‘Cloudy water’ where girl died says diver

A diver who found an 11-year-old girl who drowned at a water park told an inquest the water was “cloudy” and there was “zero visibility”.

Chris Knight, a firefighter and trained diver said: “I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face just the shadow of it.”

Kyra Hill, from Croydon, south London, got into difficulty in a designated swimming area while attending a birthday party at Liquid Leisure, near Datchet, Berkshire, in August 2022.

Mr Knight told the hearing at Reading Coroner’s Court that it was “very very difficult” to find Kyra due to visibility, depth and a lack of location for her whereabouts.

Mr Knight explained that he was not working the day that Kyra went missing, he had multiple missed calls from 15:44 onwards.

He said he returned a call at 16:19 and was informed that “someone had gone missing in the lake”.

Mr Knight lives half a mile away, after grabbing his diving gear he was on-site within 10 minutes.

The inquest heard that when he arrived a member of staff from Liquid Leisure was on a paddleboard and pointed to an area for him to search.

He said: “I was swimming circles in the area.”

When he came up the fire and rescue service were in a boat and pointing with poles to an area for him to search.

He said: “I continued searching in that location.”

He told the inquest that he was “not told directly where Kyra was last seen” and “no one had looked at CCTV”.

He said: “Because people had been wading around, fire and rescue had been poking the bottom, the silt and algae was moving around.

“I could see maybe a metre at most, it was not clear, very cloudy like seeing a shadow.”

As soon as CCTV was checked, he said he had a “more accurate area” to search and he said he found Kyra “almost straight away probably within minutes”.

Mr Knight resurfaced with Kyra at 17:09, 12 minutes after the CCTV check and handed her immediately to medical teams.

He said it would have been “very unlikely” for a surface swimmer to have found Kyra and described it as looking for “a needle in a haystack” as there was “zero visibility”.

The hearing continues.