Santa Rosa Blue Hole, Another collapse?

[reddiver970]

Just finished putting the CCR together to head down there and heard there was another collapse and its closed again. Anyone down there know the story?

 

[broncobowsher]

I would just call the office and ask there.

 

[VikingDives]

There was a collapse. Thursday morning they will make the call on reopening. I just talked to the park manager, and I may be going out tomorrow to make an assessment.

I'll update here when I know something definitive, but right now it sounds like there was a piece of the wall that collapsed near the giant stride platform.

 

[VikingDives]

I was there today. There was a (relatively) minor collapse above the grate at about 55 feet.

Here's a screenshot from the video I took:

If you had ideas about diving the cave one day, put those to rest. The rock on the right side of the photo is about 20 feet long, 6 feet wide and deep.

I'll link the video once it's done uploading.

 

[reddiver970]

I was there today. There was a (relatively) minor collapse above the grate at about 55 feet.

Here's a screenshot from the video I took:

View attachment 898916

If you had ideas about diving the cave one day, put those to rest. The rock on the right side of the photo is about 20 feet long, 6 feet wide and deep.

I'll link the video once it's done uploading.

Is that rock laying on the grate?

 

[VikingDives]

Here's the video. The action

Is that rock laying on the grate?

Yes.

 

[Jason Craig]

Any word on if they reopened?

 

[reddiver970]

Any word on if they reopened?

My brother is down there now he was told its closed until Monday for sure, he just texted me as I was writing this saying there was a diver inspecting it and said he thinks there are some rocks that may need to be knocked loose before they reopen it. So who knows

 

[VikingDives]

It's closed through the weekend, at least. The mayor is, "going to make a decision soon, and hopefully it won't take as long this time." according to the park manager. Frankly, I'm not holding my breath on that. They want to assess the gallons per minute coming out of the hole to determine if it has changed. Unfortunately, they don't have any real data on the flow coming out before the collapse other than the sign left over from when the federal government controlled Blue Hole. In other words, a sign that is based on who knows what that was placed there prior to 1972.

After we dived it, I told the city that it is divable and in my view as safe as it has ever been. Unfortunately, people are terrible at assessing risk. I'm aware of 5 fatalities in Blue Hole since 1973. Two OW divers lost in the cave ('73), the diver who died during the exploration of the cave (user error? rebreather, 2016), a diver who had a cardiac arrest (2017 or 18), and a swimmer who had a cardiac arrest (2019-2022ish).

Assuming that there are a few fatalities that I'm not aware of, let's just say 10 deaths in 52 years, or 1 death every 5.2 years. . . none of which have been caused by falling rocks.

When you compare that to the traffic fatality rate in NM, or in Santa Rosa. You're more likely to die driving to or from Blue Hole than you are to die of any reason while you're at Blue Hole.

You're also more likely to be killed (not just struck, but actually killed) by lightning in NM.

But as I said, people are bad at risk assessment and there are a few things going on in Santa Rosa that I won't get into here that are making it less likely to reopen quickly, though I hope I'm wrong about that.

 

[VikingDives]

Here's the raw video. The interesting stuff starts at about 3:00