Elon Musk offers to help Thai authorities rescue soccer team

Elon Musk has offered to help Thai authorities rescue the soccer team stuck deep inside a cave using his water pump and battery technology.

Elon Musk has offered to help Thai authorities rescue the stricken soccer team stuck deep inside a cave.

Representatives for the billionaire entrepreneur are in talks about how they can aid the rescue effort, a Musk spokesman said.

“I suspect that the Thai govt has this under control, but am happy to help if there is a way to do so,” he wrote on Twitter yesterday.

I suspect that the Thai govt has this under control, but I’m happy to help if there is a way to do so

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 4, 2018

Mr Musk’s companies are able to offer its Boring Company technology to pump water or provide heavy-duty battery packs known as Tesla Powerwalls, the spokesman said.

Mr Musk said Boring Co has “advanced ground penetrating radar & is pretty good at digging holes’’ and that Tesla’s commercial Powerpack batteries or water pumps could help remove water from the flooded cave.

Boring Co has advanced ground penetrating radar & is pretty good at digging holes. Don’t know if pump rate is limited by electric power or pumps are too smal. If so, could dropship fully charged Powerpacks and pumps.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2018

It is not known unclear whether Thai officials have accepted the offer.

Last year, in the wake of a destructive hurricane in Puerto Rico, Mr Musk’s companies sent Powerwalls and offered advice on rebuilding infrastructure after the government asked Tesla for help.

With more rain forecast, Thai rescuers are racing to pump out water from the flooded cave before they can extract 12 boys and their soccer coach with minimum risk.

A firefighter who has been working on draining the water said parts of a passage leading to the chamber where the group was found was still flooded to its ceiling, making diving the only way out.

The boys, aged 11-16, and their 25-year-old coach went exploring in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in the northern province after a soccer game on June 23. Monsoon flooding cut off their escape and prevented rescuers from finding them for 10 days.

At least three of the group trapped in the cave are still too weak to attempt the dangerous dive out, a medical assessment of the young Thai footballers has concluded. If the rescue begins later today, two or three of the 12 children, and the coach, are likely to be left behind because they need more time to ­recover, The Australian has been told.

Authorities have said the soccer players are being looked after by Thai navy SEALs, including medics, staying with them inside the cave.

The boys smile as a Thai Navy SEAL medic tends to them inside the cave in Mae Sai, northern Thailand. Picture: Royal Thai Navy Facebook Page via AP.

Officials prefer to get the boys out as soon as possible because heavy rain expected over the weekend will almost surely raise water levels again in the cave, making passage in some areas even more difficult, if not impossible. They are hoping that an upgraded draining effort can lower the water in an area where it is still at or near the ceiling. The idea is to get some headroom so the boys would not be reliant on scuba apparatus for a long stretch and could keep their heads above water.

UK experts join rescue

Extra divers and support crew from the specialist British cave rescue organisation that was successful in finding the soccer team have been sent to assist the recovery operation.

Five specialist volunteers from the British Cave Rescue Council flew to Thailand on Thursday.

BCRC chairman Peter Dennis told The Australian there were two divers among the extra crew who will share duties with their exhausted colleagues, Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, who found the boys on Monday night.

“Cave diving is a pretty rigorous and demanding occupation and we’ve been worried about Rick and John, so having fresh divers is important,” Mr Dennis said.

“The dive periods are too long to do day on day.

“It takes a physiological toll on the body and you’re meant to rest up for considerable hours between each dive and that has been pushed to the limit here.

“But those boys are in desperate need of help and you do take things further when you’re wanting to save lives.”

Three other team members will assist in a support capacity so that their colleagues can concentrate on diving.

“They are going so that when the divers have a bit of downtime they can actually rest instead of having to do gear checks and housekeeping things as well as communicating with the Thai authorities,” Mr Dennis said.

“The two who have been there all this time have just been doing everything and as we are approaching a crescendo, we’re waiting for some sort of decision whether they are going to go in and get the boys out, we felt we needed to get the extra colleagues over there for the divers to depend upon.”

They are carrying with them specialist equipment, including a hi-tech communications system that uses low frequency to allow the divers to send text messages to the surface through the dense rock.

Receiving towers with tens of metres of cables will be set up in dry parts of the extensive cave system, which flooded, trapping the boys inside, and on the surface to transmit the signal.

The Swiss technology will supplement special phones, lent by Derbyshire police, that were taken over in the first trip by Mr Stanton and Mr Volanthen after a hurried journey from a police station in Derbyshire to meet their plane in London.

“It’s quite a technological challenge to talk to someone who is so far underground,” Mr Dennis said.

“But communication is vital.”

Thai authorities have been working to redirect and dam aboveground water courses that are running into the cave through cracks and fissures.

The BCRC team are well versed in the practice, which is routing in rescue operations in caves in Wales, where flash flooding can exacerbate dangerous situations.

“They are finding some of these sinks and inlets from the north side and are attempting to reduce the waterflow into the system by diverting away from any of those fissures,” Mr Dennis said.

“It reduces the height of the flood pulse that can run through and prevents water from running over dry rescue sites.”

BCRC is made up of 15 cave rescue teams, some of which have been around for more than 70 years.