A British diver smelled the missing Thai football team before he saw them
In 2018 twelve boys and their coach spent more than a week trapped on a rock shelf deep inside a flooded Thai cave. Two British divers finally reached them after running out of guideline. Getting them out meant sedating each boy and carrying him through black, narrow water.
On 23 June 2018, twelve members of the Wild Boars junior football team, aged 11 to 16, entered Tham Luang Nang Non in Chiang Rai province with their 25-year-old assistant coach, Ekkaphon Kanthawong. The karst cave runs for 10 kilometres beneath a mountain range on the Myanmar border, and a sign at the entrance warns against going in during the rainy season. Heavy rain began soon after they entered. That evening the head coach found about 20 missed calls from parents and later discovered bicycles and bags abandoned at the mouth of the cave.
Local British caver Vernon Unsworth urged the Thai government to call in the British Cave Rescue Council. Thai Navy SEALs, American, Australian and Chinese teams all joined the search. On 2 July Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, laying guidelines through strong currents, found the whole group alive about 2 kilometres from the entrance. The boys had spent their days scraping at the rock with stone fragments and dug a hole five metres deep.
Reaching them took experienced divers six hours against the current, through sections with no visibility and a squeeze measuring just 38 by 72 centimetres. Organisers weighed teaching the boys to dive, drilling a new entrance, or waiting months for the monsoon to end. They chose to fit each boy with an oxygen mask, sedate him and have divers bring him out. With more rain forecast for 11 July, all thirteen were brought out between 8 and 10 July.
Roughly 10,000 people took part, and more than a billion litres of water were pumped out. Former Navy SEAL Saman Kunan died on 6 July after delivering air cylinders, and SEAL diver Beirut Pakbara died in December 2019 from an infection caught during the operation. The coach and three stateless boys were granted Thai citizenship on 26 September 2018.
Source: Tham Luang cave rescue
