Thai cave rescue: Why soccer team’s survival shocked even their saviours
Sedated and passed along an incredible human daisy chain, not even their rescuers expected all 12 trapped Thai boys to live.
Claus Rasmussen was all hope and no expectations as he stood in pitch darkness almost 1km underground, waiting for the first boy to be pulled through the narrow cave passage in front of him and wondering if he would emerge alive.
Hours into last Sunday’s maiden rescue attempt of 12 young Thai soccer players and their coach from the flooded Tham Luang cave complex in northern Thailand, the 45-year-old Danish cave diving instructor doubted all of the 13 could survive the terrifying gamble they were about to take.
“We didn’t know until we got all the way out of the cave that night how (the rescue) had gone, but seeing the first child come through the first passage that night — seeing that they were still well and breathing — was surprising,” Rasmussen, one of 18 international and Thai divers who helped ferry the boys the first 1.7km out of the cave, tells Inquirer.
Even with an army of almost 10,000 military and civilian rescuers working day and night towards one common goal, it was going to take a miracle to pull this off.
The extraordinary rescue of the young Wild Boars soccer team and its 25-year-old coach — from the town of Mae Sai on the Thailand-Myanmar border — more than a fortnight after they were trapped by flash floods during a post-training Saturday excursion is the stuff of Hollywood movies.
Indeed, one is already in the works.
But in the moments before he pulled the first child out of the water and on to the sandy spit known as Pattaya Beach, 400m from where the team had been sheltering since June 23, dark fears circled that he might have to carry through the cave the bodies of children the same age as his own.
“There were some thoughts going on — for all of us, I’m sure. We had hopes and we made prayers and all that kind of thing but there are no guarantees,” Rasmussen admitted this week, as the world celebrated what has been described as “one of the most inspiring rescue missions of our time”.
“You have to remember that diving into caves, even the best of divers can get into trouble and it’s a dangerous environment. To take a small child (the lightest almost 31kg) through there just increases the chances of something going wrong. It’s a very, very dangerous environment to be in, and even more so as an untrained diver. Even for trained and experienced divers it wasn’t a nice place to be.”
Every one of the divers involved in the treacherous rescue mission had a role to play.
In the case of Richard Harris, an Adelaide anaesthetist and world-renowned cave diver whose contribution to the rescue effort has been described as “essential”, it was to dive all the way to where the boys were sheltering on a muddy rise above the water line ahead of all three rescue missions and clear each one for the treacherous 3.2km journey to the cave entrance.
He would also administer a sedative mild enough to keep the boys conscious for the passage out, but strong enough to ease the sort of anxiety that might endanger their lives as well as those of their rescuers.
The British divers who led the first section of the rescue had specifically requested Harris be brought in to determine whether the boys were fit enough to handle the journey, and to assist in the rescue. The 53-year-old father of two interrupted a holiday to do so. He dived into the cave for the first time last Saturday, within hours of his arrival, and gave the green light that same night.
The 72-hour rescue mission, in which the boys and their coach were extracted in two groups of four and one of five, would begin the following morning.
That weekend the rescue teams had ferried short notes of longing and hope from the boys to their parents. They replied with letters aimed at fortifying their children for the unavoidable ordeal ahead, but through which their anguish and fear can be clearly heard.
“I am waiting for you in front of the cave,” one mother wrote to her son. “I love you. I miss you very much. I want to hug you and I want you to not give up. I am waiting for you. I want you to believe that you can do it. I love you more than anything else.”
The pressure on Harris must have been intense but Rasmussen says there was never any question of compromising the rescuers’ safety. “We were ready every single day to cancel the rest of the rescue because the weather situation was getting worse.”
Rasmussen’s role was to load each boy on to a stretcher, cover him in an insulation blanket and ferry him 800m across a section of cave known as Pattaya Beach, where British divers had initially expected to find the missing boys before eventually locating them on a muddy slope further into the cave, nine days after they went missing.
“It felt like a bloody long distance, I can tell you. Diving was no problem but walking around carrying heavy equipment was pretty much killing all of us.”
From there, each boy — wearing a full-face oxygen mask and wetsuit — would either be strapped to one of two divers or tethered between them for the next underwater section of the rescue, which included a nightmarish passage known as the T-junction.
One by one they would have to negotiate the 10m-long, U-shaped crevice, little more than the height of a school ruler, to reach the Thai navy SEALs command post on the other side in the third chamber, still about 1500m from the cave mouth.
At intervals along their 3.2km route the boys’ vital signs would be monitored and air cylinders checked. They would pass through more than 100 pairs of hands before they reached safety.
Thai navy SEALs commander Rear Admiral Arpakorn Yuukongkaew revealed this week that the order in which the boys were rescued was determined by the team. The weakest did not go out first, as some had erroneously claimed.
It took Rasmussen’s team 25 minutes to ferry each boy across his section of cave. Every time he watched one go, he wondered if he would make it out alive.
The father of three admits he was “shocked” when he emerged from the cave late on Sunday night to discover the first four boys had made it.
“We were very surprised when the kids got out and were as healthy as they are now. Hearing that all of them made it out was kind of amazing. It was almost a shock to us,” he says.
“We were dragging used tanks outside. It was almost an hour after the last kid was out before we got to the staging area. There was screaming and yelling and jumping up and down when we heard the news.”
On the other side of the T-junction, seven Australian divers had their own roles to play along a 1500m-long “daisy chain” of 124 rescuers.
Between them, the six Australian Federal Police specialists and one navy diver collectively ferried 20 tonnes of essential equipment up to 1.5km into the cave — industrial-sized pumps, hundreds of air cylinders, radio gear, food and water supplies.
Inquirer has since learned Australians played a key role in devising not only the logistics plan to get equipment into the cave, but also in the extraction plan for the boys from chamber three to the cave mouth.
The 1.5km passage presented massive logistical and technical obstacles that are only now being fully understood.
With the focus firmly on the perils involved in asking the children — still weak from nine days without food — first to learn how to scuba dive and then do so through dark, narrow, flooded cave chambers, there was less understanding outside the rescue effort of just how difficult the second extraction phase would be.
Footage since released of the terrain inside that first 1500m section reveals an intimidating environment of slippery rocky slopes and tunnels, steep canyons and tiny holes dropping to dark gullies below.
This week AFP divers described the initial gruelling trek into the third chamber from the cave entrance before water levels dropped. It included diving through deep submerged sumps “shaped like the S-bend in a toilet”, climbing up and down slippery rock canyons and walking 300m stretches through unstable tunnels before diving back into zero-visibility water, all while carrying 46kg of dive gear on their backs.
To negotiate the terrain, cables had to be laid, lighting systems worked out and a maze of guide ropes and pulley systems devised.
Video on the Thai navy SEALs Facebook page shows how the boys, covered with thermal blankets, were almost entirely cocooned in stretchers and at times passed hand to hand from one rescuer to another, at others fastened to zip lines and winched across deep canyons.
An AFP spokesman tells Inquirer the extraction plan covering the second half of the journey out of the cave was a collaborative effort, in particular with the Chinese and Americans.
In fact the entire operation has been hailed worldwide this week as a rare and shining example of what can be achieved through international co-operation.
“It’s amazing what the human being can do,” AFP commander Glen McEwen marvelled this week, describing the rescue effort as a case of “extraordinary people doing extraordinary things”.
“And when you have a common purpose, particularly when there’s a human element, egos are put aside and it is hands to the wheel. You just get on with it. And I have to say everyone did that and it was an absolute pleasure to watch that in motion.”
A source based in the US-led command centre, who has asked not to be named, says the Australians were a big part of the rescue. “They worked out, down to the inch, how they were going to get the kids out. They were always in the international planning meetings.”
Each team had rehearsed its role ahead of the first rescue effort, the first dive team in a swimming pool with local children the same height and weight as the Wild Boars soccer players trapped in the cave.
The Australians’ section too had been tested, but there were nonetheless anxieties as they waited in the daisy chain for the first child to come out — single file between two divers — through the T-Junction.
Just three nights earlier, Saman Gunan, a retired Thai navy SEAL, had died as he was diving towards chamber three through that very passage. Authorities said he had run out of air on his way back from laying air tanks at stations for other divers.
Like thousands of other volunteers involved in this extraordinary rescue mission, Saman had a day job. On the day before he died he had flown back to work his allotted shift as a security guard at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport before racing back to Mae Sai to join the cave divers that night.
“Saman hadn’t slept well, he hadn’t had enough rest,” Thai navy SEAL Lieutenant Kai tells Inquirer.
Kai, who was involved from the first days, admits he too was so sleep-deprived during the search that he was hallucinating inside the cave.
Saman’s dive buddy saw him hit his head on a sharp rock as they were negotiating the T-junction and he had lost his mouthpiece, Kai says.
“At that point it is so narrow, it is like a pipe. (His buddy) dragged him through to a sandy plateau on the other side and spent 30 minutes trying to resuscitate him.”
Saman was finally dragged to chamber three where other SEALs and a medic administered emergency aid, but it was too late.
A ripple of shock spread through the rescue team when his body was brought out of the cave.
“Almost everyone cried when we heard the news,” Kai says. “He was my close friend and my senior but the work had to go on. All of my team was in shock but they never stopped working.”
While Saman’s death cast a pall over the rescue effort, it never seriously threatened to derail it.
“There was just no alternative,” the command centre source says. “They had to come out. The monsoon was coming. There was only one small window, and if we missed it we would have to redo the plan.”
Saman’s death did reinforce how dangerous the mission was, if anyone needed reminding.
With all 12 Wild Boars and their coach now at Chiang Rai hospital and recovering remarkably quickly from their ordeal — thinner but in good spirits — operational details have begun to emerge.
Videos released by Thai officials this week showed family members, some weeping, others smiling and waving at their sons through the window of a makeshift hospital isolation ward. All 13 have now seen their parents, and relatives of the first eight have been allowed into the ward in surgical masks and gowns.
Just two days after the alarm was raised over the missing boys, a rescue unit of Thai navy SEALs got as far as the raised platform of dry ground known as Pattaya Beach, where they found footprints and shoes, before low air tanks and rapidly rising waters forced them back.
“The cave was unlike anything we had ever experienced, it was so dark,” Arpakorn said late Wednesday, revealing also that the SEALs lost contact with two of their teams inside the 10km cave complex in the first week of the search.
“We had to dive, we had to walk, we had to climb through stone and rock, but we had to keep fighting,” he said. “If we didn’t keep moving forward there would not be any hope for the children.”
The SEALs, though highly trained, are not cave divers and had to be quickly taught the basics by locally based instructors.
Meanwhile, foreign cave-diving specialists began converging on Mae Sai after Vern Unsworth, an experienced British caver who has explored the Tham Luang cave complex extensively, suggested the Thai government call for reinforcements.
More than 100 specialist divers answered the call from Thailand, Australia, Britain, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Israel, Finland, US and Sweden, but their efforts too were frustrated by heavy rains. Floodwaters rushing into narrow passages made them impassable for almost a week.
Belgian diver Ben Reymenants, a cave diving instructor who works with Rasmussen on the southern island of Phuket, says the current in the cave was so strong that at one point it ripped the mask from his face.
In the end it was two British cave divers, John Volanthen and Richard Stanton, who found the group on July 2 using a mud map Kai says he drafted following lengthy discussions with Unsworth and locals who knew the cave.
“I kept asking villagers where the highest point was in the cave, and then I drew it out,” he says.
“I thought the kids must be there because the water would not be able to reach them. I figured the boys would be clever enough to think of going to the highest point.”
News that all 13 had miraculously been found alive, nine days after they had become trapped, reverberated around the world as millions watched the first grainy footage of the anxious but smiling boys huddled together in weak torchlight.
“It was like Christmas” when they were found, the command centre worker says. “People were hugging each other, even the volunteers outside.”
An army of volunteers had gathered by then at the makeshift rescue camp erected a few dozen metres from the cave entrance. They cooked food, cleaned toilets and ferried media and rescue workers up and down the hill as the stricken families of the boys kept vigil near the cave.
Among them was Patana Navita, a local pig farmer who rushed with her mother and sister to the Tham Luang cave site the day the boys became trapped, carrying a gas bottle, wok and enough supplies from their own kitchen to make meals for anyone who could stomach them.
The three women were still there two weeks later, cooking thousands of breakfasts, lunches and dinners a day for the workers and volunteers at the rescue camp, which now included hundreds of local and foreign media — though by this time the food was supplied by the Thai royal kitchen.
“I don’t know any of the families but I felt sorry for the boys and I could see on day one that the relatives had nothing to eat,” Patana told Inquirer last week before the rescue began. “We were so happy when they found them and believe the boys will come out soon.”
But finding the boys was only the beginning.
Now the Wild Boars and their coach had to be brought above ground and the obvious way out was the least palatable.
Inquirer has been told the discussion over the pros and cons of leaving the boys in there was brief.
Rescuers dismissed it quickly because of the unknowns, even as media continued to report the possibility that the 12 boys aged 11 to 16 and their 25-year-old coach could be forced to wait out the four to five-month Thai monsoon underground.
Instead the operation seriously pursued three options concurrently.
Infantry forces and volunteers searched the mountain above the cave for “chimney” holes that might provide an alternative exit route for the boys, spurred on by the young footballers’ accounts of hearing roosters crowing and dogs barking from underground. More than 100 holes were drilled — one of them 400m down towards the cave — but without the exact co-ordinates for the boys’ location it was needles and haystacks.
Massive pumps were deployed to drain water from the cave in the slim hope the boys might be able to walk out, just as they had innocently ventured in on June 23 at the end of a regular Saturday soccer game.
But with monsoon rains expected to hit within days, it was always against a “race against water and time”.
During the 17 days the boys were trapped, a billion litres of water was drained from the cave into surrounding paddy fields. The Thai government has promised to compensate farmers for damage, but some have since refused to take the money, arguing the sacrifice was worth it.
Meanwhile, deep inside the cave the boys and their coach were learning how to scuba dive.
But on Wednesday, July 6, a new and urgent problem emerged when rescue command chief Narongsak Osaththanakorn, the outgoing Chiang Rai governor, revealed oxygen levels inside the boys’ chamber had dropped from a normal 21 per cent to 15 per cent.
“We can no longer wait for all conditions (to be ready) because the circumstance is pressuring us,” Arpakorn said that night.
“At first we thought that we could sustain the kids’ lives for a long time where they are now, but now many things have changed. We have a limited amount of time.”
This week, with the boys out of the cave, Narongsak spelled out the depth of concern over the diminishing oxygen levels and admitted it had forced rescuers to move faster.
“We were worried that if it dropped to 12 per cent the kids could be shocked into comas,” he said.
“Another factor was that water was coming. The rain in the north is massive, unlike other regions. The kids wouldn’t have any place to stay. They had only space of 5m x 5m. It would be gradually reduced.”
At the command centre, where US military officers were in charge of relaying each decision to high-ranking Thai generals from the Interior Ministry, “everyone agreed (the dive option) was the only way”.
“But the PM was ultimately making the decisions. We were just waiting for a ‘Go’.”
A day later Saman died, and it seemed officials were recoiling from the risks. As the skies darkened and hundreds of oxygen cylinders were ferried in to the boys, Narongsak announced they were not yet ready to be extracted and that water levels were still too high.
Some 20 industrial pumps were now draining water from the cave round the clock while military and civilian teams scoured the mountain above to find and divert water courses.
Water levels from the cave entrance to the third chamber dropped considerably, but the section beyond the T-junction where the boys were trapped — a basin into which water poured from sinkholes and twisting narrow corridors — was proving more difficult.
It was like trying to block holes in a sieve, though Rasmussen says the pumping did eventually improve conditions.
By the time of the rescue as much as 80 per cent of the 3.2km journey out of the cave had air pockets where the divers could lift their heads — a vast improvement on earlier conditions
One volunteer, Thawatchai Fungkajorn, drove his three giant pumps on the back of trucks 12 hours across the country to join the rescue effort. His biggest pump was named Naga, after the Thai dragon god that lives underwater.
And indeed, for all the human endeavour and ingenuity brought to bear in this monumental mission, it seemed at times that the fate of the boys and their coach rested in the hands of the deities.
On Sunday, July 8, with the cave air thinning and rains looming, the rescue began.
The British-led team of 18 divers headed into the cave at 10am after a night of activity; hundreds of volunteers filled air tanks with 80 per cent oxygen to help the boys’ mental state and placed them at intervals along the route, then checked and rechecked equipment.
As the first 18 divers moved in pairs into positions across the 1.7km stretch from the boys to the T-junction, more than 120 divers on the other side of that choke point formed a daisy chain.
“Oh my God, we were so anxious. You don’t know what’s happening in there. It was a bad feeling,” the command centre worker says, recalling the agonising wait. “We didn’t know how long it was going to take.”
In the makeshift media centre — which had moved that morning from the muddy quagmire of the rescue camp to a new tent city at a district office 2km away — the mood was pensive as hundreds of reporters awaited news of the first rescue. When confirmation came that one boy had been freed, and the excitement built with the three more to follow, it became clear that many here had also feared the worst.
Eleven hours later Harris, the last of the divers, emerged, following the fourth boy above ground to freedom.
The next day, after rescuers pulled four more boys out of the cave, a regional army commander thanked the Hindu rain god Phra Pirun and implored him to “keep showing us mercy”.
“Give us three more days and the Boars will come out to see the world, every one of them,” Major General Bancha Duriyapan told assembled media.
“I beg Phra Pirun because the meteorological department said that from Monday on there will be continuous rain. If I ask too much, he might not provide it. So I’ve been asking for three days.”
Hours later, it seemed the gods had forsaken them when the skies opened over the Pha Mee Mountain atop Tham Luang cave. But the pumps were holding — for now.
The divers went in at 10.08am on Tuesday morning for the final rescue mission, moving with greater confidence towards the last four boys and their coach.
The ninth boy came out just over six hours later, and the final three emerged within two hours of him.
Coach Ekkapol “Ake” Chantawong — a stateless orphan from Myanmar and former Buddhist novice monk, who is credited with keeping the boys alive by instructing them to meditate and drink water from cave walls — was, as he had requested, the last to come out, just before 7pm local time on Tuesday night.
Against all the odds, a team of almost 10,000 had pulled off one of the most dangerous underground rescue missions ever attempted.
“Those who say it cannot be done, shouldn’t interrupt people doing it,” Mikko Paasi, one of the 18 divers, wrote on Facebook within hours of the rescue. “13 kids all out safe and sound!”
But it was the Facebook page of the Royal Thai navy SEALs that everyone was watching for confirmation.
When it came, it was emphatic.
“Hooyah! 12 wild boars and coach out of the cave. Everyone safe,” the post read. “Now, waiting to pick up 4 Frogs.”
Three hours later the four “frogs” — three Thai navy SEALS and one Thai navy medic who had stayed with the boys from the day they were found — emerged to rapturous applause.
Australian divers this week described a hoarse Mexican wave of a cheer that signalled the last man was coming out, long before he could be seen hobbling towards the cave entrance in sunglasses.
Incredibly, just moments later the electricity failed and the pumps stopped, forcing more than 100 rescuers packing up inside the cave to run for their lives as the water rose visibly around them.
“Luckily we got everyone out, but it wasn’t easy to run with so many trying to evacuate at the same time,” Rasmussen recalls.
Arpakorn told media on Wednesday, before hosting a party in Chiang Rai for the rescuers, that the cave was now “full of water again”.
“It’s lucky we completed our mission yesterday,” he said.
Among the Australians, however, celebrations were muted by the news that Harris’s father had passed away in his home town of Adelaide as his son was making his way out of the cave for the final time on Tuesday night.
Narongsak singled out Harris for thanks this week, along with Saman, whom he called “the hero of Tham Luang”.
He also hailed the extraordinary level of co-operation between foreign and Thai militaries, government agencies and volunteers.
In the aftermath of the rescue many have noted the unconventional nature of the mission: essentially a military operation led by foreign civilians.
That would be unusual anywhere in the world but especially so in Thailand, where a military junta has for more than three years deferred democratic elections.
“The whole effort was ‘very un-Thai’,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, tells Inquirer. “This was a military operation led by civilian authorities down on the ground with a leading role for foreign experts. The entire operation was decentralised, meaning local authorities had substantial latitude. The media management was efficient, command structure decentralised, organisation very effective.
“For all the things they can be criticised for, you have to give credit to the military government. On this occasion they handled this effectively by staying on the sidelines. The British divers had the expertise, they took the initiative and got the other divers in.”
Narongsak told reporters this week that he believed the Tham Luang rescue mission had become a “symbol of unity among mankind”.
“Everyone worked together without discrimination of race or religion, as the ultimate goal was to save the young football team.
“These 13 lives were first in the hands of just a few people. Then help poured in, and a mission that many people thought was impossible became possible.”
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