Two rebreather divers using scooters died on a night dive earlier this year, after apparently venturing too close to a Belgian hydro-electric dam.
Christophe Gauder and Frédéric Pochet, both from Liege, disappeared in the Plate Taille reservoir near the southern town of Froidchapelle in Hainaut on 4 January.
The son of one of the men, concerned that he had not been in touch and finding his vehicle still in the lake’s car park, raised the alarm. The Belgian Civil Protection dive team, using 10 professional divers and sonar equipment, began the search the next day.
Gauder, 46, who was single and worked in banking, was described by fellow dive-club members as an experienced diver. Pochet, 59, was not affiliated with the same clubs but also thought to have been experienced.
The 350-hectare lake, a scuba diving and sailing attraction, is part of the Eau d'Heure complex of five reservoirs that make up the largest lake area in Belgium. It includes the Plate Taille dam, built in the 1970s and, at 790m long, the biggest in the country, equipped with a pumped-storage hydro-electric power station.
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.
The search team found the divers’ equipment, including their rebreathers and DPVs, in a fragmented state, but the men’s remains were not found until the following day, downstream of the dam.
Benoit Michel, who runs the lake dive-centre, stated that the men must have ventured far from the two authorised diving areas and too close to the inlet entrance. At that point they would have been drawn in by the powerful flow.
An autopsy carried out the following day confirmed that the recovered body parts were those of the two divers. “They would have been caught by the huge turbine present in the watercourse,” the Charleroi public prosecutor's office stated.
Also on Divernet: Exploring the hidden underwater world of Belgium’s Denée Mine, Diving into the mysteries of Felicitas Mine & Rhisnes Quarry, One-off dive mining in the slate museum
