Police Call Off Two Searches

Searches for a Spokane diver and a Walla Walla fisherman, missing and presumed drowned in the Columbia River during the weekend, were suspended Monday.

“It becomes a waiting game,” Pasco police Capt. Doug Chambers said after rescue divers unsuccessfully combed two stretches of the river on Saturday and Sunday.

The diver, Jodi L. Provo, 35, vanished Saturday near a train bridge piling in the Columbia near the Pasco boat basin.

Neil Hines, director of Columbia Basin Dive Rescue, said Provo, a single mother of a 15-year-old daughter, was swimming underwater with Shane Combs when she noticed a hole in her dry suit. As they headed ashore from the second oval concrete piling, Combs looked behind him but Provo had vanished.

In the other incident, Miles Madison, 36, of Walla Walla, jumped from a fishing boat that was on course to collide with a barge near McNary Dam and disappeared Saturday night.

Madison and a companion, Brian T. Gwinn, 29, of Walla Walla, were fishing about 11 p.m. Saturday when the barge approached and they jumped ship.