Storms threaten Thai rescue
Officials: Boys can’t stay in cave much longer
MAE SAI, Thailand — The high-risk mission to extract 12 boys and their soccer coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Thailand faced growing fears Friday that weekend storms could make a complicated rescue almost impossible.
Rain forecast for northern Thailand could refill the Tham Luang Nang Non cave with water, and alternate ways to bring the group out — through an opening in the mountainside above, or by drilling into the rock face — were not bearing fruit, authorities said.
The boys and their 25-year-old coach were on a dry ledge inside the cave and were being looked after by Thai navy SEALs. The boys are being trained in the basics of diving in case they have to swim to safety, but it was unlikely they could remain there much longer.
A former Thai SEAL lost consciousness while moving oxygen
tanks undergroundat about1 a.m. Friday and could not be revived, officials said. It was the first fatality in a rescue effort that has drawn divers and volunteers from several countries and riveted people around the globe.
“Circumstances are pressuring us,” Thai SEAL commander Arpakorn Yookonkaew said at a news conference. “We originally thought the boys could stay safe inside the cave for quite some time, but circumstances have changed. We have a limited amount of time.”
Arpakorn and other officials did not give a timeline for when an evacuation might begin. Getting to safety requires a roughly fivehour dive through murky waters and narrow passageways, difficult for even experienced divers, to a point closer to the mouth of the cave where the group could be taken out on stretchers.
“We try to set the best plan we can to bring them out,” said provincial Gov. Narongsak Osotthanakorn. “We are afraid of the weather and the oxygen in the cave, butwehaveto try to set the plan and find out which is the best.”
More than two miles inside the cave, where the boys are being fortified with highprotein gels and foil warming blankets, the team has been practicing wearing diving mask sand breathing under the instructions of the SEALs.
Officials say the boys would be accompanied by two or three rescuers each, and that not everyonewould need to be evacuated at the same time.
But the boys— ages11to16 — are thought to be novice swimmers at best, and frail afterhaving spent nearlytwo weeks underground since they entered the cave after soccer practice June 23 and were trapped by floodwaters.
The risks of the mission became apparent with the death of the former Thai SEAL, officials said.
The rescuer, identified as Saman Gunan, 38, had been moving oxygen tanks along the path that rescuers have been using to reach the boys, allowing divers to stay underwater longer during the dive.
Atonetight cornerknown asT-junction, there is almost zero visibility, said Ivan Karadicz, aDanish diving instructor participating in the effort.
“You can only see [about 8 inches] in front of you,” Karadicz said. And the point is so narrow that only one diver can usually pass at a time, meaning a boy might have to negotiate that point without the aid of a rescuer, he said.
The number of rescuers inside the cave, beneath a mountain in rugged, tropical Chiang Rai province, has also lowered oxygen levels for those inside.
High-powered pumps are clearing 50,000 gallons of water out of the cave every hour, helped by relatively dry weather over the past week. But rescuers have still not identified every point where water flows into the 6-mile-long cave.
Narongsak, the provincial governor, said crews were looking for shafts and sinkholes that could offer a way to drill into the rock face. He said they found 18 sinkholes, one of which was about 1,300 feet deep, but drilling deeper proved impossible.
Thai officials were studying the 2010 rescue of 33 miners who were trapped when a copper mine collapsed in Chile, and brought to the surface by a capsule through a specially drilled borehole.
“We’re trying to work out how long it would take” to drill an escape hole from scratch, Narongsak said. “We used the Chilean scenario; they took two months to get people out.”