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The rescue mission of 12 young football players and their coach of the cave in Thailand is fraught with danger.
The elite divers began the effort at 10am on Sunday. Their success depends on crossing miles of caves and narrow pbadages submerged by a flash flood that cut the boys when they explored the interior a little over two weeks ago. The most dangerous obstacle is a submerged throttling point of only 15 inches in diameter, shaped like a U-bend in the toilet. A former Thai Navy diver died last week after spending air trying to survive.
Oxygen levels inside the Tham Luang cave are deteriorating and monsoon rains are increasing. gears and guide them through the troubled water one by one. None of the boys have already dived, and the authorities are waiting for it to take two or three days to make them disappear.
"The visibility is bad, it's very hard to keep track of your bearings, and the maps are limited," he said.
Ben Reymenants,
a Belgian diver who helped the rescue effort. Rescue coordinators say they have no other choice: despite a week-long effort, engineers, geologists and oil industry specialists have been unable to accurately locate the location of the boys to build a relief well.
Just as the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 revealed that the moon's surface was better mapped than that of the Indian Ocean's seafloor, the attempted rescue of the caves shows that a lot of things under our feet are a mystery. Throughout the world, hikers and cave explorers often stumble across new caves, and chasms open without warning on suburban streets.
The caves we know are often sparsely mapped. The attraction of discovering new hidden worlds largely explains why spelunkers are attracted to exploring caves.
But that is also why cave rescues are so dangerous, experts say: lifeguards often have only a glimpse of what awaits them. especially outside the main cavern exploration sites in Britain, Europe and North America.
Modern technology is of little use – rock blocks satellite signals to GPS, although radio beacons can sometimes be useful. Amateur cartographers use tools as simple as a compbad and a tape measure.
"The results can be, well, variable"
Bill Whitehouse,
Vice President of the British Cave Rescue Council
The cave of Tham Luang did not have his first map before 1986. The work of the French amateurs, it was little more than a carefully drawn sketch, and Although British speleologists have annotated as they did in the years that followed, there is still no precise indication of the height of the cave. In 2014, an attempt to use GPS to verify the precise location of the entrance revealed that the map was several tens of meters away
When the soccer team has gone, the rescuers could only make their way. sketch as they went. It took almost ten days before two British divers came in contact with the boys and their coach.
"If we knew their exact location, then we could drill directly into the cave. and remove them, but we do not know their exact position, "said Thanes Weerasiri, an expert from the Thailand Engineering Institute who helps research.
Authorities believe that boys are between 600 and 1,000 meters, and their lateral location is equally uncertain.This makes the team much more difficult to extract than the 33 miners trapped in the Copiapó mine, Chile, after the collapse of the mine. a well in 2010. The rescuers had to drill some 700 yards, but at least they had an idea where to start., local governor
Narongsak Osottanakorn
Surveyors have dug more than 100 pilot holes in the mountain. Until now, none seems to be on target.
Among those who pitch is an entrepreneur
Elon Musk,
which sent engineers from its space exploration and drilling companies to Thailand. "Boring Co. has advanced penetrating radar and is good enough to dig holes," he wrote on Twitter last week.
Even though rescuers have managed to locate the boys, drilling presents a new set of obstacles. On the one hand, it is difficult to place great forests on top of a wooded hill. This would probably involve the construction of new roads.
"In Chile, we were in the middle of a desert, so you had plenty of room, while you're in a mountainous area. The hard bit is to find a space to set up a drilling rig, "said
Jeff Roten,
a drilling equipment specialist at Schramm Inc., who worked on the rescue of Chile.
The composition of the interior of the mountain is not clear either. Some experts have warned that if the cave where the boys are trapped is under pressure, then drilling a hole could simply suck the water levels higher. "It could flood the thing immediately," said
Richard Soppe,
Given the risks, the rescue organizers have been preparing unorthodox rescue plans in recent days, such as recruiting locals that climb rocks to harvest bird nests. a delicious glutinous soup. They felt that these nest gatherers know how to navigate their way into tight spaces and could also identify the bird song that some children would have said they could hear inside the cave.
It was a measure of how much the rescuers I did not want to fall back on their least favored option: Take the kids through the cave itself.
Write to James Hookway at [email protected] and Jake Maxwell Watts at [email protected]
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