Race against time, weather for Thai boys
Emergency diving drills in cave system with water set to rise
● There is “limited time” to bring out the 12 schoolboys and their soccer coach who have been trapped for two weeks inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand before heavy rains set in, the rescue mission’s head said yesterday.
The warning came a day after a Thai diver died during part of the rescue operation, marking a deadly turn in what started out as a celebration of one of the boys’ birthdays at the Tham Luang cave complex in northern Chiang Rai province.
A team of Thai Navy Seals, soldiers, police and volunteers have been working around the clock to try to drain the cave.
The boys, aged between 11 and 16, are hurriedly being taught to take on a treacherous dive through narrow, muddy, submerged passageways. Not all of them are capable swimmers.
“The critical point is when it rains again . . . there is limited time,” Narongsak Osottanakorn, head of the rescue mission and Chiang Rai’s former governor, told a midnight media briefing yesterday.
He said falling oxygen levels inside the cave were another “really big concern”.
Rescue alternatives include stocking the cave with supplies and an oxygen line to keep the boys alive in the cave for months until Thailand’s monsoon season ends, or drilling a shaft down into the cave from the forest above.
Narongsak said they would have to drill through 800m of fragile limestone rock to reach the boys and were discussing drilling angles.
The initial jubilation around the boys’ discovery by a team of British divers on Monday faded as the reality of the challenge of their extraction set in.
The ordeal facing the boys was underscored by the death of a former Thai Navy Seal, Navy Petty Officer First Class Saman Kunan, who volunteered for the operation. He died on Friday morning after passing out from lack of oxygen.
However, Ivan Katadzic, a Danish diving instructor who has been ferrying oxygen tanks inside the cave, said after a dive on Friday evening he was “double positive” about the mission because the water level had dropped considerably.
But Katadzic has not dived the final kilometre to where the boys are stranded on a muddy bank, the most dangerous part of the dive where rescuers have to hold their oxygen tanks in front of them to squeeze through submerged holes.
A team on the hill above is frantically trying to block holes and divert streams that channel water into the cave.
“Everything is a race against time,” said Kamolchai Kotcha, a forest park official.
Divers took the boys letters written by family members camped outside the cave but an attempt to send in a phone failed.
The president of soccer’s governing body, Fifa, invited the boys on Thursday to be his guests at the World Cup final in Moscow on July 15 if they make it out in time.