“Whenever cave divers go into a passage for the first time they will use a guideline and use their finger and thumb to make sure they have a route mapped out,” Whitehouse explained. Along with two Australians, the British divers conferred with the Thai SEALs and mapped a route. It wasn’t until the water started to clear a couple of days later that water levels started to drop and visibility improved. ‘Like driving in fog with your headlights on’ It had been more than a week and there still had been no contact with the boys. To be fair, the chances of getting far were not high,” Whitehouse said.
Conditions were really quite bad, the water flow was very strong and the suspended sediment made visibility very low. “At that stage there was no way they could get anywhere near the boys. They were confronted by the enormity of the task.
But the flooding had become far worse at that point. Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP/Getty ImagesĪfter they landed in Bangkok, and had taken the short internal flight north, the trio took an exploratory dive. Three British cave-divers, Rick Stanton, Robert Harper and John Volanthen arrive at Khun Nam Nang Non Forest Park near the Tham Luang cave in Chiang Rai on June 27, 2018. The Thai Embassy in London secured three seats on the next Thai Airways flight to Bangkok John Volanthen and Rick Stanton, an IT consultant and a former firefighter who just happened to be two of the most experienced cave divers in the world, were dispatched to London’s Heathrow Airport along with a cave diving veteran, Robert Harper. With his wife away looking after the grandchildren, he abandoned his lunch and found himself helping to orchestrate an international response in the heat of an unusually blistering British summer. So when the call came through, Whitehouse and his colleagues in the British Cave Rescue Council sprang into action.
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The cave diving community is small, and the number of people capable of carrying out complex operations such as the one required to find and free the Wild Boar soccer team, smaller still. Vernon Unsworth, an experienced British caver who now lives in northern Thailand not far from the Tham Luang cave, had already alerted his contacts back in the UK to the predicament faced by the Thai Navy SEALs. Whitehouse, a retired cave diver and vice chairman of the British Cave Rescue Council, was aware of the Thai rescue effort. The subject of the call was not a complete surprise. Thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world, Bill Whitehouse was at home in rural Derbyshire, England, cooking a lunch of bacon and eggs, when the phone rang. On first assessment of the scene, “our hope to find the boys was less,” he said.ĭecisions made early by the Thai rescuers proved crucial in opening the chance for the rescue to take place: one was a huge operation to pump out water from the cave, and another was to block all the streams that carried water in from the outside. Rain and the long winding caverns of an unfamiliar cave were already a concern. Arpakorn Yookongkaew recalled those initial difficulties. Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, Thai Navy SEAL commander Rear Adm. Expert divers from the Thai Navy SEALs, experienced in conventional diving situations, were faced with an unprecedented challenge.
In the days after the boys first went missing on June 23, rescuers had no idea where they were, or if they were still alive.
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Now, with the mission over and the boys recovering in the hospital, the full story of the remarkable rescue can be told. When a Thai military unit had finished dismantling a section of water pumps that had proved so crucial in the successful operation, they jumped into their open-topped vehicle near the Tham Luang cave on Wednesday, smiling triumphantly to the crowd of cheering supporters who had stayed on to give their heroes a proper send off.īut behind those jubilant scenes lay the knowledge that each one of those rescue workers carries: the near three-week operation had rested on a knife’s edge, with equal chance of success or disaster. The mood in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province is elated. Twelve young boys and their soccer coach are safe, freed from the floods deep inside a cave in northern Thailand where they had been trapped in for more than two weeks.
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