Eventually they develop a straightforward plan:
swim each boy out of the cave accompanied by a dedicated diver.
One of the biggest challenges will be preventing each child from succumbing
to deadly fear while traversing vast stretches of black water.
One of the things that the operation was afraid of was panic.
Inside any kind of overhead environment such as a cave, panic usually leads to instant death.
He's going to breathe his gas faster, he might take equipment off that he shouldn't do,
and we cannot bring the panicky diver up to the surface. First they have to reduce the fear of
drowning and ensure a reliable air supply. It was decided that we had to find full face masks. So,
having a full face mask allows the kids to breathe both with their mouth and with their nose.
The kids then were using a full face mask, and they were positioned in such a way that
the head was facing down. So, that also allows the UK diver that was bringing the kid out to
kind of protect the kid. Whenever there was an obstruction, such a rock or something,
the diver would hit the rock instead of the kid hitting the rocks.
But even that may not be enough to protect the boys and keep them calm. So they decide
to add one more precaution. Each boy will be sedated for most of his perilous journey.
Inside the cave Dr. Pak is joined by Dr. Richard Harris, an Australian anesthesiologist and cave
diver. His task will be to administer the precise dosage- enough to relax the boy,
but not so much that breathing becomes compromised. Finally, all is ready.
Early morning, Sunday, July 8th, the first major rescue mission is primed to begin.
There are now five flooded areas of the cave,
with shallow canals and relatively dry areas in between.
Dozens of divers air tanks have been positioned along the route.
U.S Airmen assist building rope rescue systems in key chambers.
And thirteen ambulances- one for each child and their coach- wait outside. Everybody- especially
the boy's anxious parents- are desperately hoping there will be survivors in need of them.
You don't know how things are going to go because this has never been done before.
You can have a pretty good plan but something this complex with these many moving parts, it's...
it's never going to go exactly as planned. Now, it's up to Dr. Pak to prepare the boys.
I explained every single detail so that they could understand,
and also it was a good way to assess their mental state, whether they were ready to do this or not.
And everyone was okay with it. Everyone was ready to leave the cave- whichever way.
The Thai government has not commented, but the boys are believed to have been
administered with a mild cocktail of the sedatives valium and ketamine to calm
them and create a state called dissociative anesthesia. Meaning, the boys will be able to
breathe by themselves but won't be conscious enough to panic or do anything dangerous.
The rescue begins at the boys location, dubbed Chamber Nine.
All along the route, different rescue teams are stationed, nervously poised for the big moment.
The divers from the British Cave Rescue Council
take turns swimming the boys through the flooded areas.
They dive alone, about 30 minutes apart, for stretches as long as
15 minutes or nearly 1200 feet and through areas as narrow as 2 feet.
When the British divers reach a dry section, other divers take over and carry the boys out
of the water to the next dive location. In the flooded depths of the cave,
the so-called “Euro” divers, Ivan and Erik are sent to man Chamber 6.
The Euro team’s role, at that point, was to go into the area called Chamber 6, which is roughly
halfway into the cave. When the rescue diver, the U.K. diver and the kid came to our position,
we assisted them with changing their tanks and also making sure that the kid was still
in good condition. One of the things we had to do, the kids were using something called
a full-face mask, and we needed to make sure that this mask did not leak at all.
Obviously, if any kind of water was to come into the kid’s mask, that could have meant drowning.
But before Ivan can even reach his post, he runs into trouble.
About one minute into the dive, maybe even less,
my helmet somehow gets trapped in the ceiling above me and the too-short strap is strangling me.
And I know that letting go of this rope is not a good idea, because I will lose my
orientation totally. But I also know that not breathing is a really bad idea, and
I chose to let go of the rope, so I can use both my hands to undo the strap.
I get the helmet off, get it free from the entrapment in the ceiling,
then I go to the position where I think the rope is, and it’s not there.
I find the rope again after 45 seconds, a minute or something like that, it felt like a lot longer.
Ivan
makes a narrow escape. Now, he and Erik wait in their chamber
for the first diver and the first boy to surface.
You’re sitting in the darkest place in the world. And
when you’re in there for longer periods of time, your mind starts playing
tricks on you. There’s a couple times that me and Ivan sort of popped up thinking that,
you know, we saw light down there, and give a yell, don’t get anything back.
Now, I can see the light from the diver and can see the silhouette of the U.K. diver,
and I can see that he’s holding onto something, dragging something through the water.
When I get to about five, six, seven meters, I can see that from whatever it is that he’s carrying in
the water, I can see bubbles coming up to the surface, which obviously indicates that the kid
is still breathing. And that was probably my best experience on this entire mission.
When the divers and boys escape the flooded part of the cave,
they are met in Chamber 3 by U.S. Air Force rescuers.
The scariest part about this is I had no idea the condition of any of the boys or
the coach. There was a good chance that any one of them could have come up and been dead.
I would turn the child so that they were face up towards me,
and I would listen to make sure that they weren’t working too hard to breathe.
It’s still nearly half a mile from Chamber 3 to the mouth of the cave
where the ambulances are waiting. In one section,
rescuers use a high-line to haul the boy’s Skedco®, a special stretcher, up a steep slope.
Once they hooked up the child to the Skedco, and we started bringing him across with the
safety line, there’s two spots where there were these rocks in the way,
where we had one guy just help assist and pull him over very carefully, right,
because it’s super slippery, it’s dark, you know, everyone just has their headlamps.
I kind of felt like the entire thing was "mission impossible"
The Sked stretcher was passed off to the Navy SEALs who had
an army of people in there to do a human chain to pass the sled all the way down.
The rescued boys are rushed, one by one, to the hospital, by ambulance or helicopter.
Their parents begin to get word,
but aren’t told which children have been rescued or who’s still in the cave.
(Translated from Thai) Every time the children were brought out, we hoped it would be our child.
All the time they were coming out, we were hoping.
By the end of Day 18, Tuesday, July 10th, all 12 boys and their coach are free,
and all are healthy. Against all odds, the 18-day ordeal that had people around
the world fearing the worst, has ended in a miracle, thanks to an audacious rescue.
All 12 boys, every child from that soccer team has been rescued.
It’s an unprecedented triumph
but as the world celebrates, inside the cave, there are still dozens of rescue workers.
And nearly a mile and a half into the mountain,
Dr. Pak and three Navy SEALs still need to escape from the boys’ location. They begin
their exodus and not a moment too soon.
Crucial pumps, diverting the water, give out, and levels begin to rise.
(Translated from Thai) I thought it would be easy to dive out because they were pumping the water
away, but seven out of the nine pumps weren’t working, so there was a lot of water flooding in.
By deciding to leave equipment behind, the rescuers make it out in the nick of time.
We finally get out of the cave, and that’s when you could finally be excited. I mean you’re
completely exhausted, but it was exciting. There was rows of people cheering, high fives, flashes.
They bought a little bit of K.F.C. in for us. I think there was a little bottle of Jack
Daniel’s® that sort of got passed around, and everyone had a little celebratory sip.
I mean, it was just lots of hugs.
The thousands of volunteers from Thailand and around the world pulled off a miraculous
rescue entirely against the odds, a marvel of bravery and human endeavor.
Just on a personal level, I’ve got four kids.
To see 12 of these kids and then the coach get rescued was incredibly satisfying.
(Translated from Thai) I felt so
proud to be a part of it, one of 10,000 people who made this mission successful.
(Translated from Thai)
It makes me happy to see that there are great moments like this in the world.
Being part of changing the impossible to the possible, that feels great. It feels great.
Knowing that you might see a dead child come up out of the cave was really challenging, and,
yeah, seeing 13 boys come out? Whoa! And the four SEALs? That was, that was pretty amazing.
This incredible story of human endurance riveted the world’s attention.
We are coming. Many people are coming.
It was a testimony to the resolve of the people of Thailand and showed us all what
can be achieved by combining sacrifice, bravery and teamwork with innovation and technology.
But much more than that, the amazing Thailand cave rescue gave 12 boys and their coach a future
that many feared was lost.