RISKY RESCUE BID
Best hope as rain threatens Thai kids
A rescue operation began Sunday morning for the dozen boys and their soccer coach trapped for 15 days in a partially submerged cave in northern Thailand.
“Today is D-Day,” regional governor Narongsak Osottanakorn told reporters. “The boys are ready and strong enough to come out.”
A fleet of ambulances and army helicopters, along with a team of divers, converged on the site at sunrise local time as a steady rain continued to fall, leaving rescue workers concerned that water levels will only rise inside the Tham Luang cave complex.
The team consists of 13 foreign divers and five Thai Navy SEAL divers, according to Osottanakorn.
The first divers went in at 10 a.m. Two divers will accompany each boy as they are gradually escorted into daylight through dark, narrow, twisting passageways filled with muddy water.
The journey will be treacherous. On Friday, a former Thai Navy SEAL died during his dive.
Authorities said that it would take at least 11 hours before the first boy could make it out — and possibly days before they were all saved.
Time had been ticking on a plan to teach the boys, ages 11 through 16, and their 25-yearold coach to make the dangerous dive.
With dark monsoon clouds threatening to flood the cave system still further, the best window for a rescue was now, according to authorities.
“Now and in the next three or four days, the conditions are perfect [for evacuation] in terms of the water, the weather and the boys’ health,” Osottanakorn said Saturday.
“We’re still at war with water and time,” he said. “It’s what we’ve been fighting since the first day.”
Worries about declining oxygen in the cave were eased when rescuers accompanied by medics and expert divers fed an air pipe into the area.
Still, heavy rains were threatening to make the water rise to the shelf where the children are sitting, reducing the area to less than 108 square feet, he said, citing estimates from cave divers and experts.
“A new storm is coming,” Osottanakorn said. “If we wait, if it rains, we’ll have to continue pumping out the water again.”
Meanwhile, billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, who has sent a team of nine engineers to Tham Luang to assist in the rescue efforts, tweeted Saturday that an escape pod he was developing might be “safe enough to try.”
He described the pod as “basically a tiny, kid-size submarine using the liquid oxygen transfer tube of Falcon rocket as a hull.
“Light enough to be carried by 2 divers, small enough to get through narrow gaps. Extremely robust,” he tweeted.
“Also building an inflatable tube with airlocks,” Musk added.
The Thai defense ministry said the Musk team should reach the cave on Sunday.
It was unclear if he was participating in Sunday’s rescue.