There were a host of heroes in July’s dramatic rescue of 13 members of a youth soccer team from a cave in northern Thailand, but then there were the hapless would-be helpers from the Thai Well Water Association.
In total, 17 people were rescued by the expert foreign cave divers who rushed to lend their unique abilities to save the boys of the team and their coach.
The story of the first four people to be rescued — which was barely reported — was recounted on Wednesday by the association’s president, Surapin Chaichompoo, who spoke about how he and three employees spent two days draining water from the cave in an attempt to help the rescue, took a nap then found themselves trapped inside with the water rising.
He said that on their third day of being trapped, two British divers searching for the boys stumbled upon them and improvised a rescue, taking them out one by one after giving them a 30-minute crash course in diving.
They made their way through the murky waters by swimming and sometimes walking, trying to avoid sharp obstacles in the low visibility, Surapin said.
Surapin said he was unable to contact the rescuers afterward, but would still like to thank them.
“I really owe my life to these two divers. They were here to help the 13 people, but I got stuck first after I went in to work,” Surapin said by telephone from the northern city of Chiang Mai. “If they didn’t save me that day, I wouldn’t be here today.”
The tale of the little-known first rescue resurfaced on Saturday last week when Rick Stanton — who with diving buddy John Volanthen discovered the four on June 28, and the cave boys on July 2 — gave a talk at the annual Hidden Earth conference of British cavers in Somerset in England, according to a report on the Darkness Below Web site, which carries news for underground explorers.
The two divers had arrived at the cave site just the day before they found Surapin and his associates.
“The foreign divers came here as volunteers. They are confident in their abilities,” Surapin said, recalling the amount of specialized equipment they carried. “You have to understand that these foreigners have a bit of crazy in them. They like to do crazy things, but they are very good at diving.”
Surapin and the other three with him were part of an early group of helpers who went in before things were properly organized.
“When I woke up I thought to myself: ‘Why is the cave half flooded?’ So I ran out to look toward the entrance,” Surapin said. “I looked back and ran to the high mound where we were sleeping. It turned out everyone had left and it was only the four of us left.”
Surapin said the group was not immediately worried if the waters did not rise further, because they had food and supplies for a month.
After a few days, he began to hear clanking noises under the water that he later found out was the sound of the British divers and their oxygen tanks knocking against the cave’s walls, Surapin said.
So he began throwing rocks into the water.
“The first rock I threw in didn’t get a reaction. The sound of clanking tanks was still soft,” he said. “So I threw another one. This time, the clanking noises got really loud and we heard clanking non-stop. After that I saw a flashlight begin to surface and told the guys: ‘Hey, there really is someone here.’”
He said when the divers found his group, “they thought they found 13 people. I told them: ‘No, it’s four. They said: ‘OK, oh my God.’”
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