‘WAR WITH WATER, TIME’
8 of 13 out of Thai cave
There was a sombre, anguished silence that descended when the first boy was nursed from the muddy water after a treacherous rescue operation from a deep, flooded cave complex in Thailand.
Confidence and relief grew as the slow but steady plan by an international rescue team to save a boys’ soccer team trapped since June 23 appeared to be working.
But even as each new boy emerged from the muddy water — alive and apparently well — after being guided by experienced scuba divers through four kilometres of dark, narrow, twisting, flooded tunnels inside the massive underground complex, there was always fear.
It remained, as one of the rescue co-ordinators called it, a “war with water and time.”
Cheers from hundreds of people waiting near the cave entrance greeted each helicopter or ambulance carrying a rescued child to hospital; four boys on Sunday and another four on Monday.
The optimism, however, belies the risk. The third phase of the operation — to rescue the remaining four boys and their coach who on Monday were spending their 17 th night captive to nature in the dark Tham Luang Nang Non cave — would be as arduous and as dangerous as the first two.
The first rescue phase came Sunday morning, local time.
Led by the Royal Thai Navy’s SEAL unit and supported by international diving experts and hundreds of support workers, the team started to extract four boys. There were 18 divers, officials said.
Each boy was equipped with a full-face breathing mask and wore multiple wet suits to protect them from the cold, CNN reported. Each was tethered to two divers, one in front and the second behind, with the lead diver carrying the boy’s oxygen tank.
Guide ropes helped them through the murky water.
At the cave’s narrowest point, the tanks had to be removed from the diver’s back and pushed through the gap separately. Oxygen tanks placed at strategic spots along the route replenished the divers’ supply.
Once out of the flooded passages, they could wade the rest of the way.
All told, it took a gruelling 11 hours to remove the first four boys.
The rest had to wait. It seemed agonizingly long before phase two was ready. Oxygen tanks needed refilling, divers needed rest and the strategic caches of fresh oxygen tanks needed replacing.
Monday’s operation began at 11 a.m. and took nine hours, with officials saying their experience the day before allowed them to be “sharper” in their execution. It was largely the same group of divers involved, officials said, since they knew best what to expect.
According to a police chief, the boys were recovering and asking for food, saying they wanted khao pad krapao, a popular Thai dish.
THE LEDGE THEY WERE CLINGING TO WAS REPORTEDLY SHRINKING AND TURNING TO MUD.
The dangers for those remaining inside, however, only grew.
Rescuers feared dwindling oxygen levels and rain. With forecasts of even heavier rain on the horizon, the ledge they were clinging to was reportedly shrinking and turning to mud.
On Monday, officials did not say whether the third phase would extract only the next group of four boys, leaving the coach to spend a last night alone, or whether all five would be moved.
Previously, the rescue coordinator said the plan was mapped out as being best for only four people at a time.
“We will do it faster,” said Narongsak Osottanakorn, former governor of Chiang Rai province and the head of the rescue operation, “because we are afraid of the rain.”
It was rising floodwater that trapped the boys, aged 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old coach while clambering deep into the cave after soccer practice. They were stuck about a kilometre beneath the earth’s surface and four kilometres of complex, narrow tunnels with hairpin turns from the cave mouth.
The first searchers were forced back by fast-moving and rising water that flooded the natural channels that sprout from the main cave chambers. Experienced cave divers were similarly thwarted. Water pumps were rushed to the site to control the floods fuelled by rain.
For nine days the boys were missing.
As hope faded and parents and well-wishers sat in vigil at the cave’s mouth expressing prayers and tears, it seemed a miracle when two British cave diving specialists surfaced in a pocket of air and, shining a flashlight through the pitch dark, found the entourage huddled on a sandy ledge.
“How many of you?” one of the divers asked as video recorded the scene. “Thirteen,” came the answer. “Brilliant,” the diver said. It meant everyone was accounted for.
Divers brought them food, blankets and medical supplies as rescue plans were debated.
Officials then announced the daring, surprisingly complicated, rescue plan: they would teach the boys how to use scuba gear and then tether them to divers who would shuttle them from point to point, with fresh oxygen tanks placed along the way.
The obstacles were considerable — much of the four kilometres to the entrance is submerged, dark passages. The only route out traverses “a crisis point,” a T-junction turn in the tunnel where it dwindles to just 38 centimetres. At other points, the passage is just a metre high.
The ever-present danger in the plan was acutely felt Friday when Saman Kunan, an experienced Thai Navy diver, died while trying to install an air line to the children’s chamber.
If such an experienced diver could fall victim to the cave’s menace, what chance did the children, already weakened by malnourishment, have? The world anxiously waited to see and cheered every success of the mission.
But the threat of monsoon rains is every present.
On Monday, the regional army commander offered his thanks to the rain god Phra Pirun, imploring him to “keep showing us mercy.”
“Give us three more days and the Boars will come out to see the world, every one of them,” Maj.-Gen. Bancha Duriyapan said.