Miracle in Tham Luang Cave
The mission to rescue 12 young Thai footballers could so easily have ended in tragedy, writes James Massola.
Sunday, July 8, began like any other morning in Tham Luang cave, near the Thai city of Chiang Mai. The Wild Boars football team woke early, as they always did, in the dark.
The air inside the cave was humid but, as they entered their 16th day perched in the Nern Nom Sao cavern, the boys were still feeling the cold despite the space blankets and extra clothes they had been given.
After being trapped for so long, the sandy bank on which they were perched felt smaller than ever. It was still only 5 to 6 metres wide, and about 20-25m deep, from the water’s edge to the back of the cave, while the slope, at various points, was as steep as 30 degrees. They must have felt as if the walls were closing in on them. The novelty of energy gels and Meals Ready to Eat had worn off, and conditions in the cave – the darkness, the smell and the constant chill – were wearing them down.
The day before, some British divers and an Australian doctor had visited and given them a detailed account of the rescue plan, which had been accepted by the Boars’ families, despite their fears that it could end in disaster and tragedy.
After fasting in preparation for the rescue, six of the boys had woken up hungry. But the rescue divers faced dawn that morning with a faint feeling of dread. Brits Rick Stanton, John Volanthen, Chris Jewell and Jason Mallinson, and Australian medics Richard Harris and Craig Challen, had all been in this situation before. They’d participated in some of the riskiest, most extreme cave rescues. They’d lost friends, and helped bring back the bodies of the dead.
The diving itself may not have been the most technically difficult. But nothing like this had been attempted before; usually, by the time help arrives, it is already too late. There was no base line against which to measure themselves.
And no-one in the rescue team had ever undertaken a mission like this, with many millions watching, hoping, praying they would succeed.
But other divers in the rescue team had far less experience, even none at all, in undertaking a high-risk rescue with such a precious, vulnerable cargo.
There were so many factors that could go wrong at any point. And the worst-case scenario – that some or even all of the boys would lose their lives – had been war-gamed again and again. If one of the boys woke up from sedation, panicked and ripped off his mask in an underwater section of the cave, he could endanger the life of his rescuer, as well as himself.
Everything possible had been done to prepare for the rescue. For the boys, there were special wetsuits that would ensure they didn’t lose too much body heat on the journey out, as well as full-face masks to fit the smallest of them. Oxygen and air cylinders had been placed at strategic points in chambers throughout the cave.
But for all their careful preparations, most of the rescuers expected multiple casualties. As Challen would later recall, ‘‘It wasn’t dangerous for us, but I can’t emphasise enough how dangerous it was for the kids. It was absolutely life and death. We didn’t expect to be getting 13 people out of there alive.’’
‘NO CHANCE OF IT WORKING’
Richard Harris was perhaps the most pessimistic. He would tell a conference in Melbourne in late September: ‘‘Personally, I honestly thought there was zero chance of success. I honestly thought there was no chance of it working.’’
Deteriorating air conditions forced the timing of the rescue. It finally began at 10.08am on Sunday, July 8, when 13 international divers entered Tham Luang cave. Heavy rain had fallen overnight and, later that day, it would fall again, but at this hour the skies over Mae Sai were grey and threatening rain, underlining the urgency of the rescue mission.
The 13 divers were closely supported by five Thai Navy Seals, as well as dozens of personnel from the Thai military, the United States, China and Australia who were positioned in the first three chambers of the cave.
The divers had, at most, a three-day window before the forecast rain would make a rescue impossible.
SLOW JOURNEY BEGINS
Inside the cave, the divers began their slow journey through the nine chambers from the entrance to Nern Nom Sao. Most of the men would position themselves at strategic points along the route, while Harris and four British divers – Volanthen, Stanton, Jewell and Mallinson – would travel all the way to the boys, where the Brits would be in charge.
Contrary to reports at the time, the boys were not assigned two divers each. That wasn’t logistically possible, given how narrow and difficult some sections of the cave were. But, almost every step of the way, a second diver would assist the man bringing them out. Each British diver would take one boy all the way from chamber 9 to the entrance.
The Brits, as well as Harris and his dive buddy Challen, went in first, as they had the longest dive ahead of them. Travelling in pairs, they set out from chamber 3, where the diving began in earnest, at about 20-minute intervals. Over the next few hours they slowly made their way to predetermined points along the route.
Challen, Claus Rasmussen and Mikko Paasi were stationed in chamber 8, the first stop on the return journey for the four Brits as each came through with one boy. The route from chamber 9, Nern Nom Sao, to chamber 8 included a 350m dive that would be one of the hardest sections to negotiate.
The rescue plan called for Challen, a retired vet, to be ready to deliver a ‘‘top up’’ injection to the boys in chamber 8 to keep them sedated, if necessary.
In chamber 6, Ivan Karadzic and Erik Brown would be ready with air and oxygen tanks, and more medicine to inject into the boys if the effects of the sedative were starting to wear off.
Between chambers 6 and 5, there was another 150m dive, then a 150m canal. And in chamber 5, Connor Roe and Jim Warny would be waiting with more air, oxygen and medicine to help the divers and each of the boys through to chamber 3. Along the way, there were two more dives of about 150m each to make before, finally, they reached chamber 3.
Chamber 3 was relatively huge – perhaps half the size of a school gymnasium, according to Brown. In all, there were perhaps another 150 rescuers stationed between chamber 3 and the exit.
In chamber 3 each boy’s vital signs would be checked by doctors and gauze placed over his eyes to protect them from the light outside the cave. Then he would be placed in a Sked stretcher and loaded onto the elaborate pulley system, or highline, which made it simpler and quicker to transport each boy through to the entrance.
But some sections simply couldn’t accommodate the highline, so he would still have to pass through a couple of hundred hands as he was brought out of the cave.
The planning had been methodical, but all the preparation and medication in the world would count for nought if one of the boys woke up mid-dive and panicked.
TIME FOR THE INJECTIONS
Harris was ready to prime the needle; it was time to sedate the first Wild Boar. He had calculated approximately what dose each boy would need. He would give each one alprazolam – more commonly known as Xanax, an antianxiety drug – by mouth, then inject him in each leg with ketamine, a sedative.
Harris had devised a plan for handling the injections. First, each of the boys to be taken out that day would swallow a tablet, which would make him feel a bit strange, and then he would join Harris at the bottom of the bank, near the water. There, he would be injected in the legs and go to sleep. When he woke up again, he would be in a hospital bed, out of the cave.
While Harris prepared his sedatives, the boys were briefed again in Thai by a Dr Pak. As he spoke to the boys, the doctor, who had already spent seven nights in the cave with three Navy Seals, paid careful attention to whether or not the first four were ready for the mission.
They were; they were eager to get started. Down by the water line, under unsteady torchlights, Harris was ready. He plunged the needle into Note’s leg; he would be the first boy out.
THE UNDERWATER TEST
Once the first boy was sedated, and his full-face mask fitted, Harris took him down to the water and pushed his head under water. It was absolutely critical to test each full-face mask to make sure it fitted properly.
After about 30 seconds, which passed with agonising slowness, Note started breathing again; the mask worked, and the sedative had been administered in the right dose. Over the next three days, Harris would repeat this breathing test 12 times.
After so long in the cave, a couple of the boys showed
signs of the early stages of pneumonia; it was remarkable that more of them weren’t ill. But the last boy to leave on that first day gave Harris a scare. After the doctor administered the injections in each leg, the boy ‘‘behaved like a bad kid with a chest infection under anaesthetic – breath-holding, he was over-sedated’’, he later recalled. He lay down on the sand with the boy for half an hour, spooning him and listening to his breathing to ensure that his airways remained open.
It was one of many tense moments over the next three days. He later said he was ‘‘thinking this is what I predicted would happen, this is going to go really badly. Then he sort of fired up. He ended up needing another dose to put him back [under] in the water about 200m down the track’’.
INTO THE UNKNOWN
Although the divers knew what to expect, those first few moments in the water were still a shock. Each man had the life of a young boy in his hands; each of the boys was, at best, semi-conscious and, even if he had been fully conscious, he would have been unable to fend for himself in this incredibly dangerous place.
Once Mallinson was in the water with Note, the pair submerged for the first 350m dive. As well as the wetsuit and full-face mask, Note was wearing both a buoyancy device and a harness that would keep him attached to Mallinson and give the diver a handle to grab on to.
‘‘I was very nervous when we took them from the end point and you got into that first flooded section,’’ Mallinson says. ‘‘Until you got a feel for the way their breathing rhythm was going, it was very nervous for the first five or 10 minutes, you just wanted to see those air bubbles coming out of that mask all the time.’’
It was dark in the water, but the lights each diver wore helped him to see. The next step was to locate the path-finding line, which would help him to pull them through. Sometimes, the boy would be positioned to the left or the right of the diver, depending on where the guideline had been laid. At other times, the diver was so close to the boy that he could feel and see the air bubbles that would slowly escape from the face mask his young charge wore.
To get through the narrowest choke points, the diver would push the boy through first with the help of the other divers stationed throughout the cave. It was a painfully slow process, and took much longer than the couple of hours it had taken for the divers to reach Nern Nom Sao.
While the divers did their best, it was sometimes impossible to avoid bumping the boys into rocks and other obstacles. The key thing was to keep the boys’ full-face masks on – a task that, as the hours passed, became mentally exhausting. One wrong manoeuvre, one wrong turn, could dislodge them. The extra concentration required to protect these young lives would take a heavy toll on the divers.
AGONISING WAIT
In chamber 8, Challen, Claus Rasmussen and Mikko Paasi were enduring an agonising wait for Mallinson and Note to arrive. But as soon as they reached chamber 8, the trio swung into action. First, Challen checked the child’s breathing; he was alive and breathing normally. The three men were flooded with relief.
Now it was time to start removing Note’s diving gear. A muddy, rocky section that was about 200m long lay ahead and the team would have to carry the boy on a stretcher, then drag it through a section that included a narrow sump that was difficult to negotiate.
Once they had cleared this section, Challen checked the boy again and the team began to put his diving gear and fullface mask back in place. It was time to go back in the water – another dive, past chamber 7 and through the T-junction and on to chamber 6.
Although each of the boys had lost an average of a little over two kilograms, it was still difficult to wrangle them through the cave. Every obstacle would eat up precious minutes that raced by.
Again and again on that first day it was a case of trial and error as the four British divers grappled with how exactly to get the boys through those first six chambers to chamber 3, where a huge rescue team waited for them. At this point the divers had been working their way into and then back out of the cave for at least four hours.
In chamber 6, about 100m past the T-junction, more help was waiting. Like the trio in chamber 8, Karadzic and Brown had been sitting in the near darkness for about two and a half hours, although to them it seemed much longer. They were primed and ready for the moment the first boy and his diver would appear and they could check his breathing. But as Mallinson surfaced and started swimming with Note towards them, the two men were consumed by one fundamental question – was the boy still alive?
A SLOW-MOTION MIRACLE
They had to face this moment over and over again, as each boy was brought into chamber 6. Miraculously, one by one, the boys came through safely and they were all fine.
Brown says he will never forget the moment when the first boy came through: ‘‘You’re not sure what’s about to happen, but you’re optimistic. You’re on edge, in the dark, and you finally see that little light appear. Your heart is going a million miles a minute. When they came through the darkness, that first time, it was in slow motion.’’
The four divers had brought the first four boys to the brink of freedom. The next day, Monday, they would have to do it all again.
Edited extract from The Great Cave Rescue by James Massola (Allen & Unwin, $32.99).