Nervous wait in store for Thai cave boys
Trapped junior football team may have to dive to their freedom, or remain underground for months
Rescuers are trying to come up with a plan to rescue the 12 Thai boys and their football coach trapped in a six-mile cave network deep in the jungle. The boys were all found alive on Monday, but yesterday Thai officials said they may need to swim to safety or wait months to be pulled out.
TWELVE Thai boys and their football coach have endured another night in a dark, flooded cavern as their rescuers grapple with complex plans to extract them from the six-mile cave network deep in the dense jungle.
Yesterday, Anupong Paojinda, Thailand’s interior minister, said the boys may need to swim out using diving equipment before the area is hit by the bad weather that is forecast for later in the week. He said the boys would have to be brought out via the same complicated route through which their rescuers entered.
However, earlier yesterday, Anand Surawan, a navy captain, suggested that the boys would be sent “additional food to be sustained for at least four months,” while they trained to dive and rescuers continued to drain water with high-pressure pumps.
The group were found by rescue divers, led by Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, two British caving experts, late on Monday night. They were discovered in the vast Tham Luang cave network in northern Chiang Rai province during a desperate search that lasted more than a week and drew international help.
Their discovery led to jubilation among desperate family members and hundreds of exhausted volunteers camping in bad weather at the entrance to the cave.
But the 1,000-strong Thai-led rescue team, which includes military and international experts from the US, UK, China, Japan and Australia, remains undecided over the safest way to save the boys from their predicament. Rescuers fear that the children, who have no diving experience, could panic while trying to negotiate dark swirling waters and strong currents.
But the alternative could mean a long wait underground for monsoon rains to stop and the floodwaters to subside.
Emma Porter, from the British Cave Rescue Council, who is providing the British diving team with logistical support, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday evening that there was “no clarification” as yet about the way forward.
“We just don’t know. [Any decision] is weather-dependent. The Thai navy seals have been looking at putting plans together and we’re waiting to see what is decided,” she said.
Seven Thai navy seals, including medics, stayed inside the cavern with the boys yesterday. They said that the children, aged 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old coach were mostly in stable medical condition and have received high-protein liquid food.
Ms Porter said that the British team on the ground were “very professional” and were “focusing on whatever job is at hand” despite the global attention on their “remarkable” discovery.
The moment Mr Stanton and Mr Volathen found the boys alive on Monday evening was captured in an extraordinary video filmed in the gloom of the underground prison.
Peering out of the darkness, the young boys, still wearing the red Tshirts of their Wild Boars football team, perched on a muddy ledge above a flooded chamber, weakened but in apparently good spirits, and conversed calmly and politely with their rescuers, thanking them for coming.
“Can we please go outside now?” said a voice from the group.
“Not today, you have to dive,” replied one of the men. But he reassured the boys that “you are very strong” and that help was on the way.
But the elation was dampened yesterday by the perilous reality of their four-mile route to escape, which will require them to cross a dangerous labyrinth of passageways flooded by murky, brown floodwaters.
Patrick Moret, a mining rescue expert at Cornwall Search and Rescue, told The Telegraph that the safest option may be to secure the boys for now in their current location with clean water, food and warm clothes, rather than
‘Thai navy seals have been putting plans together and we’re waiting to see what is decided’
‘For the rescue divers themselves it’s very risky because if a child begins to panic underwater it is incredibly dangerous’
try to teach them to dive. “[If ] the lads are going to have to dive, it’s going to be very arduous for these boys. It’s a lot of people and a lot of risk,” he said.
“For the rescue divers themselves it’s very risky because if a child begins to panic underwater it is incredibly dangerous.
“The urge to panic is going to be like a red light on a dashboard, absolutely terrifying.”
Surely it was a miracle? Twelve Thai boys found alive in a pitch-black underground cave complex. Perhaps it is surprising that they were discovered after nine days, but the nationality of the men who found them is not: they were British. It may take a South African like me to point this out, but the Brits lead the world in caving.
Let’s start with the facts. Brits have helped discover some of the world’s most impressive caves – the Dragon’s Breath in Namibia, for example, was found in 1986 and contains the world’s largest subterranean, non-glacial lake. Even when a cave is found by another nationality, Brits are often first on the scene. In Uzbekistan, the Dark Star cave (widely considered to be the world’s underground Everest) was discovered by Russians but first reached by Brits, who started exploring there in 1990.
Having started as a scientific pursuit, caving as a sport began in Britain in the late 1800s, with the first caving clubs forming in the 1920s and 30s. The Cave Rescue Organisation in Yorkshire, formed in 1935, was the first of its kind in the world – since then, the development of specialist equipment and techniques have allowed cavers to explore deeper into more difficult cave systems. This has in turn enabled more advanced and sophisticated rescue operations to take place – such as the one in Thailand.
The UK has some excellent caves of its own: from the non-adventure ones such as the tourist caverns of Cheddar Gorge in Somerset to breathtaking wonders like Alum Pot in Yorkshire, with its sky-lit waterfalls, incredible plant life and wreathing mist. One underground passage in Yorkshire has been known since the late 1970s as Dead Man’s Handshake after one cave diver left his companion for dead, trapped on the other side of a crevice, after shaking his hand through a gap in the rock. Luckily both cavers survived, and it is now customary when caving there to shake your dive partner’s hand through the same hole.
This tradition sums up another reason why Brits excel at caving: it takes an odd mix of heroism, eccentricity and a taste for adventure to put yourself through it all.
Possibly one of the most heart-stopping moments of my life was being invited on a cave dig in the Yorkshire Moors. It involved crawling, head to toe, through a rabbit-sized hole on a snowy hill. We lay, squeezed on all sides by muddy earth, waiting for the next excavated rock to be passed down our bodies in a wriggling motion, until our feet could push it along to the next person.
When the cave leader finally broke through the rock obstruction to an undiscovered underground stream, the sound of his voice echoing in the larger chamber ahead, and that of the rushing water, was as extraordinary as the view from the top of any mountain that I have climbed. It was a complete voyage of discovery into an unknown: a very dangerous world set right beneath the sheep grazing on the Yorkshire Moors.
On another expedition I was on, someone fell three metres through a hole and ripped their leg open. It took eight hours of slowmoving rescue tactics led by a competent and very calm British caver to evacuate the injured person.
British cavers may be eccentric, but they have nerves of steel. Those 12 Thai boys are luckier than they know. follow Rachel Colenso on Twitter @Rachelcolenso; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion