THAI HEROES TO THE RESCUE
Fresh from Tham Luang cave rescue, volunteers save baby, 13 others from Laos dam disaster
THE rescue of a baby boy, terrified and hungry after days without food, has been captured in a viral video showing the infant survivor of a dam collapse in southern Laos being carefully carried through swirling flood waters and waist-high mud.
Footage of volunteers from Thailand rescuing 14 people, including the baby, was widely shared online when it was released yesterday as an increasingly international relief mission scrambles to save lives in a disaster that has left scores dead or missing.
The group of survivors were stranded by floodwaters after they fled up a hill on Monday as the Xe-Namnoy dam broke under heavy rain, leaving several villages devastated by flash floods.
The Thai rescue team, who waded several kilometres through rushing water containing uprooted trees and debris, are fresh from efforts to help free a youth football team trapped in a cave north of their country.
They have now come to help out in neighbouring Laos, which is poorly equipped to deal with disasters of this scale.
“The boy is 4 months old. He didn’t have a fever but he was crying, maybe because of the cold weather,” Kengkard Bongkawong, one of the rescuers, who is from Thailand’s northeast, said.
“The baby was crying and looks terrified. They were (all) terrified of the rushing water.”
The video had been watched nearly half a million times just hours after it was posted online.
Earlier this week, officials said 27 bodies had been retrieved so far, with the country’s prime minister reporting 131 missing.
But yesterday, Attapeu governor Leth Xiayaphone revised the toll to five, saying the larger number previously given was “unconfirmed information”.
Secretive Communist authorities are unused to international scrutiny and have blocked access to foreign media, complicating efforts to establish the exact death toll in a remote area.
The mystery over numbers of dead deepened with a resident of the badly-hit Ban Mai saying eight people were presumed to have died in his village alone.