Heroes of the Thai Cave Rescue
The day before the rescue, everything is ready. Several options have been duly considered and politely dismissed. The kids won’t be confined to airtight metal coffins, as Elon Musk has proposed, or made to crawl through a several-kilometres-long inflatable bouncy castle tube, as one Bangkok construction company suggested. No: their faces will be covered by full-face masks and their bodies dragged underwater. Separately, in 45-minute intervals, four lead divers will each take a child through two kilometres of watery passageways and treacherous boulders with only their hands to guide them along a single thread, before delivering them to Station 3—call it Grand Central—where teams of medical support will await to hurry them through the rest of the cave, pumped mostly dry. The terrain the divers will traverse will be dotted with four manned diving stations, banks of land in air chambers equipped with air and oxygen tanks, with only a couple of support divers at each. These support divers, with only their dive buddy, will wait to offer assistance to each lead diver bringing a child through. Most support divers will be European; all lead divers will be British. At least that is the plan. Onward to the drills.
First, the pool drills. Little boys plucked from a local school shiver in a nearby pool, testing the smallest full-face masks sourced from around the world. Divers practice hauling the boys face-down through the water to see if the masks leak. Unlike the more common half-masks, with which a diver uses a regulator mouthpiece to breathe, full-face masks use pressure to push air out, making it more difficult for water to seep in. Full-face masks must be sealed airtight, though—if water were to seep in through a too-large mask, the mask would flood and the child could drown. They don’t make full-face masks for children. These masks may not be small enough. But onward.
Next, the rock drill. Like a special forces team drawing lines in the sand with rocks and branches to map out an attack, the divers walk through a miniature mock-up cave in a parking lot. Police tape wrapped around sticks signifies the route along the main guide line the divers will follow out of the cave. Plastic half-litre water bottles wrapped with different colours of tape signify people and tanks: red for the children and the coach, blue for air tanks for the divers, green for oxygen tanks for the children. (If something goes wrong, it will be easier to revive someone who has been breathing pure oxygen.) Here, enacted in the rock drill, is “the plan”: extract four of the cave’s prisoners, one at a time, dead or alive, on each of three rescue days—plus a fifth on the third day. Thirteen red bottles are placed near the stick marking the spot where the soccer team has been stranded for two weeks. It begins: Is Station 6 that bit of mud or that bit of mud? Do we need more tanks here and fewer there? Fewer here and more there? This is the only time divers see the cave in anything approximating light. Still, onward.
To the sedation drill.
Image: uncredited
