Thirteen in the Cave

On 23 June 2018, twelve boys from a youth football team called the Wild Boars went exploring with their assistant coach after practice. They were aged between eleven and sixteen. Their coach, Ekkapol Chanthawong, was twenty-five.

They rode their bicycles to Tham Luang, a long cave system under a mountain in Chiang Rai province, in northern Thailand. They had been in before. They left their bikes and bags at the entrance and went in.

While they were inside, heavy monsoon rains began. Water poured into the cave and flooded the passages behind them. The way out was cut off.

Missing

That evening, a parent raised the alarm. Their bicycles were found at the cave entrance. Rescue workers went in, but the water was rising fast, and muddy floods blocked the tunnels.

Within days, Thai Navy SEAL divers arrived, followed by experts from around the world: cave divers from Britain, Australia, Belgium, the United States, China, Japan and many other countries. Thousands of volunteers gathered on the hillside. Cooks set up kitchens. People came to help however they could.

The problem was the water. The cave passages were long, narrow, pitch-black and completely flooded. Some sections were so tight that a diver had to remove his air tank and push it ahead of him.

Found

On the evening of 2 July, after nine days, two British cave divers, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, were laying guide ropes deep in the cave. They surfaced in a flooded chamber, about four kilometres from the entrance, and smelled something.

On a muddy ledge above the water were thirteen thin, tired figures. All of them were alive.

Volanthen filmed the moment on a helmet camera. The video, showing the boys smiling in the torchlight, asking what day it was and saying they were hungry, was shared around the world.

The coach, who had trained as a Buddhist monk, had kept the boys calm. They had drunk water dripping from the cave walls and had huddled together for warmth. They had tried to dig their way out.

An impossible rescue

Finding them was a miracle. Getting them out seemed impossible.

The boys could not swim well, and none of them had ever dived. The route out involved hours of diving through dark, flooded tunnels, with zero visibility in some places. Oxygen levels in the cave were falling. More rain was forecast, which could flood the ledge where they sat.

Many ideas were tried at the same time. Teams drilled into the mountain looking for another way in. Engineers pumped huge amounts of water out of the cave. Volunteers diverted streams on the mountain above. Local farmers agreed to let the pumped water flood their rice fields, destroying their crops, so that the water level in the cave would fall.

On 6 July, Saman Kunan, a former Thai Navy SEAL who had volunteered to help, died in the cave while returning from delivering air tanks. His death showed everyone how dangerous the rescue was, even for expert divers.

The plan

In the end, the rescuers chose a plan that had never been tried before.

An Australian anaesthetist and cave diver, Dr Richard Harris, would sedate each boy so he would not panic underwater. Each boy would wear a full-face mask, and be carried out by an expert diver, one by one, through the flooded tunnels. Along the way, other divers and Thai SEALs would be waiting in the dry sections to help carry them over rocks and through passages.

The rescuers knew the risks. They did not know whether all the boys would survive.

Out

The rescue began on 8 July. Four boys were brought out that day. Four more the next day. On 10 July, the last four boys and their coach came out.

All thirteen had survived. The last people to leave the cave were Dr Harris and the Thai Navy SEALs who had stayed with the boys on the ledge. Shortly afterwards, a water pump failed, and the cave flooded again.

The boys recovered in hospital. Many of the people who had helped became lifelong friends of the team.

Want to read more?

Rick Stanton's memoir, Aquanaut, describes the rescue from inside the cave. The documentary film The Rescue includes footage taken during the operation.