Fourth Diver Dies Without Regaining Consciousness Death Of Only Survivor Leaves Officials With Questions About Irrigation Canal

The only survivor of a dive into a murky underground irrigation canal near Zillah, Wash., died Tuesday without regaining consciousness, leaving investigators with unanswered questions about what went wrong.

Charlie Mestaz, 37, died after two days in a coma in a Yakima hospital, a nursing supervisor said.

Mestaz and Rusty Hauber, 34, dove into the vast subterranean canal Saturday to rescue two divers who drowned while trying to remove submerged vehicles.

Two more divers went after the rescuers, finding Hauber dead and Mestaz unconscious. He was taken to an intensive care unit.

The bodies of Marty Rhode, 33, and John Eberle, 41, were recovered late Monday at the Roza Canal and taken to the Yakima County morgue. Autopsy results were not immediately available Tuesday.

Sheriff Doug Blair said investigators from a Pierce County diving investigation team took the diving equipment to a Seattle lab to undergo extensive tests.

“The information probably won’t be conclusive, but it might help us eliminate some questions about what happened,” Blair said.

It was the first time authorities remember a Yakima County search-and-rescue volunteer dying in the line of duty. Blair said the divers’ deaths has hit the search and rescue teams hard.

“We’re supposed to be the ones who save lives. We’re not supposed to lose ours in the process,” he said.

Authorities still don’t know the circumstances that led to the deaths of the two irrigation divers, Rhode and Eberle, who were contracted to remove debris from the 95-mile canal’s seven siphons.

The incident began when Rhode and Eberle, both professionals, went into the tunnel-like canal Saturday morning to attach cables to submerged vehicles so they could be pulled from the canal before the start of irrigation season. They failed to surface.

The two volunteer search and rescue divers went after them, and also ran into trouble and had to be pulled from the water by two other volunteer divers. Their air tanks were empty.

The canal section is about 20 miles south of Yakima, in an arid region of south-central Washington that was turned into farmland by huge federal irrigation projects.

The divers were operating in an underground, tubular section of the canal which drops about 100 feet over a distance of some 2,500 feet. The tube was built to prevent the water from cascading.

Divers must swim in the dark amid strong water pressure. The tube is 13 feet tall, but plunges to a depth of 100 feet below the ground.