Search operation continues
Rescuers struggle to drain a flooded cave where 12 children and their football coach have been trapped for days.
MAE SAI ( Thailand): Rescuers struggled to drain a flooded cave where 12 children and their football coach have been trapped for days, as monks chanted prayers for the boys.
The young footballers, aged between 11 and 16, have been stuck in the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand since Saturday night after monsoon rains blocked the main entrance.
Hundreds of rescue workers worked overnight to install high-pressure water pumps to reduce flooding in the cave, but it was a losing battle as rains continued to fall in the area near the Laos and Myanmar borders in northern Chiang Rai province.
“Today’s work is much harder, we are trying hard to drain water by pumping out but the water level is still rising,” provincial governor Narongsak Osottanakorn told reporters yesterday.
Conditions in the cave also proved tough for the 200 rescuers dispatched into the tunnels to find the boys.
“The water inside the cave is very murky, and there’s not much oxygen,” Narongsak said.
The governor said three foreign cave-diving experts would arrive soon to aid the harrowing search.
About 1,000 people had been mobilised for the rescue efforts, including air and ground teams and divers. The Army dispatched special operation troops to aid the rescue.
Thailand’s Navy SEAL unit said on Facebook that water levels rose 15cm overnight and that a third chamber of the complex cave network – believed to be several kilometres long – was now flooded.
Soldiers carried large hoses to attach to eight water pumps that were shipped in to drain rising floodwaters.
The young football team, called the “Boars”, and their 25-year-old coach are familiar to the area and know the cave well, officials said.
They went into the cave after football practice on Saturday and a mother of one of the players alerted authorities when her son did not come home.