Thai schoolboys not ready for escape
Decision that team may have to wait months in cave before rescue has been met with little enthusiasm
MAE SAI, THAILAND— Thai officials were still trying Friday to work out an extraction plan for the young soccer team and their coach trapped for nearly two weeks in a water-filled cave, stoking fears that all available options remain too risky.
Officials said they were rethinking strategies after a diver died while trying to set air tanks along a route through the vast cavern complex. By late Friday, they had still failed to agree to a rescue method and acknowledged that all remain risky and imperfect.
“We are trying to set a plan,” said Chiang Rai Gov. Narongsak Osotthanakorn. “If the risk is minimum to get them out, then, maybe, we will try.”
Saturday will mark two weeks since the dozen young teammates and their coach became stranded deep in the cave after flash floods from heavy rains blocked their exit — and now pose huge challenges for a growing team of rescuers from around the world.
In a possible new bid to avoid the waters, engineers working for entrepreneur Elon Musk will be dispatched to Thailand. In a series of tweets, Musk said his tunnelling firm, Boring Co., and others will look for potential ways to reach the underground chamber in northern Thailand.
Drilling into the cave and extracting the boys from above has also been suggested, but Narongsak, speaking at a news conference, said only 18 of the 100 holes they have located are potentially viable.
He compared the situation to the 2010 mine rescue in Chile that took 69 days to get the miners to the surface.
Narongsak pointed out that any drilling process could take months.
“We are trying to rule out the impossible,” he said.
The boys, he added, “cannot dive at this time” and are not ready to make the almost six- hour journey out of the cave. At the same time, officials remain desperately concerned about the weather, with heavy rains forecast within days that could flood the cave once again and render their efforts to pump water out futile.
“We would like to take the minimum risk possible,” he said. “But we can’t wait for the rain.”
The governor’s midnight news conference, held just as a drizzle started to fall over the muddy, chaotic rescue site, underscored how there is still no good option to free the boys and their coach after they were found alive on Monday night.
Guiding the boys out through a dive has been raised as the most likely possibility, but a retired Thai Navy SEAL preparing the boys for their dive by placing compressed air tanks around the cave ran out of oxygen himself early Friday. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful, and he was later transferred to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
The fatality, the first of the rescue mission, raises fears that a rescue could be fraught and even deadly for the boys.
Officials said Thursday evening that three of the boys are in poor health, weaker than their other teammates. It is unclear if a rescue effort would prioritize those three for an evacuation.