Five people are believed to be dead after a small plane crashed into the waters of a reservoir in southwest Colorado on Saturday.
The Socata TBM700 aircraft first took off from Gadsden, Alabama and stopped in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The plane was on its way to Montrose when around 2 p.m. it crashed into the Ridgeway Reservoir near Montrose, which is 180 miles southwest of Denver, the Associated Press reported.
Rescue efforts for the five passengers began Saturday and have continued into Monday. Dive teams found the tail of the single-engine plane on Saturday. Reinforcements from Denver and Gunnison were called to aid in the search.
"It's in deep water and it's in cold water, and we don't have the right resources in the county," Ouray County spokeswoman Marti Whitmore told the AP.
By Monday the dive teams began using a remote-controlled rover to focus on the rest of the plane, which crashed in 60 to 90 feet water, nearly 90 feet from shore. However, because of sediment in the water from the mountains, divers can only see between five and ten feet ahead of them, Whitmore told the AP.
The passengers are presumed to be dead, Whitmore said. Their names have not been released and the cause of the crash is not yet known.
National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Eric Weiss said the last thing the pilot reported was that the plane was spinning, the AP reported.
A woman who was attending a wedding said she saw the plane spiral out of the sky.
"It popped out of thick, heavy clouds and went into a flat spin," Lena Martinez told the Ouray County Plaindealer, according to the AP.
Saturday's plane crash occurred several weeks after another plane crashed after it took off from Colorado's Telluride airport, the AP reported. Three people lost their lives.
