‘A WAR AGAINST WATER AND TIME’
Treacherous mission resumes after four boys are rescued from flooded cave by team of divers
MAE SAI, THAILAND— When the wail of the ambulance siren first reached the Thai village, people started cheering: the sound meant one of the boys trapped in a cave for more than two weeks was out at last and on his way to the hospital.
After more than a week of searching the flooded cave complex, and then days of planning a daring and increasingly desperate rescue, divers safely evacuated four of 13 members of a youth soccer team Sunday. Nine remained behind, waiting their turn to escape, as of early Monday morning.
The boys on the team range in age from 11 to 16, and the coach with them is 25.
Authorities said the next phase could begin any time within a10-hour window between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. local time (8 p.m. and 6 a.m. our time), and acknowledged they are locked in a race against time. The dive to the cave area where the boys are trapped takes several hours.
One by one, the first four to be rescued emerged after a treacherous, hours-long journey through the tight, underwater passageways of the Tham Luang cave. Skilled cave divers, part of a team assembled from around the world, hugged the four to their bodies as they swam through the dark.
“The 4th wild boar is out of the cave,” said a posting Sunday evening on the Facebook page of the Thai navy SEALs, who are aiding in the rescue.
The Wild Boars is the name of the boys’ soccer team.
After the first four rescued, however, the evacuation came to a halt. There was no choice: The rescuers had used up all the air tanks divers had placed along the route, said Narongsak Osottanakorn, head of the search operations. It would take divers 10 to 20 hours to replace the tanks for the next rescue attempt, he said.
The rescue was far from over — but it was a remarkable turn in the 16-day drama that has captivated Thailand and the world.
“Today, everything was very smooth,” Narongsak told a throng of reporters at a news conference. “Today is the best day, with the best situation of the weather, the health of the boys and the water level.”
Monday morning saw cloudy skies, with rains easing after a night in which heavy monsoon rains lashed the mountainous region for several hours.
It was not immediately clear Monday how the overnight rains had impacted water levels inside the flooded cave. Officials have said storms forecast for Chiang Rai province in Thailand’s far north had factored into their decision to go ahead with a complicated and dangerous plan to have the boys and their coach dive out of the cave.
Thailand’s Meteorological Department said there was a 60 per cent chance of rain Monday with thunderstorms forecast throughout the week.
It took 10 days just to locate the missing boys, who were deep inside the flooded cave complex. Then it took nearly another week to figure out a way extract them.
Some Thai officials proposed leaving the boys and their coach in the cave for four months, until the water subsides and they can walk out. But Narongsak said Saturday it would probably take even longer — until December or January — for the water level to get that low.
“We are still in a war against water and time,” he said.
None of the options were easy: Drill through a mountain. Wait months for the floodwaters to recede. Or escort scared and exhausted young people, few if any of whom could swim, through an underwater maze that was daunting even for the world’s best cave divers.
Underscoring just how dangerous getting the boys out of the cave could be, the operation suffered its biggest setback on Friday, when a volunteer diver, Saman Gunan, 38, a former Thai navy SEAL, died after losing consciousness while underwater.
He had been placing air tanks along the route — the same task that other divers must now hurry to complete.
But Sunday’s rescues went more quickly than expected, offering hope the remaining nine team members could be extracted soon and safely.
Dark clouds shrouded the mountains above the cave much of the day Sunday, bringing heavy rains and threatening to raise the water level in the cave once again.
After considering several alternatives, Thai officials settled on a tandem dive arrangement with the boys wearing full face masks so they could breathe normally.
Narongsak said 90 divers assisted in Sunday’s rescue, about 50 of them from overseas. He said 18 divers — 13 foreigners and five Thais — made up the team that brought out the four.
He did not say which countries the foreign divers came from, but British cave divers have played a key role in the operation, and the United States, Australia and China have all sent teams to help. Divers from several other countries have also volunteered.
The divers entered the cave at 10 a.m., and Narongsak said at the time he expected the first rescue to be done by 9 p.m. In fact, it was three hours earlier than that; the last of the four was taken from the cave before 8 p.m.
All four were quickly transported to a hospital in Chiang Rai, the nearest large city.
The Guardian reported that authorities did not name the boys who had been rescued – not even to the parents of the group, said Namhom Boonpiam, the mother of Mongkhol Boonpiam.
Mongkhol Boonpiam, 14, is among the 12 boys trapped in the cave. Namhom told the Guardian she had only learned he may have been freed from reports on social media, which the families are tracking from the cave site. “I just heard his name, Mongkhol, and I was happy enough,” she told the Guardian.
She was sleeping at the cave site on Sunday night with many of the other parents and had not yet thought about what she would say once she saw him. “Let me meet him first,” she said.
It is understood the four boys were given preliminary health checks and rushed into ambulances to get them to hospital as soon as possible after they were freed.
Before the mission began, expert divers said the first mile of the journey out of Tham Luang Cave would be the most dangerous.
The tandem divers could expect to face strong currents and pass through perilous tunnels, without any air pockets for safety in an emergency. “Everyone knows exactly what they have to do, because any confusion in there would be really bad,” Narongsak told reporters shortly after the operation began.
Only a day earlier, on Saturday, Narongsak had told reporters a rescue attempt was not imminent. But the weather worsened suddenly overnight, prompting officials to move quickly.
“We believe there are no days when we have been readier than today,” Narongsak said Sunday. “If we don’t do the rescue on the day when we are readiest, we might lose the opportunity to carry out this mission.”
The cavern where the group took refuge is about 3 miles from the cave’s lone entrance. When the cave is flooded, it can take skilled divers more than five hours to make the trip from the entrance to the cavern.