Renowned diver Brett Hemphill dies in Texas cave he set US record

A renowned underwater cave explorer died last week during an expedition inside the Texas cave where he set a world record a decade earlier.

The body of 56-year-old Brett Hemphill was brought back to the surface from Phantom Springs Cave in Toyahvale Sunday, four days after he vanished in the treacherous cavern, his company Karst Underwater Research announced.

Hemphill and the company’s director Andy Pitkin had entered the cave around 10:45 p.m. Wednesday to explore a potential new path in the complex underwater system starting at 450 feet below surface level.

The pair became separated shortly into the journey and Hemphill never resurfaced.

He was last seen on video tying off a guideline onto a rock at 570 feet deep, KUR said.

Hemphill’s own KUR colleagues found and recovered Hemphill’s body four days later from the cave system, though it’s not yet clear how the record-breaking diver lost his life.

“When we have got all the information and analyzed it, we will issue a statement about the incident that will answer everyone’s questions,” Pitkin said in a statement. “Until then, please allow us some time to come to terms with his loss, as up until now we have been focused on the recovery.”

Hemphill and KUR team set the country’s deep-underwater cave record in 2008 after reaching a depth of 407 feet in Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs — subsequently discovering that it is the deepest known naturally formed spring in the country, according to his company biography.

Hemphill smashed his own record just five years later while exploring Phantom Springs. He made it just over 465 feet below the surface and 8,000 feet back in the cave, also revealing that it is the deepest underwater cave yet measured in the US.

The KUR president and his team have been working within the intricate cave system since their discovery, along with the Texas A&M University Marine Biology Department, in order to research Phantom Spring’s natural species.

During one of the explorations, they discovered that there was an even deeper sector of the underwater cave.

Hemphill served as president of Florida-based KUR, a well-known cave-diving nonprofit that specialized in exploring, mapping and documenting deep underwater systems in Florida, Texas and Missouri, as well as overseas in the Bahamas, Dominican Republic and Mexico.