Rescuers say they are elated to have found survivors who have been trapped in a flooded cave in Laos for a week but caution that it will be difficult to extract them.
Five people were found alive on Wednesday afternoon and rescuers are searching for two others who remain missing.
The group of seven, who entered the cave in search of gold, were stranded after torrential rain flooded the cave and blocked the entrance with gravel and dirt. Rescuers said around 4.30pm local time that they had reached five of them who were trapped about 300 metres from the cave’s entrance.
The miners were found huddled together in a small, muddy chamber of the cave, according to video filmed by two rescue divers, Mikko Paasi and Norrased Palasing.
Sobs could be heard in the background of one video, shared by Kengkard Bongkawong, the president of Metta Tham Rescue, a Thai organisation invited by the Lao government to join the rescue effort.
In the videos, the five survivors told rescuers that they were famished, but not injured or ill. Two of them appeared to have working headlamps.
Paasi, a Thailand-based Finnish cave diver, called it a “brief relief” to find the survivors healthy and in good spirits. “But the extraction is still ahead and it ain’t going to be easy,” he said in a social media post.
He and another diver, he wrote, would need to bring the miners supplies to help them gain strength and prepare for the journey out.
The two divers, and Metta Tham Rescue, were also involved in the successful 2018 rescue of members of the Wild Boars youth football team who were trapped in a cave in Chiang Rai in northern Thailand for 18 days after it flooded.
This rescue effort, as with many like it, has been complicated by dangerous conditions including flooded passages, potentially contaminated air and narrow tunnels.
Paasi said in an interview late Tuesday that he had never seen such narrow tunnels in his 30 years of diving in mines. The tunnels in the cave were long, he said, with only a few chambers large enough to stand up in.
“But other than that, it’s just sliding or wiggling yourself through,” he said. “It makes it very hard or difficult and dangerous because you can’t turn around.” The claustrophobic environment, he added, created extra anxiety.
In the interview, before the men were found, Paasi said that any rescue would involve pumping water out of the cave. “We can’t dive them out, it’s too small, too tight, too risky,” he said.
The cave is part of an extensive underground network in Xaysomboun, a mountainous province about 120km northeast of Vientiane. Tourists flock to caves in Laos for trekking, while local villagers often go to sift for gold.
Local authorities had warned people to not enter the cave, Buonkham Luanglath, the head of Laos Rescue Volunteer for People, a group of civilian rescuers told The Associated Press on Monday.
- This article originally appeared in The New York Times
