TRANSCRIPT:
It’s the story that captivated the world. In June of 2018, 12 members of a boys soccer team and their coach went missing in the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand. They survived 10 days in total darkness before they were even found, and once they were found, their rescue became a harrowing race against time that had little chance of success. It’s a story of bravery, ingenuity, and sacrifice that’s almost impossible to believe.
Imagine that you’re a parent. If you already are one, congratulations. This should be easy.
It’s a Saturday. You’ve just finished cooking dinner but your son’s still not back from soccer practice. It’s no big deal, he and his friends ride their bikes home from practice and they often get sidetracked like kids do. So you put the food in the oven to keep it warm.
But then an hour passes. Then two hours. Then it’s dark. Still… nothing.
Now you’re getting concerned. You start calling the parents of his team members and they all say the same thing – their kids aren’t back yet either. And now it’s raining.
Word starts to spread, from one of the kids on the team who did make it home, that they had planned to stop by a local cave after practice.
One of the kids had a birthday that day and it was something of a local tradition for kids to write their name on the wall of the cave on their birthday.
So you and a handful of parents go down to the cave and check on them. And when you get there, through the rain and the dark of night, you find their bikes laying on the ground. Along with their bags and a couple pair of soccer cleats.
And at the mouth of the cave, you see water rushing in. Lots of water. And it hits you… You can’t get in there. And they can’t get out.
This is exactly what happened to the parents of 12 children and their soccer coach on the night of June 23, 2018 in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province.
The rescue that followed took 18 days, involved over 10,000 people, and captured the attention of the entire world.
Chances are you remember it, it wasn’t that long ago and it was a HUGE news story. But the details of this rescue mission are absolutely insane and required techniques that had never been tried before.
And will probably never be tried again because it was… let’s say ethically questionable.
The Tham Luang cave is the fourth largest cave in Thailand. It extends over 10 kilometers that we know of, going down 220 meters deep.
It holds a special place in the lore of northern Thailand. The locals call it “The great cave of the sleeping lady”
The name refers to a princess from the ancient kingdom of Chiang Rung.
According to a buddhist legend, the princess fell in love with a commoner, which was absolutely not allowed, so they kept it a secret – until she got pregnant.
Worried that her father was going to literally kill her, she fled into the cave to hide. Because the cave is huge and there were many places to hide in there.
Her plan was to wait in the cave for her lover to join her… but he never arrived. The king’s soldiers found him and executed him before he could reach her.
When she eventually realized she was never going to see him again, she ended her own life.
And ever since then, the princess’ spirit watches over the cave as a “jao thi” or a “guardian spirit.” Locals often say a prayer to her before going in to ask for her protection.
Because there’s a lot to need protection from.
On top of the obvious things like head bumps and ankle twists and potential falling rock, there’s also just the sheer size of it, and the complex and winding cave system, it’s just really easy to get drawn in, to want to see what’s around the next corner, what’s in the next cavern, and the next and the next until you turn around and have no idea where you are.
And then there’s the water.
Flooding is a known problem in the cave.
In fact, when I said that the locals call it “The great cave of the sleeping lady”? That was actually a shortened translation. It literally translates to “the great cave and water source of the sleep lady mountain”.
The “mountain” is Khun Nam Nang Non mountain, which sits on top of the cave. And the “water source” is the mountain itself.
It’s made of limestone, which is very porous, so when it rains, that water flows through tiny channels in the rock, which combine into bigger channels that eventually feed into the cave system. In fact that’s how the cave system was formed, all this rushing water, carving it out through the rock.
And as you can imagine, it rains a lot in Thailand. Especially in the monsoon season.
Visitors can tour the cave but only from November to April.
The monsoon season officially starts in July, and at that point, any random rainstorm can fill the cave with up to 5 meters of water in a matter of hours.
So when the boys and their coach entered the cave on June 23, they were kinda pushing it. But they probably thought they were safe because monsoon season hadn’t officially started.
I should stress that while yes, this cave could be dangerous, it was a popular local spot, there were a lot of traditions around it. That’s why they were going in, they were going to write their names on a particular spot where soccer teams had been doing that for years.
Plus it was clear outside when they went in, they had no idea that a freak storm would hit.
So they entered and signed their names and then just started exploring a little. They probably went a little further than they should, the call of the void and whatnot. But then the water started to rise. Quickly.
They headed toward the mouth of the cave but unfortunately, it’s actually lower in elevation than where they were, meaning the closer they got to the mouth, the higher the water rose.
It eventually got up over their heads and it filled the cavern completely. In order to keep from drowning, they had to go further in to the cave, toward higher ground.
Thankfully, they found a ledge just over 37 meters higher than the mouth of the cave. But beyond that was a dead end. They were safe – for now. But they were stuck in that spot.
So, they waited. In the dark. Hoping that the waters would recede.
They didn’t.
Hours passed. Eventually the hunger pains hit and they shared what meager snacks they had on them. They picked a spot to use for the bathroom. A day went by. The coach led the kids to sing songs together and tell stories to pass the time and keep their spirits up.
As they entered the second day, the gravity of the situation began to dawn on them. It might be a long time, maybe weeks before the water goes down. And did anybody know where they are? Surely their parents are looking for them, but do they know they’re in the cave?
Is anybody coming? They had no way of knowing.
Indeed, there were people looking for them. Lots of people.
Their parents discovered their bikes at the mouth of the cave within hours of them being trapped, and word spread fast. Local authorities sought the help of the Thai military, who rushed a team of Navy seals to to search for the boys.
Search and rescue teams scoured the mountainside, looking for another way into the caves, ultimately to no avail.
So it was up to the Navy Seal divers to go in through the front. And within 24 hours, they began searching the cave.
It did not go well.
For one thing, they ran into surprisingly strong currents in the cave water that could throw divers off-course for hours at a time and even rip off their facemasks. In fact, three of the Seals went missing for an entire day and had to be rushed to the hospital due to oxygen deprivation.
But there was a bigger problem.
These guys were some of the best and most experienced divers in the country… but they were trained and worked in the open water, they were not trained for cave diving. And cave diving is a whole other monster.
It’s more cramped and claustrophobic, there are stalactites and rocks that you can get your gear caught on, and there’s no surfacing if something goes wrong. There is no surface.
But the worst part was the water in this cave was extremely muddy. There was almost zero visibility. The only way to go forward is to feel your way through, and the only way out was to hold on to a guideline, which would disappear from existence if you ever lost your grip on it.
The biggest barrier these navy seals faced was psychological. They were expert swimmers and knew their gear inside and out, but in this cave the slightest misstep can leave you with no idea where you are, or even which way is up or down. And that leads to panic. And a panicked diver is a dead diver.
Seriously, cave divers are absolute lunatics. I’ll never understand what drives a person to do that.
But I guess it’s a good thing that there are lunatics that like this stuff, and they came out of the wood work to help.
Including, some guys who had actually been cave diving in that cave.
One of them was British cave diver Vernon Unsworth, who lived nearby and had experience in the Tham Luang cave. He volunteered within a day of the rescue efforts to provide information about the layout of the cave and help coordinate the effort.
And when he saw how inexperienced the seals were with cave diving, he realized they needed more experts in there, and called in some fellow cave divers, including John Volanthen, Rich Stanton, and Robert Harper.
Meanwhile the rescuers began pumping out water to try to get those wild currents out of control.
With the pumps working and a team of experts in the cave, they began making progress, methodically searching through the cave for the boys.
There were various dry chambers that were above the water level along the way and as they reached them, they set up camps and holding areas in those spaces while support teams followed up behind with supplies like oxygen tanks.
But the expert divers continued forward in shifts, sharing the areas they had searched to form a map.
Keep in mind, again, the water was so muddy that even with lights they could only see inches in front of their face. They had to feel their way through this. And they had no idea if the boys were even alive, for all they knew, at any moment, they could come across a floating body.
And the likelihood of that grew with each passing day.
Back on their dry landing, the boys were in their tenth day. None of them had eaten for nearly a week, and they stayed hydrated by licking the walls to collect condensation and rainwater.
Ironically the water that trapped them was too muddy and dirty to drink.
Over those 10 days they actually tried to dig their way out with rocks and metal items they had on hand. And they actually managed to dig a hole 5 meters deep before it became obvious that it was a waste of time.
I can’t imagine the frame of mind these kids had to have been in after 10 days with no contact whatsoever, in total darkness. No food, their clothes starting to hang off their bodies, and clearly no way out.
And I can’t imagine the joy they must have felt when one of them noticed… a faint glow in the water.
I imagine the first one who saw it probably didn’t believe what he saw, he probably thought it was a hallucination.
But the lights got brighter and closer and finally, against all hope, two divers poked their heads out of the water. It was John Volanthen and Rich Stanton.
The celebrations were rapturous, especially among the families, but it was short-lived.
The kids were found two and a half miles into the cave, or four kilometers. Even with the path marked out, it took 4-5 hours each way, just to reach them, through extremely narrow passages that were so tight the divers had to remove the tanks from their backs to squeeze through.
The difficulty of getting these kids out became apparent immediately. This was going to be an ordeal.
They had three options to consider. And all of them were terrible.
Option 1, they could drill down to them from above.
Now that they could pinpoint where the kids were, they might have a shot at drilling down from above and pulling them out, similar to the Chilean miner rescue from 8 years earlier.
This got ruled out pretty quickly because, again, there was a whole mountain above them.
They would have had to drill down 1.2 kilometers, it would have taken way too long to get to them and the space they were in was so small, it was way too risky.
There was also the risk of disrupting the water channels through the rock and send even more water down into the chamber.
The second option was to give the boys a crash course in scuba diving and have them swim out with the divers. But, again, this was a very treacherous journey that was too challenging for highly trained Navy Seals in prime physical shape. These were kids who had never scuba dived in their lives and haven’t eaten in 10 days.
If they slipped into a panic for even a moment, it would be over for them. It was just way too risky.
And the last option was to just wait it out. They had already been sending high calorie food and water to the boys, maybe they could hold out until the waters subsided.
But the waters weren’t subsiding, and the rain wasn’t letting up, in fact it was projected to get a lot worse. The monsoon came early this year.
They could be stuck in there for four or five months. Which, if they kept getting food and water, might be doable, but there was something else that they were running out of. Oxygen.
The oxygen level in the chamber had already dropped down below 15%, which is getting into the danger zone. They didn’t have months to spare.
And besides, this would require a constant flow of food and supplies to these boys, and every single dive was a risk.
A fact that was punctuated on July 6th.
With more rain in the forecast, dropping oxygen levels, and the threat of more deaths, the pressure was on to get those boys out of there. And going out the way they came in was the only option. But how?
This is where I do have to talk about the whole Elon Musk thing.
When the news of the rescue went viral, he had a team of SpaceX engineers try to solve the problem and they came up with this mini-submarine that they made out of a Falcon 9 liquid oxygen transfer tube.
It was a tiny pressurized capsule that the kids could fit in and breathe normally while they were transferred out of there. Which, it’s not the dumbest idea.
Apparently he’d had exchanges with one of the diver consultants who told him that it couldn’t hurt to try it, so he and his team tested it out and he personally flew to Thailand with it.
Once they got there though, it was decided that it wouldn’t work because it was too big and rigid for one of the tightest passages, remember the one they have to take their oxygen tank off for? Yeah it never would have fit through there.
Then Vernon Unsworth called the whole thing a PR stunt and Elon responded by calling him a pedo. Totally normal stuff.
That whole circus aside, the problem was still, how do you prevent these kids from panicking? Which by the way, wouldn’t just put the kid’s life at risk, but the divers that were with him as well.
Somewhere along the way, an idea was floated. That maybe… they can’t have a panic attack if they’re not awake?
One of the divers was an anesthesiologist named Dr. Richard Harris. He worked with a veterinarian named Dr Craig Challen, who was also a diver, and they suggested that a dose of ketamine could render the boys unconscious for the dive.
This was unheard of and had never been tried before. The divers would have to not only traverse the dangerous cave system, but do it while towing an unconscious kid along with them. All the while monitoring the kid’s oxygen levels, making sure he’s breathing, and worse, both the ketamine and the oxygen would run out before they left the cave, so they would have to find spots to re-administer the shot and replace the oxygen tanks. All in near-zero visibility.
The likelihood of all the kids getting out safe was very small. But the chance that they lose all of them was rising by the day. So they put their plan into action.
First thing they needed to do was make sure the masks and equipment would fit the kids. An American team of divers provided diving equipment for the trapped kids but they were all adult sized.
So they tested the airmasks on child volunteers at a local swimming pool and found the masks would work on the kids if they pulled the head straps as tight as possible.
They used positive pressure masks so that if the masks lost the seal, no water would rush in.
Once the boys were knocked out, they would need to secure their arms and legs to keep them from getting caught on rocks and stalactites. They would do this by tying their feet together and their hands behind their backs using zip ties.
They also made the decision to strap the boys onto a plastic stretcher called a Sked. This not only kept them from flopping around in the water, it could also protect the kids from the jagged rocks and prevent further injury.
And by the way, they didn’t just have to worry about the underwater stuff. That’s what people talk about the most but they also had pretty long stretches of dry cave to traverse, and they had to figure out a safe way to carry the kids through that, too.
This alone was no small feat, this was a very rocky, uneven surface filled with slick spots and tight turns. So they MacGyvered a series of solutions.
They devised teams of eight crew members that would carry each Sked through the cave. Crews also grouped together water hoses to create slides that they could glide each boy across.
They even built ziplines in some sections of the cave that they could suspend the stretchers from and push them along without having to deal with the rocky ground.
They also brought in rafts so they could float the stretchers over parts of the underwater river.
With all the pieces in place, on July 8th the decision was made to start bringing the kids out. The divers made their final preparations.
Part of those preparations, by the way, was they got assurances from the regional governor that they wouldn’t be held liable if it didn’t work and the kids drowned.
All they needed was one brave boy to go first.
Weirdly I couldn’t find which of the boys went first, I’m sure that information exists out there somewhere but we do know how they chose which boys would go first. And it’s kinda surprising and even… funny?
You might think they’d pick the weakest to go first because they would need the most medical attention but doctors had actually been with them since they were found and had been treating them so they were doing relatively well.
Or you might think they would pick the strongest to go first because that would give the best chance for success. Which would have been a huge morale boost and let’s just be honest, it would have been good for PR.
But no, the team chose based on who lived the furthest away from the cave… Here’s why.
The assistant coach, Ekapol Chanthawong later said in an interview:
“We were thinking, when we get out of the cave, we would have to ride the bicycle home, so the persons who live the furthest away would be allowed to go out first… so that they can go out and tell everyone that we were inside, we were okay.”
“We put the hopes on them to tell the families we are coming out and prepare food.”
Yeah it seems that the divers purposefully did not tell the kids just how big of an operation this whole thing was, and that it had become worldwide news, probably to keep them calm. I guess to them, they just thought there were a handful of divers helping them out.
Regardless, they made their choice, and picked 4 kids to go in the first batch of rescues, with each of them leaving 45 minutes apart.
And on July 8th, 17 days after they walked in, the first group of boys exited the cave.
The next day, another group of four were extricated from the cave, each journey taking over 5 hours to reach the outside.
In all, it took three days of non-stop work and dedication to get all 13 members of the soccer team through the cave. And miraculously, every last one survived.
It wasn’t without its hiccups though.
In one case, the diver’s hand slipped off the guide rope and he couldn’t find it again. He got turned around and accidentally circled back to a previous cavern before he could back on track. His oxygen reached dangerously low levels but he survived.
And apparently the last kid to go out was actually the smallest of the team, and the face mask didn’t fit him properly. They had to use extra straps to force it to his face, which worked thankfully, but if the strap had come undone, the kid could have drowned.
With the last kid and the coach finally out, the world gave a sigh of relief, but the danger wasn’t quite over for the rescuers.
While they were in the process of removing the equipment and infrastructure they’d built in one of the interior base camps, the water pump suddenly failed sending a rush of water back into the cave.
One of the Navy Seals who was just 800 meters away from the mouth of the cave with no scuba gear found himself standing in waist high water that started rising to his chest. He and other crew members in the cave had to scramble to higher ground.
Fortunately, they got the pump working again and all of the remaining crew members made it out safely.
By July 10th, the rescue operation was over, and the team spent around a month in the hospital before returning home to their families.
The Tham Luang cave rescue was nothing short of a miracle. Even the dive team who planned the rescue had prepared themselves to lose at least one of the boys. But I guess the spirit of the princess was working overtime that day.
It wasn’t without its tragedy though. As I mentioned before, Saman Kunan died while trying to save the kids. By the way, he was a retired Navy Seal at that point, he was working as a security guard at the airport. But he left his job to volunteer to help save them. And lost his life in the process.
Today, there’s a statue memorializing him at the entrance to the cave, along with a museum dedicated to the rescue.
There was also one other diver who contracted a blood infection from the cave waters who later succumbed to his illness. Which puts the official death toll at 2 people.
The Tham Luang Cave remained closed for almost five months. When it reopened, it became a major tourist attraction.
More than 1 million people visited the national park that houses the cave in just the first month after its reopening.
And it’s still a popular tourist spot to this day.
There are some who have been critical of Coach Eak for leading the boys into the cave, some have even called for pressing charges, but the boys’ families totally had his back.
They credit him for keeping them alive in those 10 days before they were found. He was a former monk and taught them meditation to regulate their fear and told them stories to keep their spirits up.
So for the most part, he came out a hero.
After the rescue, the Thai Navy Seals added cave diving to their training so they won’t be caught on their heels the next time this happens.
Since then all the boys have finished school and are out there living their lives. With one exception.
This story does have a tragic addendum here, in 2023 the team captain, Duangphet Phromthep, took his own life. It would be easy to blame it on this event, giving him PTSD or something like that but we really don’t know. Just very sad.
Several movies have been made about the daring rescue including “Thirteen Lives” directed by Ron Howard and a Netflix limited series called “Thai Cave Rescue” that goes into a bit more detail.
There’s also been a number of studies and papers published about the Thai cave rescue. A 2022 research paper in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry examined the ethical and moral challenges of administering general anesthesia in emergency rescue operations.
The Journal of Management Injury published a paper last year on a research study conducted by the University of Quebec that looked at the leadership structure of the rescue.
The study coined a term known as “The Rudolph Effect” showing how providing support for unconventional team members with unique skills can elevate them to higher leadership positions.
That’s right. That person in the office who keeps insisting in meetings that an espresso machine and cereal bar could improve productivity may not just be too cheap to buy their own breakfast. They could be the next leader of your industry.
It felt like the world watched almost every minute of this thing. They defied the odds that seemed stacked against them from the very beginning.
But I love stories like this, just thousands of people coming together to help a bunch of strangers. Just people being good for once. More of that please.
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