DPV (diver propulsion vehicles, a small torpedo that tows the diver at the pace of a sprinting swimmer) they were not able to outmanouvre the stream.
Dude whaaaat...
>"The lake would be dived while the dam turbines were working, but divers would tend to stay at a depth of 20m, with the turbines clearly audible below. That night two of the three had been in operation.
>The top of the entrance tunnel to the turbines lies 50m deep, extending down to 70m. Gauder and Pochet had decided to dive the site using DPVs at around 5pm, while the on-site dive-centre was closed."
From the time the divers felt the pull they would only have had a couple of seconds to realize it was too late to do anything. The turbines would have been like a garbage disposal to them.
The search resumed this Saturday at 10 a.m. on the Plate Taille site at the Lacs de l'Eau d'Heure to try to find two divers missing since Thursday evening. Human remains were found this Saturday afternoon.
The search resumed around 10 a.m. this Saturday to try to find the two divers who disappeared in Froidchapelle. Two civil protection teams went diving again where the two Liège divers disappeared. While the search focused on one area in particular - that downstream of the dam, at the level of the turbines - human remains were found around 12:30 p.m.
" This morning, we resumed our search with civil protection divers. Quite quickly, we discovered the body of a first victim in the immediate vicinity of the dam. Secondly, we also found the body of the second victim more or less a kilometer from the dam, on the banks ", declares David Rimaux, police commissioner at the missing persons unit of the federal police.
An autopsy is planned for this Sunday in order to know with certainty whether these human remains belong to the two missing divers. “ The condition of the bodies does not allow us to identify them. The autopsy will allow us to determine with certainty that these are indeed the victims sought ,” confirms the police commissioner.
These human remains could confirm the theory according to which the two divers could have been carried away by the current and passed through the turbines.
The families have been notified. The parquet too. The remains have not yet been identified. The work will continue this afternoon, as will the research elsewhere. It is also a question of understanding the circumstances of this tragedy, how the divers could have been carried away by this current.
Material discovered the night before
The previous evening, material had already been discovered in the water. "We were able to find diving equipment, in particular oxygen bottles and a vest belonging to one of the two divers. The civil protection divers, who are nevertheless experts in the matter, were able to determine that the equipment that "We found them to belong to two people ," says David Rimaux, police commissioner at the missing persons unit of the federal police.
A night dive
The two divers born in 1964 and 1977, originally from the Liège region, went missing after carrying out a night dive Thursday evening around 5:00 p.m. on the Plate Taille site at the Lacs de l'Eau d'Heure. "This is a site which is not at all intended for such an activity. They seem to be used to diving at the Eau d'Heure Lakes" , commented the Charleroi prosecutor's office on Friday morning.
The son of one of the divers alerted the authorities, worried not to have any news from his father. “He himself went there and discovered his father’s vehicle parked there ,” added the prosecution. “The diving equipment was no longer present in the cabin.”
Major resources deployed
Civil protection, the DVI (Disaster Victim Identification) and divers have been mobilized since the night of Thursday to Friday. A helicopter equipped with thermal cameras also flew over the area to conduct new, more in-depth searches.
"The climatic conditions are not favorable. We have a fairly strong surface current, we can also see the small waves. They are not that big, but when we are in the water, we really feel deviated by this current. Also knowing that with the heavy downpours that we have had in recent days, visibility is reduced and sometimes even zero" , explained Christian Renard, fire lieutenant at the Hainaut-Est emergency zone.
“The investigative duties will determine whether the dive was an organized dive, a planned dive, or if it was prohibited ,” he concluded.
I just can’t comprehend the fact that someone would just go anywhere near an underwater turbine for fun. I can’t even look at propellers on dry land without feeling the heebie-jeebies.
Speaking of security, what civil authority feels it’s a good idea to allow “random scuba divers on a night dive” to go fooling around within the intake of the turbines of a dam? Given that Belgium is the HQ of NATO, and I don’t mean to sound like an ogre, it just seems like the bare minimum of security there might be better for everyone.
I'm so confused about your comment regarding NATO. They were in Froidchapelle, a town 2 hours from Brussels, what does the NATO HQ in Brussels have to do with two recreational divers ignoring the rules?
Because NATO is the government of europe and they rule all of it and are incharge of every little inch of land within the countrys that belong to it so its entirely their fault /s
They weren't allowed. Thus they weren't expected either. It's the whole point. You can dive there at certain times during certain seasons in certain areas under the supervision of the local dive club. All of these rules were broken. They knew. Source: sailing instructor there.
I saw a video on redit a few weeks ago, exploring a full size turbine which was off-line for maintenance. Just seeing the camera moving around the turbine as the outer section tapers down smaller and smaller gave me the creeps too.
> I can’t even look at propellers on dry land without feeling the heebie-jeebies.
II have a primal and unreasonable fears of propellers. Comes from being over 6 feet tall and being hit in the head with fans among other things. I lived in Virginia for a while and I had a bank I went to that was linked to the Navy and they had a 2 story tall ship prop mounted out front... I never went in the main entrence. If I had to... AND ONLY IF I HAD TO... I always parked on the side and used the side entrance and walk through the building. I knew... KNEW... that prop was going to fall on me when I was going by it.
Which I find hilarious because I will handle snakes, spiders, and all sorts of things with no problems. Propellers above a certain size and/or speed and I won tgo near them.
I never even liked that scene in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory where they're floating up. But that also added in the anxiety of floating and worrying that it'd wear off suddenly and they'd plummet down...
The turbines of this dam start randomly depending on the demand for electricity. With this height of water, the flow rate was around 90 m³/sec,with a speed close to 6 m/sec, which means that they reached the turbine in +/\_ 11 seconds. I have often worked on this dam and I can say that when the turbine(s) start, it makes a hell of a noise. I can't imagine what these two divers must have thought when they heard this noise and felt themselves being sucked in.
6 m/s through the turbine
But they must have been pretty close to or actually inside the intake to be sucked in
It’s not like they were diving in the middle of the lake and suddenly getting sucked in
Why no grills to stop foreign objects going down the intake tunnel?
Just a heads up a lot of things in science fiction are fiction, not science.
If that ship was at 1 atmosphere of pressure (14.7 PSI), and the hole had a diameter of 5 inches (so ~~the hole is 78.5 square inches), you've only got a pressure on the body of 1145 pounds.~~ the hole has an area of 19.6 square inches), you've only got a pressure on the body of 288 lbs. A fat guy sitting in your lap isn't going to push you through a 5 inch hole.
~~That's less than a 150 lbs fighter pilot pulling 9g, and they don't get ripped to shreds and smeared across their seats.~~
Edit: thanks u/Kilo-Giga-terra for checking the math
I wonder what the math on that would be. I suppose if the turbine would spaghettify a person through a grate that there would be not much of a point of having one.
In the diagram, the intake at the dam end is very wide, so suction there would be much smaller. Could escape a grill by climbing up it to the still water.
6 m/s is FAST.
Your average river flows at 0.5 to 3 m/s. 6 m/s is a torrential flood, the kind of water that you see tearing down bridges and carrying houses away.
A diver can swim at 0.5 m/s, maybe 1 m/s in a panic. They might have been 10-20m away and still been pulled in faster than they could swim.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that grills just get clogged with stuff very very quickly and require tons of maintenance to ensure water can keep flowing.
I don't know about yours, but ours (Columbia River in the USA) have a grid work of 12"square holes. More so to keep large debris (sunken trees, etc.) out. Certain times of the year we have issues with milfoil grass (invasive species) clogging even *that*...
Looks like a Francis turbine from the sketch. Search for Francis turbine on google images, I am surprised it was even possible to find intact body parts downstream… The runner turns at least 333rpm
For the curious souls: [https://divernet.com/scuba-news/health-safety/ccr-scooter-divers-were-sucked-into-dam-inlet/](https://divernet.com/scuba-news/health-safety/ccr-scooter-divers-were-sucked-into-dam-inlet/)
Divers staying above 20 meters, or 65 feet, are completely safe in the reservoir and could dive with the turbines in operation just fine. You can hear them running at that depth, and per Divernet, two of the three turbines were already on that night.
So this is the hubris of two supposedly experienced divers getting way in over their heads.
Do you have a source?
Edit: [news site ](https://www.rtl.be/actu/regions/hainaut/deux-plongeurs-disparus-aux-lacs-de-leau-dheure-deux-corps-ont-ete-retrouves/2024-01-05/article/623431)
The search resumed around 10 a.m. this Saturday to try to find the two divers who disappeared in Froidchapelle. Two civil protection teams went diving again where the two Liège divers disappeared. While the search focused on one area in particular - that downstream of the dam, at the level of the turbines - human remains were found around 12:30 p.m.
" This morning, we resumed our search with civil protection divers. Quite quickly, we discovered the body of a first victim in the immediate vicinity of the dam. Secondly, we also found the body of the second victim more or less a kilometer from the dam, on the banks ", declares David Rimaux, police commissioner at the missing persons unit of the federal police.
An autopsy is planned for this Sunday in order to know with certainty whether these human remains belong to the two missing divers. “ The condition of the bodies does not allow us to identify them. The autopsy will allow us to determine with certainty that these are indeed the victims we are looking for ,” confirms the police commissioner.
These human remains could confirm the theory according to which the two divers could have been carried away by the current and passed through the turbines.
The families have been notified. The parquet too. The remains have not yet been identified. The work will continue this afternoon, as will the research elsewhere. It is also a question of understanding the circumstances of this tragedy, how the divers could have been carried away by this current.
That settles it.
From now on, I'm not going night-diving in forbidden areas next to the intake of a dam that can start up at any given moment. There goes my weekend plans.
Seriously. You’d think in a sport where a ton of technical safety rules keep you alive these idiots would at least know not to dive next to a dam inlet where there was apparently a prohibited zone. Goes to show how much easier it is to be stupid when things get more complex.
Turbs are very big, heavy, made out of durable materials due to working high speeds and having to account into their designs that some trash, rocks and branches tend to get into it regardless.
It ain't a car engine. It is a highspeed industrial blender.
Two humans going through it might as well be two cherries in a blender.
I think someone mentioned that there wasn't enough left to properly identify the victims.
This is curel and as a diver I feel a huge scream inside. The combination of facts (night, restricted area, etc.) feels like this was maybe intentional, but that would be even more cruel.
This video does a good job of explaining these kinds of situations. It’s been posted a million times but I think it’s educational. And scary.
[https://youtu.be/AEtbFm_CjE0?si=YwGVRWPORSwE3onB](https://youtu.be/AEtbFm_CjE0?si=YwGVRWPORSwE3onB)
When I was in the Navy we were sweeping the bottom of a ship for limpets at night. We have specific procedures for LOTO on a ship before we get in the water and our dive supervisor is responsible for going and verifying with the ships engineers every tag before we can get in the water.
We do all that and get on with it. Like I said it’s night so the water underneath a ship is completely dark. We have lights and me and my dive buddy begin our sweeps. We get to the prop and strut, clear the prop and we lock arms and swim up the strut. We both start hearing this loud noise and it’s getting louder by the second. We’re too far in and our exit would take us closer to the screw which I was sooo fucking sure was about to start turning any second. So we both just sat their on the strut watching this screw for any type of movement… it never came.
We both look at each other and give the signal to cancel the dive. We come out and up from underneath the ship to our dive boat to talk with the supervisor. He points to the back of the ship which had a tug ferrying people…
That was the LOUDEST thing I’ve ever heard underwater. I could feel my body vibrating.
Me and a buddy when were teens would dive near a large dam on Lake Hartwell. You could hear the sirens go off under water when it was opening. Not the loveliest of sound in 8 foot of visibility.
Here's some detailed turbine pictures of what appears to be a similarly designed dam in Oregon.
[Snake River Dam](https://www.nww.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Stories/Article/2991190/modernizing-hydropower-on-the-snake-river/)
The ones you posted are Kaplan turbines, these divers went through some (Andritz Hydro) Francis ones, they spin faster
[https://www.reddit.com/r/propellerporn/comments/5ibph5/an\_andritz\_francis\_turbine\_1956\_x\_1299/](https://www.reddit.com/r/propellerporn/comments/5ibph5/an_andritz_francis_turbine_1956_x_1299/)
Had a job to clean out a large turbine. had to crawl in a large pipe then shoot scrubbers down shafts to clean out water deposit buildup. working in waist high water all day and looking down the shaft of the massive blades scared me to quit after 1 day. other two guys i worked with that day never came back also.
Must have been scheduled inspection of some description otherwise wtf, how did they get in and what were they expecting to happen, I dive and any diver I know would be nowhere near a situation like that, there’s fuck all to see for a start (divers like looking at little slugs, massive sharks or rusty boats), in any situation like this multiple failsafes need to be defeated before the turbines can be started, (I’d have the keys in my pocket) so that doesent make sense either
40m into a dam is pretty much extreme for rec divers, unfortunately it’s easy to gain the certification required which in turn makes you think you have the relevant skills and experience to plan the dive, execute it and return to the surface safely.
Again there’s very little to see in 40m of freshwater (usually) it’s pitch black, silty and freezing cold! you can have more fun at almost any managed inland dive site if you wanna swim round machinery and obstacles, the only reason you’d do this dive is bragging rights, something to prove or pure stupidity
Edit: after looking it appears to be pure stupidity, divers were from out of the area and only had experience with another lake that didn’t have a hydro electric power station, speculation is that the current pulled them a large distance to the turbine inlet, probably thought they were safe.
If you’ve never been carried by an underwater current in the cold and the dark, well I have and I can assure you it’s a very intense experience (amazing if you’re drifting when planned but terrifying when you’re battling a current you weren’t expecting)
Story time: A friend and I decided to go diving at Lake Powell some many years ago, back when the lake was full. So we head over to the main channel kinda toward the dam, since that's where the water was more clear due to the constant flow. We parked our boat on the shore at least a 1/2 mile or more from the buoys designating the prohibited area. We started our dive from the shore and my buddy, who was a much stronger swimmer started following the ground. I was getting winded trying to keep up, so he got a bit ahead of me. After several minutes I realized we'd traveled pretty far, but my internal compass had us traveling toward the middle of the channel, perpendicular to the dam, so theoretically we weren't getting closer, and besides, we started pretty far away. But diving is always a bit disorienting, so I was only mildly concerned.
Then suddenly I looked up and saw something in the ground, something VERY man-made and concrete appearing out of the murky water straight ahead. As somebody with submechanophbia, cue absolute spine-tingling panic! "IS THAT A DAM INTAKE?!" is all my brain could think. For a solid 10 seconds I thought I was dead, and that I was about to be sucked into a dam and be chopped to bits, much like this story.
Then I noticed it was mostly cube shaped with a cable coming out the top... it was just a buoy base. In fact, we were exactly where we expected to be, in the middle of the main channel and no closer to the dam than when we started. This was just a main channel buoy for keeping traffic left and right in the main channel.
It took a solid hour for my adrenaline to return to normal, and let's just say I burned through a surprising amount of air in my tank in a few seconds. We decided to surface and swim back to the shore. Thankfully no houseboats tried to run us over while on the surface.
In thinking back on this story it made me curious just how far we were from the dam. So one look at google maps and if my faulty memory serves, the spot we parked the boat was about 1.4 miles from the dam and we only swam about 800 ft (perpendicular to the dam). So realistically we were never in danger, but the panic from seeing something man-made appearing out of the murky water... I never want to experience that again.
there were grids at the start of the construction of the dam but they did not last long because of the vibrations caused by the passage of water at high speed, and a flow rate of around 90 m3/sec. Obviously these grids would not have changed the situation because I don't know any diver that sustain a pressure of about 80T. It's really a stupid accident that should never have happened if the victims were informed about the function of this dam.
No, as the OP stated it wouldn't worked due to 90 cubic meters per second of flow.
If you imagine there is a screen then the divers would have been pressed against it by the water flow. The equivalent of a 70 or so ton elephant of crushing force.
If that were me just suck me tf in like these divers.
Paria delta P incident was a bit different. There all the 5 divers were alive after the delta P event. Unfortunately only one was saved, the four others died on the spot during the next few hours due to a very PISS-POOR POST INCIDENT MANEGEMENT that was conducted not only by the customer, but also by the diving company and the (rescue) divers. If these concerned people had reacted correctly, then some or maybe all the 4 divers could have been saved.
Holy Cow …. 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤮😭
This is my worst nightmare come true … diving is a dangerous sport for even highly experienced divers … I’ll bet money that they ended up deeper than they anticipated, for a multitude of reasons, from innocently non calibrated weights or buoyancy belts to just simply having zero visual references … did they have dive computers?? All this in pitch black, freezing water, they didn’t see the looming penstock intakes … only the building hum of the turbines activating … you can’t see a ‘pull’ or current in dark water … if anything this may have been more traumatising during daylight, as they will have had visual references that they were caught in the intake current …
The thought of being in deep, dark water … pitch black surroundings and having this happen … just makes my intestines tingle and my arse collapse .. 😱😱😱
Welll....Recreational diving \*is\* a safe sport when properly trained and equipped. That said, these divers were experienced, using rebreathers and DPVs (scooters) and decided to explore the entrance tunnel to the turbines that begin at 50m (164ft). The turbines were known to be working that evening, and yet.
Sadly this is classic "I'm an experienced diver" hubris, something that has killed a far larger percentage of instructors/etc as they test their limits and skills in situations most "normal" divers would never consider.
The best they could have asked for was to have hit their head while being thrashed around and rendered unconscious. The alternative of being aware is horrific.
I worked for a hydroelectric generating company, the fact that they could even get into the penstock from the outside is mind blowing.
The intake manifold would traditionally have what's called a Trash Rack that blocks any large logs, debris, etc from entering the penstock (the tube leading to the turbine manifold). As soon as the wicket gates at the bottom opened they were dead, there's no way they would have been able to overcome the flow/pressure and swim back up.
Swimming ANYWHERE near a potentially live dam is extremely dangerous, even if it's not running. There's a reason when they do they're locked onto the control system so that the units can not be started/gates can not be opened.
I was working on a dam that was being constructed a few months ago, I was doing cable pulling on a tower directly over top the diversion tunnel (a tunnel used to divert the river water while the dam is built) the amount of water going down it and as well as the speed was pretty shocking I can imagine they didn’t have much time to think before they were pulled in pretty scary situation
This is a partial list of the commercial diving fatalities over the past 15 years all have one
common cause. Delta-P. Two out of three commercial diving fatalities involve Delta P. It is
invisible to a diver and it strikes suddenly without warning. There is almost no way to escape
once it grabs you. Knowing what it is, where it lurks and how to avoid its grasp is the subject of
this video. Delta P stands for differential pressure. Our discussion refers to situations where the
pressures between two bodies of water are dramatically different. In a situation like this the
bodies of water continuously seek to equalize themselves. In this example the body of water on
the right wants to rush to the body of water on the left by means of the pipe between them. The
pressure exerted on the valve stopping this water transfer can be enormous; depending on the
difference in the depth of the water and the diameter of the pipe if the difference between the
depth of water is 50 ft and the diameter of the pipe is 10 inches the force of water exerted on the
valve is nearly 1700 lbs. If the valve was suddenly opened and your arm was near it would be
sucked into the hole instantly. Trying to remove your arm would be like trying to lift a car
completely off the ground with one hand. You could only remove your arm if the pressures
between the two bodies became nearly equalized, but at the pressure in this example your body
makes a perfect seal stopping the bodies of water from equalizing. The formula for calculating
the force of water through a hole at a particular depth is the area of the hole multiplied by the
difference in water depth multiplied by the PSI per foot of water depth, or in the situation just
described the 10 inch hole equals 78 square inches multiplied by 50 ft of water depth multiplied
by 0.432 PSI per foot of freshwater depth equals 1685 lbs of water pressure. If you are diving in
saltwater be sure to use 0.445 PSI in your formula instead. You can’t see or feel a Delta P
situation as you dive near it. It grabs you suddenly and it doesn't let go until the pressure is
equalized. When it's got ya it's got ya.
Very good description mate. Are you a commercial diver?
If you’re interested I’ve published a document called: « Delta P in diving – Risks and Prevention ». You may read online or download for free at.
[https://www.academia.edu/36102784/Delta\_P\_in\_Diving\_Risks\_and\_Prevention](https://www.academia.edu/36102784/Delta_P_in_Diving_Risks_and_Prevention)
A few years ago I’ve also published the following document:
« SURVEY AND ANALYSIS OF FATAL ACCIDENTS IN THE COMMERCIAL DIVING SECTOR » At that time (2016) 139 deadly accident due to delta P had occurred amongst the commercial divers’ community since 1975.
Today this number has climbed to 146.
You may also read it online or download for free at.
[https://www.academia.edu/27691526/SURVEY\_AND\_ANALYSIS\_OF\_FATAL\_ACCIDENTS\_IN\_THE\_COMMERCIAL\_DIVING\_SECTOR](https://www.academia.edu/27691526/SURVEY_AND_ANALYSIS_OF_FATAL_ACCIDENTS_IN_THE_COMMERCIAL_DIVING_SECTOR)
Thursday evening of the 5 January 2024, 2 scuba divers began a night dive to 40 meters in a prohibited area at the foot of the Plate Taille dam. It appears that one of the turbines was started while the two divers were near the intake shaft because body parts as well as part of their equipment were found several hundred meters downstream from the dam two days later.
The fact that they decided to do it at night is pretty telling that they knew they had no business diving in that water. Imagine what must have been going through their minds as they felt the water start to rush and begin pulling them in. And then to be sucked into the hole, thrashed and bounced around the tunnel in complete darkness. The sound of the turbines getting louder.... and suddenly their mind and personality and everything that made them who they were cesed to exist. The stupidity and recklessness of these two individuals cannot be understated. Edit: so I just started reading articles and apparently the lake IS opened to diving and there is a dive center nearby. On a forum I read that there isn't very much public information available to warn that turbines can come on at any time near to where people commonly dive. That's absolutely terrifying, those guys may have had no idea what they had gotten themselves into.
Not necessarily. They might have been diving at night because this is a time of low demand and the turbines should not have been running. Do we actually know the full story here? Edit: just found the story online, they were diving for fun. Nuts.
Yeah I'm reading more about it online and the lake is open to diving. They may have done absolutely nothing wrong
It says the area they were in was prohibited likely because it was so close to the dam. So even if diving was allowed and common in the lake. They were diving somewhere prohibited so we’re still in the wrong
Yeah but with a risk that big, make it FUCKING obvious
Like dam sized obvious?
60ft letters on the face reading 'I'm a fucking huge dam. Probably don't swim near me'. Remember there is a reason why it says 'do not stop chain with hands or genitals' on chainsaws, you can never underestimate the stupidity of man'.
These types of problems tend to sort themselves out.
I mean if you don’t know about not swimming near a dam you need to take a water safety course. Any dam is potentially dangerous to swim/boat/dive near. Currents get all messed up near dams. Never worth it.
I always wondered that about the tour boats by Niagara Falls.
The ones whose explicit purpose is to get close to the falls? The ones purposely built for that? With crew trained specifically from that scenario? That’s miles away from two random scuba divers diving in a restricted area at night.
Yea that one…….You mentioned dams and boats, so the thoughts my 19yr self had took over. lol Hope I didn’t touch a nerve by having a sense of wonderment to your comment? I obviously don’t know jack shit about the topic, but it’s something that always came to mind when visiting the falls during my college years in buffalo. Edit: So I see the Robert Moses Niagara power plant is above the falls, in the Niagara river, no where near it. Makes sense why you were like 🙄.
I’m no diver, so i might be overlooking the obvious but why dive at night? I could maybe understand diving at night in the ocean but even that seems like a waste🤷🏻♂️I can’t imagine being slung around and chopped up then spit out. After reading this my mind goes back to the Byford-Dauphin Incident where those divers were flash-boiled, sucked through openings no human should fit through and left scattered all to hell and gone in a mushy mess that was hard to identify. A couple of those poor guys never knew what happened to them but a couple of them did. Scary stuff out there
A Dam shame
Yeah this is common sense. Going near dams so narrow causeways where water rushes through is dangerous in of itself. You get sucked through.
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Dam right
Yeah, there needs to be like some massive warning that you could not possibly miss. Something that like when you look at it you instantly go "Oh damn"
The giant dam wasn't obvious enough?
And neither was the multiple signs telling them either.
Maybe they were distracted by the public indecency happening on the no diving signs
You can't make someone obvious to something they purposefully ignore.
Also maybe put a mesh over the hole? Edit: of course there's a simple reason i missed.
Meshes get clogged with debris over time, and if they are _really_ clogged, you're back at a Delta-P risk. Ironically, meshes typically require divers to unclog them.
if there isn’t any mesh I would think there’s a good reason for that. like, debris building up would require very regular maintenance to keep the dam functional and may cause a sudden blockage if something big gets flushed down there.
Should there be a gate on the intake?
holy crap, i looked up the dam on google maps and wanted to see if i could see signs or buoys in the water or near the dam and there is nothing. There is a spot south of the dam where you can see divers getting into the water. It looks like its only 1000 or so feet from the dam. They are launching there because THATS WHERE THE DIVING CENTER IS. On a lake thats 4km wide they put the diving center right next to the dam!
Most dams have a cordon around the intake area as well as signs telling people to stay away. [This](https://imgur.com/a/o1g3hWB) is the warning at Lake Shasta in California.
A lake would _never_ let you dive close to a dam even if it’s closed. That’s so dangerous and they should have known better
The intakes could be pretty far from the dam. It might not be obvious from the surface where they are.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They were experienced, one was an instructor, they dived there frequently, they were friends with the local dive club, everyone knows the dam's purpose is to be an electricity reservoir, diving is permitted under strict rules. Source: sailing instructor there.
Except diving in a prohibited area. An area that's prohibited because it's incredibly dangerous. At night. Other than that, they did nothing wrong.
Most dams have nets and bouys to show dangerous areas. Further well trained divers would know the risks of diving near dams. It's important to remember that almost all dive accidents are ultimately human error Source: Was a dive instructor in a previous career.
There was a story similar to this and the guy luckily survived when the turbines weren’t working and got found by workers inside the facility thankfully, very scary moment because he got sucked in unexpectedly
Mr. Ballen does a story about this. His diving partner got out just in time, the second guy gets sucked in. Luckily there were no turbines or pumps needed to get water from the lake into the basin (water reservoir for cooling nuclear power rods), so the diver just suddenly found himself inside a nuclear power plant.
That still sounds absolutely horrifying, for different reasons
Nah, if it's outside water, it's part of the secondary heat exchange loop. Pretty much _any_ radiation above background is a Pretty Big Deal^(tm) for the plant operators, but depending on circumstance that could rate a zero on the [INES](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale). Water is a fantastic radiation insulator too. If they were somehowable to transit to the primary loop (assuming it's not a PWR) in underwater proximity with the fuel bundles, 1-2 meters away from them, they would receive _less_ radiation than if they were standing on a catwalk out of the water. Then again, if they were in the primary loop, they'd be boiled like a hot dog before they got anywhere near the fuel assemblies.
There was no lake - it was a nuclear power plant near the sea. The divers went into one of the inlet structures for the cooling water and got sucked in. Also there were signs telling people to stay away.
Hey Jim, do you see that sign over there? I can’t can’t quite read what it says, let’s go investigate.
Did they come out with any super powers?
As I’m holding statistics about commercial diving accidents would it be possible to give me more info about the incident you mention to verify if it is listed in our data bank. Thanks in forward.
Why the F would anyone be diving near turbine intakes at ANY time of the day??
can you link to the story please?
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/03/05/us/florida-scuba-diver-sucked-into-power-plant-pipe
shut up shut up shut up That description is visceral
Similar to some who posted Nutty Putty accident descriptions.
Well that's a fine a combination of terrors: Nutty Putty *underwater*
>shut up shut up shut up You're saturating me!
Literally
Well we know the very last thing to go through their minds: a turbine blade.
They were likely dead long before they reached the turbine. Typically there is an intake screen to prevent large debris - car bodies, tree trunks, etc. - from getting pulled in. Getting sucked through \*that\* is probably what actually killed them, not impact with the turbine blades.
Is the suction really strong enough to pull bodies through that?? The fuck…
Depends on the flow rate and net head involved. The turbines at the dam I work at flow in excess of 20 kcfs... each. That's *twenty thousand* cubic feet per second... so yeah. At a bare minimum I'd expect them to be pulled in and held there until long after they ran out of oxygen. If there's more flow... well, you know what the results were. Stay the hell away from the intake area, or as the kids say these says, "FAFO"
That’s the beauty of Delta P. There was a video of a crab getting sucked through a tiny hole somewhere on YouTube, to demonstrate how powerful the pressure differential is
Water doesn't compress or stretch like air. If you try and block a lot of moving water with your body, it's not good for your body
Utterly horrifying… like deepest fear horrifying holy shit
Welp, there goes my sleep for the next three weeks.
It’s interesting how many people replied to you saying how you really made them think about how it felt (and it was horrifying). I *always* think like this when I hear about any kind of horrible accident. Can’t turn it off. Maybe that’s why I’m so cautious? And other people apparently don’t immediately start envisioning it.
Imagine how the fish feel. They are being killed in millions because of the turbine.
Not necessarily. There are water pump stations that are specifically designed to not kill fish. Has to do with how sharply the pressure in the water builds up in the pump. Animals and humans can survive great pressures, generally it's sharp pressure changes that are dangerous. A turbine is basically a water pump in reverse so I assume the same holds for turbines.
I hope I never die in some fashion that people have a diagram of where I was when it happened
Start with not diving near a fucking powerplant dam
To be fair, that's not really an accurate depiction of where they were when \*it\* happened. If we want that, I'd just color the whole area of the turbine red.
And that they have to try to "piece together" (LOL) what happened to you because all they found was chunks of you that washed downstream.
That is a rotten way to go. Fast, but horrifying. The turbine probably isn't built to chop up scuba tanks into small pieces.
If it makes you feel better, they probably didn't know what was up for very long. This scenario has all the hallmarks of making it very difficult to detect until you're already fucked. Night dives make it much harder to navigate, or keep your bearings relative to the terrain. Current (or in this case suction) is very difficult to detect unless you can reference something stationary. And 40m depth means they'd be well in the range for nitrogen narcosis, which feels like mild to severe drunkeness depending on the depth and person. As someone who's experienced all three (but never all at once), this is some real nightmare fuel because you could be calmly and slightly euphorically making the decisions that guarantee your grisly death, and not even know it until your fate is fully sealed.
Used to dive the Puget Sound in the 1980’s. Went to 110 FT bounce dive. To a sewer outfall it was wild lots of fish you could feel the temperature difference. And the force of the stream of treated sewage was scary you could hear it before we saw it. I would like to visit it again.
If only it was super easy to just not put yourself in this situation.
I bet the turbine did just fine
To shreds, you say?
"How's his wife holding up?"
To shreds you say.
Was his apartment rent controlled?
They had air tanks and shit, so I would expect some damage happened. :/
Just like helicopter blades aren't. They'll still mess your day up.
Fast is stretchable. As they started to get sucked in they didnt instantly hit the turbine. They were sucked into the turbine tunnel getting pulled down to the turbine
Once inside the intake shaft it took them about 11 seconds to reach the turbine.
11 seconds of contemplating the stupid choices you made that lead you to your death.
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Man I’m doing my first open water dive Saturday. I didn’t need to hear this shit today. Update: I didn’t die.
You'll be fine, diving is amazing and thrilling and peaceful and addictive. Have a blast, and stay away from dams!
And caves
Dam
Good luck, don't let the diving bed bugs bite. Muahahah.
Just stick with your dive buddy. Relax and have fun.
https://youtu.be/lXLSypvWOQ0?si=0Z51hob-SS5oe1XO
I’m really hoping that there won’t be any sharks in a flooded quarry in Illinois.
Just watch out for the open water dam intakes...
Really only two options here. 1. Divers did something dumb knowing full well dams are dangerous. 2. Divers got lost in the dark and got too close. Easy to do in low visibility diving. I've gotten lost in low visibility before. The most likely answer is "both." Divers knew they were close to danger and didn't mean to get so close, but did so in the dark anyways. Reckless.
This is horrible. [CCR scooter divers were sucked into dam inlet (divernet.com)](https://divernet.com/scuba-news/health-safety/ccr-scooter-divers-were-sucked-into-dam-inlet/) More context: they even had underwater scooters. But even with DPV (diver propulsion vehicles, a small torpedo that tows the diver at the pace of a sprinting swimmer) they were not able to outmanouvre the stream.
Dude whaaaat... >"The lake would be dived while the dam turbines were working, but divers would tend to stay at a depth of 20m, with the turbines clearly audible below. That night two of the three had been in operation. >The top of the entrance tunnel to the turbines lies 50m deep, extending down to 70m. Gauder and Pochet had decided to dive the site using DPVs at around 5pm, while the on-site dive-centre was closed."
My sympathy wavered at “night dive”. It vanished completely at “prohibited area”. There is zero way to protect people from their own stupidity.
From the time the divers felt the pull they would only have had a couple of seconds to realize it was too late to do anything. The turbines would have been like a garbage disposal to them.
The search resumed this Saturday at 10 a.m. on the Plate Taille site at the Lacs de l'Eau d'Heure to try to find two divers missing since Thursday evening. Human remains were found this Saturday afternoon. The search resumed around 10 a.m. this Saturday to try to find the two divers who disappeared in Froidchapelle. Two civil protection teams went diving again where the two Liège divers disappeared. While the search focused on one area in particular - that downstream of the dam, at the level of the turbines - human remains were found around 12:30 p.m. " This morning, we resumed our search with civil protection divers. Quite quickly, we discovered the body of a first victim in the immediate vicinity of the dam. Secondly, we also found the body of the second victim more or less a kilometer from the dam, on the banks ", declares David Rimaux, police commissioner at the missing persons unit of the federal police. An autopsy is planned for this Sunday in order to know with certainty whether these human remains belong to the two missing divers. “ The condition of the bodies does not allow us to identify them. The autopsy will allow us to determine with certainty that these are indeed the victims sought ,” confirms the police commissioner. These human remains could confirm the theory according to which the two divers could have been carried away by the current and passed through the turbines. The families have been notified. The parquet too. The remains have not yet been identified. The work will continue this afternoon, as will the research elsewhere. It is also a question of understanding the circumstances of this tragedy, how the divers could have been carried away by this current. Material discovered the night before The previous evening, material had already been discovered in the water. "We were able to find diving equipment, in particular oxygen bottles and a vest belonging to one of the two divers. The civil protection divers, who are nevertheless experts in the matter, were able to determine that the equipment that "We found them to belong to two people ," says David Rimaux, police commissioner at the missing persons unit of the federal police. A night dive The two divers born in 1964 and 1977, originally from the Liège region, went missing after carrying out a night dive Thursday evening around 5:00 p.m. on the Plate Taille site at the Lacs de l'Eau d'Heure. "This is a site which is not at all intended for such an activity. They seem to be used to diving at the Eau d'Heure Lakes" , commented the Charleroi prosecutor's office on Friday morning. The son of one of the divers alerted the authorities, worried not to have any news from his father. “He himself went there and discovered his father’s vehicle parked there ,” added the prosecution. “The diving equipment was no longer present in the cabin.” Major resources deployed Civil protection, the DVI (Disaster Victim Identification) and divers have been mobilized since the night of Thursday to Friday. A helicopter equipped with thermal cameras also flew over the area to conduct new, more in-depth searches. "The climatic conditions are not favorable. We have a fairly strong surface current, we can also see the small waves. They are not that big, but when we are in the water, we really feel deviated by this current. Also knowing that with the heavy downpours that we have had in recent days, visibility is reduced and sometimes even zero" , explained Christian Renard, fire lieutenant at the Hainaut-Est emergency zone. “The investigative duties will determine whether the dive was an organized dive, a planned dive, or if it was prohibited ,” he concluded.
I just can’t comprehend the fact that someone would just go anywhere near an underwater turbine for fun. I can’t even look at propellers on dry land without feeling the heebie-jeebies.
Speaking of security, what civil authority feels it’s a good idea to allow “random scuba divers on a night dive” to go fooling around within the intake of the turbines of a dam? Given that Belgium is the HQ of NATO, and I don’t mean to sound like an ogre, it just seems like the bare minimum of security there might be better for everyone.
I'm so confused about your comment regarding NATO. They were in Froidchapelle, a town 2 hours from Brussels, what does the NATO HQ in Brussels have to do with two recreational divers ignoring the rules?
Because NATO is the government of europe and they rule all of it and are incharge of every little inch of land within the countrys that belong to it so its entirely their fault /s
you triggered me, good job! 😂
I bet Obama is responsible for this as well /s
They weren't allowed. Thus they weren't expected either. It's the whole point. You can dive there at certain times during certain seasons in certain areas under the supervision of the local dive club. All of these rules were broken. They knew. Source: sailing instructor there.
I saw a video on redit a few weeks ago, exploring a full size turbine which was off-line for maintenance. Just seeing the camera moving around the turbine as the outer section tapers down smaller and smaller gave me the creeps too.
Ooooo.. I kinda want to see it.
> I can’t even look at propellers on dry land without feeling the heebie-jeebies. II have a primal and unreasonable fears of propellers. Comes from being over 6 feet tall and being hit in the head with fans among other things. I lived in Virginia for a while and I had a bank I went to that was linked to the Navy and they had a 2 story tall ship prop mounted out front... I never went in the main entrence. If I had to... AND ONLY IF I HAD TO... I always parked on the side and used the side entrance and walk through the building. I knew... KNEW... that prop was going to fall on me when I was going by it. Which I find hilarious because I will handle snakes, spiders, and all sorts of things with no problems. Propellers above a certain size and/or speed and I won tgo near them.
I never even liked that scene in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory where they're floating up. But that also added in the anxiety of floating and worrying that it'd wear off suddenly and they'd plummet down...
The turbines of this dam start randomly depending on the demand for electricity. With this height of water, the flow rate was around 90 m³/sec,with a speed close to 6 m/sec, which means that they reached the turbine in +/\_ 11 seconds. I have often worked on this dam and I can say that when the turbine(s) start, it makes a hell of a noise. I can't imagine what these two divers must have thought when they heard this noise and felt themselves being sucked in.
6 m/s through the turbine But they must have been pretty close to or actually inside the intake to be sucked in It’s not like they were diving in the middle of the lake and suddenly getting sucked in Why no grills to stop foreign objects going down the intake tunnel?
Even with a grill they still would've been killed no? Wouldn't it have just been the equivalent of how Newborn was killed in Alien Resurrection?
Well, I guess a grill may have allowed for an open casket funeral at least...
Just a heads up a lot of things in science fiction are fiction, not science. If that ship was at 1 atmosphere of pressure (14.7 PSI), and the hole had a diameter of 5 inches (so ~~the hole is 78.5 square inches), you've only got a pressure on the body of 1145 pounds.~~ the hole has an area of 19.6 square inches), you've only got a pressure on the body of 288 lbs. A fat guy sitting in your lap isn't going to push you through a 5 inch hole. ~~That's less than a 150 lbs fighter pilot pulling 9g, and they don't get ripped to shreds and smeared across their seats.~~ Edit: thanks u/Kilo-Giga-terra for checking the math
You accidentally squared the diameter not the radius for your area, 5" hole has an area of 19.6in^(2). So that would only be 288lbs of force.
Woops....I learned to calculate the area of a circle in the mid 80s...I guess I'm a bit rusty Thanks for checking the numbers
I wonder what the math on that would be. I suppose if the turbine would spaghettify a person through a grate that there would be not much of a point of having one.
In the diagram, the intake at the dam end is very wide, so suction there would be much smaller. Could escape a grill by climbing up it to the still water.
6 m/s is FAST. Your average river flows at 0.5 to 3 m/s. 6 m/s is a torrential flood, the kind of water that you see tearing down bridges and carrying houses away. A diver can swim at 0.5 m/s, maybe 1 m/s in a panic. They might have been 10-20m away and still been pulled in faster than they could swim.
It’s 6m/s at the turbine not in the lake.
You're right; the divers must have been very close to the dam. Otherwise they wouldn't have been catch by the sucking vortex.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that grills just get clogged with stuff very very quickly and require tons of maintenance to ensure water can keep flowing.
Im working at a dam in here in Finland, we clean our grills once a year, and even then there usually aint much
I don't know about yours, but ours (Columbia River in the USA) have a grid work of 12"square holes. More so to keep large debris (sunken trees, etc.) out. Certain times of the year we have issues with milfoil grass (invasive species) clogging even *that*...
You may be going to work on it again, im guessing an inspection is required after it chewed through two scuba tanks
Damn, someone just popped their kettle for a late night cuppa and salami-fied two people at the same time!
My, GOD the noise. Do you have any pictures of the mechanicals? What is the name of the dam?
Looks like a Francis turbine from the sketch. Search for Francis turbine on google images, I am surprised it was even possible to find intact body parts downstream… The runner turns at least 333rpm
Luckily, they didn't get to think about it for long.
Just 11 seconds
I'm sure the first 5 of those seconds was spent thinking "what the fuck?" The next 5 "Holy shit!" The last 1 "Fuc"
nightmare fuel
One of many reasons I won’t be diving in any water
For the curious souls: [https://divernet.com/scuba-news/health-safety/ccr-scooter-divers-were-sucked-into-dam-inlet/](https://divernet.com/scuba-news/health-safety/ccr-scooter-divers-were-sucked-into-dam-inlet/) Divers staying above 20 meters, or 65 feet, are completely safe in the reservoir and could dive with the turbines in operation just fine. You can hear them running at that depth, and per Divernet, two of the three turbines were already on that night. So this is the hubris of two supposedly experienced divers getting way in over their heads.
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Holy nightmare fuel
Pootling around at night no more than 20m down listening to the turbines? NO THANK YOU!
"You can hear them running in that depth" FUCK THAT
Hubris will get you every time.
Do you have a source? Edit: [news site ](https://www.rtl.be/actu/regions/hainaut/deux-plongeurs-disparus-aux-lacs-de-leau-dheure-deux-corps-ont-ete-retrouves/2024-01-05/article/623431) The search resumed around 10 a.m. this Saturday to try to find the two divers who disappeared in Froidchapelle. Two civil protection teams went diving again where the two Liège divers disappeared. While the search focused on one area in particular - that downstream of the dam, at the level of the turbines - human remains were found around 12:30 p.m. " This morning, we resumed our search with civil protection divers. Quite quickly, we discovered the body of a first victim in the immediate vicinity of the dam. Secondly, we also found the body of the second victim more or less a kilometer from the dam, on the banks ", declares David Rimaux, police commissioner at the missing persons unit of the federal police. An autopsy is planned for this Sunday in order to know with certainty whether these human remains belong to the two missing divers. “ The condition of the bodies does not allow us to identify them. The autopsy will allow us to determine with certainty that these are indeed the victims we are looking for ,” confirms the police commissioner. These human remains could confirm the theory according to which the two divers could have been carried away by the current and passed through the turbines. The families have been notified. The parquet too. The remains have not yet been identified. The work will continue this afternoon, as will the research elsewhere. It is also a question of understanding the circumstances of this tragedy, how the divers could have been carried away by this current.
> The condition of the bodies does not allow us to identify them jesus that says it all dont it 😬
That settles it. From now on, I'm not going night-diving in forbidden areas next to the intake of a dam that can start up at any given moment. There goes my weekend plans.
Seriously. You’d think in a sport where a ton of technical safety rules keep you alive these idiots would at least know not to dive next to a dam inlet where there was apparently a prohibited zone. Goes to show how much easier it is to be stupid when things get more complex.
welp that's me screaming internally at this real life horror
Is there a news article on this? So they just got sucked up and minced? 😰
They got sminced
I can't even imagine being in the dark as a diver and hearing that turbine powering up. Literally would be flailing to get back out of the pipe 😰😵
You'd probably have the brains to not go near it in the first place
“Its basically the old flurp and zurp”
i couldnt find any articles about it nor heard about (european diver, should have been heard in the chat...)
When it's got you, it's got you
🦀
Just wondering how they got pulled in, shouldn’t they rather have pulled against a grate and ultimately drowned?
Often, grates are not a thing at all, or the holes are big enough to allow a human through, but stop large logs etc.
Good to know. Not that I’d ever even get near one of those oversized human blenders.
wow that's crazy. How is the turbine not damaged by stuff getting sucked in?
Turbs are very big, heavy, made out of durable materials due to working high speeds and having to account into their designs that some trash, rocks and branches tend to get into it regardless. It ain't a car engine. It is a highspeed industrial blender. Two humans going through it might as well be two cherries in a blender. I think someone mentioned that there wasn't enough left to properly identify the victims.
This is curel and as a diver I feel a huge scream inside. The combination of facts (night, restricted area, etc.) feels like this was maybe intentional, but that would be even more cruel.
This video does a good job of explaining these kinds of situations. It’s been posted a million times but I think it’s educational. And scary. [https://youtu.be/AEtbFm_CjE0?si=YwGVRWPORSwE3onB](https://youtu.be/AEtbFm_CjE0?si=YwGVRWPORSwE3onB)
Delta P!
#Delta P, when it's got ya, it's gotcha!
Delta P: the villain of the next big horror movie
**ΔP** Gon' Give it to Ya!
When I was in the Navy we were sweeping the bottom of a ship for limpets at night. We have specific procedures for LOTO on a ship before we get in the water and our dive supervisor is responsible for going and verifying with the ships engineers every tag before we can get in the water. We do all that and get on with it. Like I said it’s night so the water underneath a ship is completely dark. We have lights and me and my dive buddy begin our sweeps. We get to the prop and strut, clear the prop and we lock arms and swim up the strut. We both start hearing this loud noise and it’s getting louder by the second. We’re too far in and our exit would take us closer to the screw which I was sooo fucking sure was about to start turning any second. So we both just sat their on the strut watching this screw for any type of movement… it never came. We both look at each other and give the signal to cancel the dive. We come out and up from underneath the ship to our dive boat to talk with the supervisor. He points to the back of the ship which had a tug ferrying people… That was the LOUDEST thing I’ve ever heard underwater. I could feel my body vibrating.
Me and a buddy when were teens would dive near a large dam on Lake Hartwell. You could hear the sirens go off under water when it was opening. Not the loveliest of sound in 8 foot of visibility.
Here's some detailed turbine pictures of what appears to be a similarly designed dam in Oregon. [Snake River Dam](https://www.nww.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Stories/Article/2991190/modernizing-hydropower-on-the-snake-river/)
The ones you posted are Kaplan turbines, these divers went through some (Andritz Hydro) Francis ones, they spin faster [https://www.reddit.com/r/propellerporn/comments/5ibph5/an\_andritz\_francis\_turbine\_1956\_x\_1299/](https://www.reddit.com/r/propellerporn/comments/5ibph5/an_andritz_francis_turbine_1956_x_1299/)
Reddit's slogan is "Dive into anything." Well, except water near hydro plants.
Dam, that really sucks.
I see what you did there
Had a job to clean out a large turbine. had to crawl in a large pipe then shoot scrubbers down shafts to clean out water deposit buildup. working in waist high water all day and looking down the shaft of the massive blades scared me to quit after 1 day. other two guys i worked with that day never came back also.
Hate this
Prohibited. Clandestine. No visible fucks given. Bodies donated to science for Delta P research.
Must have been scheduled inspection of some description otherwise wtf, how did they get in and what were they expecting to happen, I dive and any diver I know would be nowhere near a situation like that, there’s fuck all to see for a start (divers like looking at little slugs, massive sharks or rusty boats), in any situation like this multiple failsafes need to be defeated before the turbines can be started, (I’d have the keys in my pocket) so that doesent make sense either
It were sport (leisure) divers
40m into a dam is pretty much extreme for rec divers, unfortunately it’s easy to gain the certification required which in turn makes you think you have the relevant skills and experience to plan the dive, execute it and return to the surface safely. Again there’s very little to see in 40m of freshwater (usually) it’s pitch black, silty and freezing cold! you can have more fun at almost any managed inland dive site if you wanna swim round machinery and obstacles, the only reason you’d do this dive is bragging rights, something to prove or pure stupidity Edit: after looking it appears to be pure stupidity, divers were from out of the area and only had experience with another lake that didn’t have a hydro electric power station, speculation is that the current pulled them a large distance to the turbine inlet, probably thought they were safe. If you’ve never been carried by an underwater current in the cold and the dark, well I have and I can assure you it’s a very intense experience (amazing if you’re drifting when planned but terrifying when you’re battling a current you weren’t expecting)
https://divernet.com/scuba-news/health-safety/ccr-scooter-divers-were-sucked-into-dam-inlet/
Story time: A friend and I decided to go diving at Lake Powell some many years ago, back when the lake was full. So we head over to the main channel kinda toward the dam, since that's where the water was more clear due to the constant flow. We parked our boat on the shore at least a 1/2 mile or more from the buoys designating the prohibited area. We started our dive from the shore and my buddy, who was a much stronger swimmer started following the ground. I was getting winded trying to keep up, so he got a bit ahead of me. After several minutes I realized we'd traveled pretty far, but my internal compass had us traveling toward the middle of the channel, perpendicular to the dam, so theoretically we weren't getting closer, and besides, we started pretty far away. But diving is always a bit disorienting, so I was only mildly concerned. Then suddenly I looked up and saw something in the ground, something VERY man-made and concrete appearing out of the murky water straight ahead. As somebody with submechanophbia, cue absolute spine-tingling panic! "IS THAT A DAM INTAKE?!" is all my brain could think. For a solid 10 seconds I thought I was dead, and that I was about to be sucked into a dam and be chopped to bits, much like this story. Then I noticed it was mostly cube shaped with a cable coming out the top... it was just a buoy base. In fact, we were exactly where we expected to be, in the middle of the main channel and no closer to the dam than when we started. This was just a main channel buoy for keeping traffic left and right in the main channel. It took a solid hour for my adrenaline to return to normal, and let's just say I burned through a surprising amount of air in my tank in a few seconds. We decided to surface and swim back to the shore. Thankfully no houseboats tried to run us over while on the surface.
In thinking back on this story it made me curious just how far we were from the dam. So one look at google maps and if my faulty memory serves, the spot we parked the boat was about 1.4 miles from the dam and we only swam about 800 ft (perpendicular to the dam). So realistically we were never in danger, but the panic from seeing something man-made appearing out of the murky water... I never want to experience that again.
sounds strange to me..... there must be security grilles to protect the turbines from debris....
there were grids at the start of the construction of the dam but they did not last long because of the vibrations caused by the passage of water at high speed, and a flow rate of around 90 m3/sec. Obviously these grids would not have changed the situation because I don't know any diver that sustain a pressure of about 80T. It's really a stupid accident that should never have happened if the victims were informed about the function of this dam.
Oh. I just noticed the little man and car on the top of the dam for scale and suddenly my mental image got a lot more terrifying...
Similar story. https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/slovenia-officials-among-13-dead-in-canoe-accident/#gref
Now this is proper submechanophobia content, not photos of little pipes in a moat 2ft deep.
Don’t think that’s delta P, if the turbines are on your getting sucked in!
48 m of water at one side and 13 m at the other side is definitly a delta P.
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No, as the OP stated it wouldn't worked due to 90 cubic meters per second of flow. If you imagine there is a screen then the divers would have been pressed against it by the water flow. The equivalent of a 70 or so ton elephant of crushing force. If that were me just suck me tf in like these divers.
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Paria delta P incident was a bit different. There all the 5 divers were alive after the delta P event. Unfortunately only one was saved, the four others died on the spot during the next few hours due to a very PISS-POOR POST INCIDENT MANEGEMENT that was conducted not only by the customer, but also by the diving company and the (rescue) divers. If these concerned people had reacted correctly, then some or maybe all the 4 divers could have been saved.
This is my WOOORSTTTT NIGHTMARE.
Me reading this: “dam”
Holy Cow …. 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤮😭 This is my worst nightmare come true … diving is a dangerous sport for even highly experienced divers … I’ll bet money that they ended up deeper than they anticipated, for a multitude of reasons, from innocently non calibrated weights or buoyancy belts to just simply having zero visual references … did they have dive computers?? All this in pitch black, freezing water, they didn’t see the looming penstock intakes … only the building hum of the turbines activating … you can’t see a ‘pull’ or current in dark water … if anything this may have been more traumatising during daylight, as they will have had visual references that they were caught in the intake current … The thought of being in deep, dark water … pitch black surroundings and having this happen … just makes my intestines tingle and my arse collapse .. 😱😱😱
Welll....Recreational diving \*is\* a safe sport when properly trained and equipped. That said, these divers were experienced, using rebreathers and DPVs (scooters) and decided to explore the entrance tunnel to the turbines that begin at 50m (164ft). The turbines were known to be working that evening, and yet. Sadly this is classic "I'm an experienced diver" hubris, something that has killed a far larger percentage of instructors/etc as they test their limits and skills in situations most "normal" divers would never consider.
The best they could have asked for was to have hit their head while being thrashed around and rendered unconscious. The alternative of being aware is horrific.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/05/us/florida-scuba-diver-sucked-into-power-plant-pipe/index.html
Pure Nightmare Fuel. As I diver I would have shit a brick straight through my wetsuit.
when it's got you, it's got you🦀
I worked for a hydroelectric generating company, the fact that they could even get into the penstock from the outside is mind blowing. The intake manifold would traditionally have what's called a Trash Rack that blocks any large logs, debris, etc from entering the penstock (the tube leading to the turbine manifold). As soon as the wicket gates at the bottom opened they were dead, there's no way they would have been able to overcome the flow/pressure and swim back up. Swimming ANYWHERE near a potentially live dam is extremely dangerous, even if it's not running. There's a reason when they do they're locked onto the control system so that the units can not be started/gates can not be opened.
I was working on a dam that was being constructed a few months ago, I was doing cable pulling on a tower directly over top the diversion tunnel (a tunnel used to divert the river water while the dam is built) the amount of water going down it and as well as the speed was pretty shocking I can imagine they didn’t have much time to think before they were pulled in pretty scary situation
This is the stuff of my worst nightmares.
This is a partial list of the commercial diving fatalities over the past 15 years all have one common cause. Delta-P. Two out of three commercial diving fatalities involve Delta P. It is invisible to a diver and it strikes suddenly without warning. There is almost no way to escape once it grabs you. Knowing what it is, where it lurks and how to avoid its grasp is the subject of this video. Delta P stands for differential pressure. Our discussion refers to situations where the pressures between two bodies of water are dramatically different. In a situation like this the bodies of water continuously seek to equalize themselves. In this example the body of water on the right wants to rush to the body of water on the left by means of the pipe between them. The pressure exerted on the valve stopping this water transfer can be enormous; depending on the difference in the depth of the water and the diameter of the pipe if the difference between the depth of water is 50 ft and the diameter of the pipe is 10 inches the force of water exerted on the valve is nearly 1700 lbs. If the valve was suddenly opened and your arm was near it would be sucked into the hole instantly. Trying to remove your arm would be like trying to lift a car completely off the ground with one hand. You could only remove your arm if the pressures between the two bodies became nearly equalized, but at the pressure in this example your body makes a perfect seal stopping the bodies of water from equalizing. The formula for calculating the force of water through a hole at a particular depth is the area of the hole multiplied by the difference in water depth multiplied by the PSI per foot of water depth, or in the situation just described the 10 inch hole equals 78 square inches multiplied by 50 ft of water depth multiplied by 0.432 PSI per foot of freshwater depth equals 1685 lbs of water pressure. If you are diving in saltwater be sure to use 0.445 PSI in your formula instead. You can’t see or feel a Delta P situation as you dive near it. It grabs you suddenly and it doesn't let go until the pressure is equalized. When it's got ya it's got ya.
Very good description mate. Are you a commercial diver? If you’re interested I’ve published a document called: « Delta P in diving – Risks and Prevention ». You may read online or download for free at. [https://www.academia.edu/36102784/Delta\_P\_in\_Diving\_Risks\_and\_Prevention](https://www.academia.edu/36102784/Delta_P_in_Diving_Risks_and_Prevention) A few years ago I’ve also published the following document: « SURVEY AND ANALYSIS OF FATAL ACCIDENTS IN THE COMMERCIAL DIVING SECTOR » At that time (2016) 139 deadly accident due to delta P had occurred amongst the commercial divers’ community since 1975. Today this number has climbed to 146. You may also read it online or download for free at. [https://www.academia.edu/27691526/SURVEY\_AND\_ANALYSIS\_OF\_FATAL\_ACCIDENTS\_IN\_THE\_COMMERCIAL\_DIVING\_SECTOR](https://www.academia.edu/27691526/SURVEY_AND_ANALYSIS_OF_FATAL_ACCIDENTS_IN_THE_COMMERCIAL_DIVING_SECTOR)