Holy crap! What a terrifying situation. I wonder if they’re trying any external construction to reroute floodwaters away from the cave.
What an awful, awful thing for their families. Mother Nature is really not cooperating at all.
Makes shudders run down my spine just thinking about it. Ugh.
Kilometers! Good luck to everyone. Even if they can be supplied and taken care of, it would be awful to be trapped for months in a cave like that.
None of the boys know how to swim, and they’re going to have swim out. One at a time.
Or you get a set of scuba instructors who are used to the buddy system, give them a little training to relax and breath and then swim them out, one by one. I do understand that there’s some risk here, but it does seem like they’re over hyping it a bit…
I’ve been following this. The rescuers have it under control
There’s a Robert Mueller parallel in here somewhere, but it involves a swamp instead of a cave…
“We are talking kilometers of transport under the water with zero
visibility,” said Claus Rasmusen, a certified cave diving instructor
based in Thailand
I did a fair amount of caving when I was younger. It’s rare for people to get kilometers away from the entrance of a wild (non-tourist) cave, unless they’re experienced cavers exploring a big cave system. And I’m thinking about mostly dry caves in VA and WV with a lot of walking passages.
So it boggles my mind that they got so far in that there are kilometers of flooded passage between them and the entrance, even after they’ve done a lot of pumping that’s created breathing room in enough formerly flooded passages to make it possible for the rescuers to find the kids.
I’m thinking the guy’s exaggerating, that there’s maybe multiple stretches of several hundred feet of flooded passage between the kids and the entrance. Several hundred feet underwater in a cave with crappy visibility would be plenty intimidating for anyone who isn’t experienced with this sort of thing. (I certainly would find it scary, I don’t mind saying.)
Cave diving is kinda the worst of spelunking and scuba diving. From the previous articles, some of the passages would be no fun to navigate in air, such as longish crawls with lousy clearance. And now in the dark, because the floodwaters have no visibility to speak of. Not impossible, but requiring long periods of calm under stress and a fair amount of good luck.
Yup, and now that they’ve actually lost a diver I probably should temper my enthusiasm for swimming them out.