Deon Dreyer (7 August 1974 – 17 December 1994) was a South African
recreational scuba diver who died in
Bushman's Hole in South Africa. Cave diver
David Shaw died while trying to retrieve Dreyer's body over 10 years later.
Life
Dreyer's father, Theo (who owns a business that sells and services two-way radios) and mother, Marie, raised him in the town of
Vereeniging
Vereeniging ( ; ) is a city located in the south of Gauteng province, South Africa, situated where the Klip River empties into the northern loop of the Vaal River. It is also one of the constituent parts of the Vaal Triangle region and was forme ...
, about 35 miles south of
Johannesburg
Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu language, Zulu and Xhosa language, Xhosa: eGoli ) (colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, Jo'burg or "The City of Gold") is the most populous city in South Africa. With 5,538,596 people in the City of Johannesburg alon ...
. Dreyer designed "obscenely loud car stereos", had a passion for diving, and loved adventure, (e.g., hunting, racing a souped-up car, and motorcycling).
''Outside Magazine''s Tim Zimmerman reports:
Death
Dreyer drowned on 17 December 1994, aged 20, during a practice dive. He was helping a team, assembled by
Nuno Gomes, set up conditions for a deep
technical dive scheduled to take place later that week. According to first-hand accounts from those diving with him, Dreyer was lost on ascent around from the surface. They conjectured he had probably lost consciousness either because of
oxygen toxicity
Oxygen toxicity is a condition resulting from the harmful effects of breathing molecular oxygen () at increased partial pressures. Severe cases can result in cell damage and death, with effects most often seen in the central nervous system, lung ...
or
hypercapnia
Hypercapnia (from the Greek ''hyper'', "above" or "too much" and ''kapnos'', "smoke"), also known as hypercarbia and CO2 retention, is a condition of abnormally elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the blood. Carbon dioxide is a gaseous pro ...
induced by the high work-rate of breathing at depth.
Two weeks after Dreyer's death, Theo hired a small, remotely operated sub used by the
De Beers
The De Beers Group is a South African–British corporation that specializes in the diamond industry, including mining, exploitation, retail, inscription, grading, trading and industrial diamond manufacturing. The company is active in open-pi ...
mining company. It found Dreyer's dive helmet on the
sinkhole
A sinkhole is a depression or hole in the ground caused by some form of collapse of the surface layer. The term is sometimes used to refer to doline, enclosed depressions that are also known as shakeholes, and to openings where surface water ...
floor, but there was no sign of his body.
Commemoration
Dreyer's parents erected a plaque on a rock wall above the Bushman's Hole entry pool, in memory of their son.
In Phillip Finch's book ''Diving into Darkness: A True Story of Death and Survival'', it was suggested that one of the reasons Dreyer's death created such an impression on the cave diving community was because of the plaque. The bodies of most other divers who die, even whilst cave diving, are recovered. However, for many years it was assumed Dreyer's body would never be recovered from the cave because it was simply too deep, but the plaque was a continual reminder to cave divers that his body lay within.
Recovery of body
Ten years later, in October 2004, renowned cave diver
David Shaw discovered Dreyer's body in the cave at a depth of . On 8 January 2005, Shaw tried to recover the body but died in the attempt. Shaw's close friend and support diver, Don Shirley, also nearly died and was left with permanent damage that has impaired his balance.
On 12 January 2005, while others were recovering Shaw's technical equipment, they discovered the bodies of both Dreyer and Shaw had floated up close to the surface. Both bodies were then recovered.
See also
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* (whilst retrieving Deon Dreyer's body)
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dreyer, Deon
1974 births
1994 deaths
Deaths by drowning in South Africa
Place of birth missing
Sport deaths in South Africa
South African underwater divers
Underwater diving deaths
Deaths from hypercapnia
Sportspeople from Vereeniging
20th-century South African people