Cave Diving Gone Wrong - Negligence Caused Horrible Disaster!

One of the most important rules of cave diving is to make yourself aware of the present conditions of the cave diving site before embarking on your journey. Ignoring this could result in life threatening situations as we’ll see in today’s story. The incident in this story is one of the most disturbing cave stories we’ve covered.

#ManateeSprings history can be traced back 9000 years. The original residents of Manatee Springs were the Timucuan Indians. The entire picnic area was once a Timucuan Indian village. The Timucuans chose this site because it was alongside the Suwannee River providing them with a means of transportation and fresh water. The spring was named by William Bartram when he saw a manatee carcass on the shoreline of the spring. Manatees are large, wholly aquatic animals. They’re marine mammals, mainly herbivores, and they’ re also called sea cows.

There was an attack near Manatee Springs between 1835 and 1842 called the Seminole Wars, led by Major General Andrew Jackson. Many Seminole Indians were killed while the rest were forced to leave Florida. The #caveexploringdisasters became settled by farmers who harvested timber from the spring and cultivated their crops there. After the incident at Manatee Springs, the spring was sold to the state and, in 1954, it became the first #Florida State Park.
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