[The world’s attention has been riveted to their story, which echoes the tale of the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped for 69 days nearly half a mile below the surface in 2010. Engineers there eventually drilled a vertical hole to reach their chamber, and all the miners were pulled to the surface one by one while a global audience watched on live television.]
By Shibani Mahtani, Karla Adam
and Joel Achenbach
 |
|
On
the ninth day of their search, rescuers found 12 boys alive in a flooded cave
in
Thailand. (Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
|
SINGAPORE
— They’re alive and in
relatively decent shape, given their ordeal, but many challenges remain for 12
boys and a soccer coach who so far have survived 10 days inside a flooded cave
in Thailand and are still a long way from seeing daylight.
Divers who braved murky water and strong
currents found the soccer team Monday on a dry ledge more than a mile from the
mouth of the cave. The team remained there Tuesday, no longer alone and with
food, water and medicine, as authorities tried to figure out how to extract
them safely.
This is the season of the monsoon, with two
inches of rain forecast to fall through Sunday. The monsoon lasts until the end
of summer. The water in the cave is expected to rise.
The boys and their coach are not in danger of
drowning. But the floodwaters cut off their path of escape. None of the boys
can swim. Officials are considering giving the entire group a crash course in
cave diving so that they can swim through flooded passages.
The joyous news that the soccer team was
found alive has been coupled with vexation over what to do next. A thousand
people at least are involved in the rescue effort, with help coming from around
the globe, but technology is struggling to overcome the geology of the Tham
Luang cave complex.
There is no simple way to save the trapped
team.
Engineers have drained water from portions of
the cave, but it is a vast subterranean cavern fed by a broad watershed. There
is no sign that the efforts have lowered water levels to a point that would
allow an extraction on foot.
Officials said Tuesday they might try to
bring some of the boys out within a matter of hours, but they also said they do
not want to take unnecessary risks. At one point Tuesday, officials suggested
that the rescue could take months.
“We will not rush to take the lads out of the
cave,” the governor of Chiang Rai province, Narongsak Osoththanakorn, told
reporters, according to the BBC.
The boys range in age from 11 to 16, and are
with their 25-year-old coach. They went missing on June 23 while exploring the
six-mile-long cave, which is in a park in northern Thailand near the Myanmar
border.
The world’s attention has been riveted to
their story, which echoes the tale of the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped
for 69 days nearly half a mile below the surface in 2010. Engineers there
eventually drilled a vertical hole to reach their chamber, and all the miners
were pulled to the surface one by one while a global audience watched on live
television.
The members of the Thai soccer team were
discovered Monday by two British divers, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen. In a
video posted by the Thai navy on its Facebook page, the boys are seen huddled
on a rock in mud-stained T-shirts and shorts surrounded by water.
“How many of you are there — 13? Brilliant,”
a member of the rescue team, speaking in English, said to the boys. “You have
been here 10 days. You are very strong.”
When one of the boys asked if they could
leave the cave, the rescuers replied that they couldn’t yet but that many people
were coming for them.
“Navy SEAL will come tomorrow, with food and
doctors and everything,” the rescuer said.
The British divers described their three-hour
round-trip into the cave as challenging because of the murkiness of the water.
The rescuers had to fight a current as they pulled themselves through narrow,
flooded passages by gripping the walls.
Members of the British cave-diving community
say that Stanton and Volanthen have been involved in a number of high-profile
rescues. Thai authorities called on them to help.
“I said from the outset, if anybody is going
to find these kids, it will be these two divers, who are arguably the best in
the world,” Andy Eavies, a spokesman for the British Caving Association, told
The Washington Post. “Compared to what Rick and John are normally doing, this
is extremely easy diving, the only complication was the flow of the water,” he
said, referring to the current.
Volanthen, a computer engineer, told the
Sunday Times in 2013 that the secret to cave diving was keeping a cool head.
“Panic and adrenaline are great in certain situations — but not in cave
diving,” he said. “The last thing you want is any adrenaline whatsoever.”
A limestone cave complex is like a giant
sponge, said Amy Frappier, a professor of geosciences at Skidmore College who
has done extensive research in caves. She said that when the water table is
low, you can walk throughout the complex, but then the air holes fill up as the
water table rises after heavy rains.
That appears to be what happened here: The
boys and their coach walked into the cave, and then the rain came. They could
not go back the way they had come because they would have had to swim through
flooded passages.
Options for extracting the soccer team
include drilling from the surface to create another exit. But experts have
warned that this could take a long time.
“Caves are these complicated three-dimensional
environments, so you don’t necessarily know from the surface where you can
drill a hole to get to a passage,” Frappier said.
The boys and the coach are no longer alone.
They’ve been visited by a doctor and a nurse who accompanied five other divers,
and they’ve been given high-
protein liquid food, Thai navy SEAL commander
Rear Adm. Arpakorn Yookongkaew said, according to the Associated Press. The
boys are being entertained, and a phone line is being installed to permit them
to speak with their families, the BBC reported.
The fastest way to get them out would be to
have them use diving gear. That’s obviously risky. Yookongkaew said authorities
“have to be certain that it will work and have to have a drill” to make sure
“it’s 100 percent safe,” the AP reported.
Khaosod English, a Bangkok-based news
organization, reported that officials are calling for donations of small diving
masks that would fit the boys, as regular diving equipment could be too
dangerous.
Officials say they have performed an informal
medical evaluation and determined that most of the boys are in stable
condition. No one has any critical injuries, said Chiang Rai’s governor.
The boys and their coach did not know what
day it was when the divers found them.
“After that many days, their normal circadian
rhythm would start to break down,” said Frappier, the scientist. “It will seem
very bright when they come out into the sunshine. They may try to bring them
out at night.”
Adam reported from London and Achenbach from
Washington. Angela Fritz in Washington contributed to this report.
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