Australian Diver Among Team Rushing to Rescue People Trapped in Flooded Laos Cave

An Australian cave diver is part of an international team that has brought one man out alive from a remote flooded cave in Laos, with the rescue operation continuing for six more men still trapped underground. One man was brought alive from the labyrinthine cave complex late on Friday. Four remain stranded on a rocky ledge about 300m from the cave entrance, while two men are still unaccounted for. The men who have been found in the cave are weak with hunger, and some have injuries. A group of eight prospectors entered the cave in Xaysomboun province, central Laos, to search for gold more than a week ago, but sudden heavy rain blocked the cave entrance. One man managed to escape, and alerted authorities to the seven men who remained trapped. Five of them were found alive this week, but they had lost contact with two others also in the cave system. The rescuers, some of whom were involved in the rescue of a young Thai football team in 2018, still need to extract the survivors from the inundated passageways. “The first one is out. Safe and sound!!!” Manat Artmongkron, a rescue technician for Saithan Saphanboon Foundation, a Thai rescue group, wrote in a Facebook post, when the first man was brought from the cave on Friday. Video posted on social media showed a man covered in mud clambering out of the cave to safety. He was met with some cheers and wrapped in an emergency blanket. Kengkard Bongkawong, the head of operations for Metta Tham Rescue, a Thai group, said on social media that searching for the two missing men would be even more challenging, requiring teams to dive through a 30m narrow tunnel, checking along the way for any intersections. “The next mission will be harder,” he wrote. Extracting the survivors will also be challenging, due to low oxygen supplies, more rain and a lack of dive experience among the people who are trapped. Divers with a specialised skill set to handle the extremely narrow conditions in the cave were flown in from around the world on Friday. They will be taken by a military helicopter to the remote and hostile jungle terrain where the men are stuck. Australian cave diver Josh Richards, who leads a cave exploration team in Australia called the Soggy Wombats, named after a marsupial known for its burrowing, flew in on Friday to help with the rescue operation. “It’s pretty awful, by the looks of things,” Richards said. “We’re predominantly dealing with clay and mud walls, which are particularly unstable and unpleasant. That mud and clay also [affects] the water; you’re essentially diving in coffee. You’re not going to be seeing anything through it. “It’s all being done by touch and feel, following the lines that have been laid through the mine.” Richards said he was not a “physically large guy”. He said his fellow international divers, who had been asked to support the rescue team, were “all fairly small, we’re all fairly light, and we’ve all spent a fair bit of time underground, squeezing into small places”. “I’m very comfortable underwater with a regulator in my mouth, twisting and turning and doing all those bits and pieces, contorting myself around in order to get into particularly nasty places,” he said. “And unfortunately, this mine sounds like it’s one of them.” Other diving specialists are reportedly arriving from Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and France. A diver from Malaysia joined the mission on Thursday. Richards said the rescue plan was now being developed among the divers, “that will be as safe as possible for everyone involved. There’s a lot of different ideas being thrown around.” As sections of the tunnel between the miners and the surface are completely flooded, the team on the ground was also trying to pump out as much water as possible in a two-pronged approach, Richards said. “If they’re not able to pump all that water out, and there are sections that are completely flooded, that’s … why we need to be there to potentially get these folks through short sections, where they’ll be using scuba equipment,” he said, “and they almost certainly have never used scuba equipment before in their lives.” For people who are familiar with the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand, Richards said there were similarities but also “glaring differences”. The Laos cave is a “considerably” smaller site in terms of length and the physical size of the tunnel itself. The Tham Luang cave is kilometres long, with numerous air chambers where rescuers could set up base stations. Thai rescuers could pump out huge amounts of water, but were also dealing with much more water. “This site is about 350m long. It is much, much smaller, but at the same time, the actual tunnels that we’re trying to squeeze down into are considerably smaller again,” Richards said. “So, there’s similarities in that you’ve got a group of folks who are not trained cave divers but are stuck in a cave, and flooding is a concern, but it is a radically different environment that we’re dealing with, and also not dealing with kids is another factor.” Heavy machinery is being used to clear a route to the cave site, so that equipment can be transported more easily. Additional reporting by Ben Doherty and Rebecca Ratcliffe