I agree with Siam Sam. The coach took kids into a cave system well beyond the safe point during monsoon season. There should be criminal charges.
Are any more out now? Or is it still just the four?
Amen to that.
Still just the four. They’re having to recharge the oxygen tanks, as they ran out of enough oxygen to bring more out.
So there are nine more, the 8 kids and the coach, or are my numbers off?
I believe that is correct – four out, leaving 8 boys and the coach for nine still in the cave.
and that will definitely stop kids from going into caves. Faa.
I just heard on CNN that the boys will be kept in separate hospital rooms and not allowed to see their parents in person for about 24 to 48 hours. Are they being quarantined to prevent the spread of possible diseases they may have contracted in the cave? They didn’t say why.
I remember reports that bats bothered the boys.
Bat poop is pretty toxic. Especially since they were exposed for over 2weeks.
And rabies is endemic in Thailand.
An ABCNews report based on an interview with two team members who did not go in the cave that day indicates they had previously explored as far as 3 miles into the cave. Not sure if that was down the same fork where they became trapped, but it sounds like they had previously gone pretty deep into the cave.
This just goes to illustrate what I said about news coming out of Thailand being often inaccurate or completely wrong.
There is a sign outside the cave, put there long before this incident, that clearly says the cave is closed from July to November, not in June.
All the air tanks are being refilled, it’s a lot of tanks.
Monsoon rains are now falling on the cave system. The water will rise, no one can say how fast or how much. The weather could also severely hamper the power supply currently being used to pump water out and air in.
Everyone was feeling so confident after the first four were extracted, the operation went quite smoothly.
It’s a crushing development.
So the cave may have been entered legally after all? If so, I’d still be hiring a hitman for that coach if my kid were there. I would have signed him up for soccer, not spelunking.
With the international scale of this operation, It seems crazy to have the rescue delayed due to a need to recharge oxygen tanks. It seems it should have been easy enough to have more than enough tanks on hand. With all the international resources available (hell, I’m reading Elon Musk has custom submarines built and shipped) is it really an acceptable thing to have a lack of charged oxygen tanks actually be a factor in the successful completion of this evacuation?
If monsoon rains are falling, isn’t that even more reason to go get them ASAP, assuming the rains won’t stop for a long time? Or does the lack of O2 tanks mean that the mission can’t continue no matter what until they are filled?
(Are these O2 tanks for the divers/swimmers, or for the people stuck on the ledge?)
Refilling the cylinders is a trivial task. A truck mounted compressor with a cascade bank system could refill the roughly 1000 cylinders mentioned in the press in twelve hours or less. Getting the cylinders pre-positioned in the cave again is not trivial.
It takes 10-11 hours for a diver to make a full round trip to the far cave section where the boys are. And each diver could reasonably position one or possibly two cylinders in a single dive. Staging cylinders every 50 meters or so along the way will require many divers, with progressively shorter round trip times the closer to the cave entrance the cylinders are dropped and tied off. Fortunately they have a team of around 90 divers.
And then there is the issue of traffic control. With many divers working simultaneously they will need to coordinate among themselves to avoid logjams at the restriction points. And, of course, they need to do this very dangerous work safely and track the progress along the way to ensure enough cylinders are staged at the needed points.
It could take a couple days to re-stage all the needed cylinders.
…what do you mean by “acceptable?”
You don’t just need to recharge tanks. You need to recharge the people. You have the best-of-the-best people on the ground at the moment. It was a momentous effort logistical achievement to do what they have done already, and it would have been impossible for them to do-it-all-again immediately not just because of the tanks but because you can’t just send the divers (and support crew) with zero rest. There is no point having extra tanks available if you have nobody ready and available to put them into the staging points because everyone is exhausted.
It sounds like they are doing the very best they can do considering the circumstances. It sounds like they’ve got the logistics of this figured out pretty well. They got the weakest out. They recharge the tanks and they recharge the people. And they go in again for the rest when they can. This isn’t a movie.
The cylinders are likely for both the trapped boys and the rescue divers. Even though it is diving at extraordinarily shallow depths the rescuers are fighting a current on the way in. That will cause them to use more air. I’ve seen experienced professional divers take a standard 80cu ft aluminum cylinder from 3000psi to 500psi in less than 30 minutes while swimming at a depth of less than 10 feet while fighting a current.
The rescuers would want to start the return trip with full cylinders and carefully monitor air consumption rates and remaining gas supply prior to entering each flooded sump section. The rescuer’s air consumption rate should be markedly lower going with the current coming out of the cave. But the plan apparently includes the inexperienced boys breathing off the rescuer’s cylinders for at least part of the trip out. That could drain their cylinders quite quickly.
I would expect them to use guide ropes to pull themselves into the current.
Usually a guideline (pdf) is quite thin and would not be capable of withstanding the tension of a diver pulling against current without breaking. However I noticed the guide rope pictured in some video is substantially thicker than that typically used.
Pulling oneself along the guide rope is not the preferred procedure in cave diving as it risks breaking the line. And in this case breaking the line would require delays to re-string the line. However as they are using a much thicker gauge guideline in at least parts of the cave perhaps they can get away with that.