Title pretty much says it. It's there more to training kids for a one time dive than it would take if it were an adult? Are there more difficulties due to the circumstances?

Seems to me it would be hard to train for a one time dive...
Especially, one that their life depends on...  You panic or freak out, you get in trouble, more than you may already be in...

Not saying that it can't be done, but with anything, the more training, the more experience someone gets, the better prepared they are to handle something like this...

JMHO,  But, like you, I am no diver...

The flooded sumps of that cave are literally some of the most difficult diving conditions on the planet. As someone mentioned in the other thread, the British rescue divers are the best in the world and just getting to the chamber where the kids are is likely pushing the limits of their training and experience.

Training kids who have never dived before to swim out of an overhead, zero visibility, sideslung (or tethered to another diver), tight environment? I wouldn't assign it a difficulty rating so much as say it's just not an option.

I don't know what their current plan is, but it would probably be much easier to bring them supplies and wait for the water levels to drop, however long that takes.

They said on the radio this morning that it could take 'months' for the water level to drop.

I imagine some will die if they try to get them out by diving.  Too many unknowns.

And that still may be the best option. The people running the rescue are in a very unenviable situation right now.

Dry cave rescue is difficult and time consuming. Rescuing kids from a live cave is a nightmare.

Plus the kids don’t know how to swim. Heard that this morning, too.

Well, they were delivered 4 months of food. They have plenty of time to learn and practice.

A tether line jas been erected so its much safer now.

This is reason 481 to never set foot in a cave again.

Seems like a safe assumption, until you realize it's monsoon season there, with plenty more rain on the way.

I pray their little island stays dry.

Oh shit, I didnt realize they were a kilometer underground.

I'm with you on this!

I discovered I was claustrophobic in mammoth cave at fat mans misery.

I knew the tour was a mistake when i was 4 inches taller and 100 pounds heavier than the next biggest person in the tour line. I asked the park ranger if i would be able to fit all the way through, oh yeah you'll be fine. LYING BITCH!

Oh come on, that spot's not bad. I don't consider squeezes to be tight until I have to exhale then scoot with my toes a few inches at a time

That's why when I go caving, I'm behind the fat guy on the way in and in front of him on the way out

What about sedating the kiddos? Get them sedated, get a supply of air for them and get them hooked up. Take them out one at a time with a buddy diver or two?

I don't know the complexity of the route they need to dive out of.

Kids are fearless, and many third-world kids learn to free-dive from an early age.

I know cave diving has its really bad challenges, but with the recent rains and visibility being down, i doubt the cave divers that got to them really had to go that far through any system to get to them.

It's a matter of laying a good rope, having an adult with them to guide them, getting them to breathe and clear, then knowing visibility will be zero - just keep placing one hand in front of the next while following a substantial guide-rope.

I'm writing it off as 'not a huge problem - not the dilemma many here are making it out to be.'

But that isn't a column of water or the divers who got there would not have got to them.  The only question is of how deep and complex each water-route is on the way up and out.

In one of the caving threads on GD, I mentioned this before, "Try not to be the biggest person in the group when exploring sections you haven't been in before". Smaller people can underestimate the difficulty that someone bigger may experience.

Got stuck in a tight crawl one time, in a very tight S-bend, and wondered if anyone as tall as I was, had ever made it through before. Everyone else in the group (including the folks who'd been through the section before, were all shorter/smaller.

I didn't think my legs could make it, but after a lot of contortions, I found the right sequence of contortions to get unstuck and make it through. It's the one time while caving, that I began feeling REALLY claustrophobic.

* Sobering thought: John Jones figured out the sequence of contortions necessary to pass the tight spot where he eventually got stuck in Nutty Putty (and died), because the rescuers couldn't get him back out past that section without risking breaking his legs.

That coach is an idiot for taking the kids into the caves with that impending weather.

As for taking kids out with diving equipment, who have no prior diving experience (and apparently can't even swim): consider how easy it is to get claustrophobia and potentially panic, in a tight section with your eyes open.

Then consider that; while in a tight section, underwater, with zero visibility, breathing through apparatus you're not used to breathing through.

It was a 1.5 mile, 4 hour swim for the rescue divers to get to them.

Many of the passages are so narrow that it requires removing all the dive gear and pushing it ahead of you.

None of those kids can dive. None of those kids can swim for that matter.

It's a huge problem.

That is a huge problem.  I didn't realize it was a 'true' cave dive (vs. passage diving) to even get to them.  Holy cow.

It wasn't that bad. It was the feeling of knowing millions of tons of rock were surrounding me and a slight bump by mother earth and we became morlocks.

Here's the thread in GD: https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/Divers-find-youth-soccer-team-alive-in-flooded-Thailand-cave-after-9-days-trapped/5-2124597/?r=73255839&page=4&anc=73255839#i73255839

FWIW I'm full cave certified and if they do a swim out I'm expecting some loss of life. The passageway that they have to get the kids thru is big enough for one person if they remove their gear and push it in front of them. In other words they basically have to send the kids thru by themselves and hope for the best. If something happens to one of the kids while they're in the passageway then they effectively block the exit for everyone behind them.

They'll have to relay the kids with divers on either side of the passage. Maybe with extra gear staged on the far side with a long reg so the kids can switch before the squeeze and not have to worry about passing their gear through.

I'm strictly a dry caver. Even I know that having the kids swim out is a really stupid idea.

It’s certainly been discussed but could they pump the water out?  I don’t see carrying the kids out as an option.  Cave diving is one of the most dangerous endeavors anyone can try, much less an unskilled kid.

I'm a dry caver (short of a few silly quick swims to the next room where part of my face was still above water) and a SCUBA diver but I'm still years away from combining the two. And I do not envy any of those who are involved in this rescue.

Attached File

I wonder if there's a possibility of boring above the flooded passage or even digging a sump in it.

There are really 3 options here.

1) Wait out the water. The figure being quoted is 4 months until the end of the rainy season. 4 months in a cave is a loooooong time. And it's going to keep raining, which means their dry spot might not be so dry for long. It also raises other issues that make it less than ideal.

2) Drill a bore shaft like a mine rescue. This is probably the "safest" option, but it's also the most logistically intensive. Getting a drill up into the mountains is not going to be easy. They weigh like, 30 tons, and depending on the type, require a staged boring operation. The terrain sucks, locating them topside sucks, overall the whole thing sucks. It would also take a decent amount of time to actually get the hole to where the kids are. The Chilean mine rescue took a month of drilling, and that's after they knew where they were and already had bore holes through which they were able to resupply the miners. That was to 700m.

3) Teach the kids to swim out. You don't have to teach the kids to be cave divers. You need to teach the kids to equalize and remain calm, follow a line, and move slow and easy, purge a FFM, purge a mask, swap regulators. Really they don't even need to know how to swim. It's not a massive push dive, it's sump diving, of which there's at least one no-mount restriction. That is the difficult part because you cannot control the kids once you get to the restriction. However, put them in a full face mask with comms so the Thai divers can talk them through it, and you maximize their chances of getting out alive. No-mount restrictions are no joke, but they're not impassable. We do it all the time in cave diving, and while I'm never super comfortable with them, I'm also not peeing myself at the thought. Given the right kind of support, training, and psychological preparation, the kids will be able to do it. Remember, most of these kids are half the size of the divers that made the push. That all helps. Hell, you'll probably turn a couple of them into future cave divers.

They appear to be going with option 3 as they've already started teaching the kids how to dive. They're already improving the cave to hedge their bets against anything untowrd happening, running lines that can be used to pull as opposed to simple cave line, staging tanks along the whole route through the sumps, adding auxiliary lighting, etc. They're doing everything they can to maximize their chances of success, and the Brits are the best in the world at this type of rescue. If it's gonna happen, they're the ones that are calling the shots on how it goes down.

My opinion is based on 1) being a cave diver, diving in squirrely places where you have to take your stuff off to fit, miles from air, 2) having family in mining who know a hell of a lot about that side of things, and 3) being familiar with those CDG guys, their qualifications, and their track record of doing stuff like this. You want to pull someone out of a deep cave, call the Finns, you want to pull someone out of a sumpy mud hole, call the CDG. This is a sumpy mud hole and they've got the best guys in the world leading the way.

Looks like they are running out of time.  Oxygen levels are going down, presumably because the sheer number of rescuers in the cave breathing it up.

Agreed. Everyone is acting like they have to teach these kids to be the next Brett Hemphill or something... just teach them enough to stay alive for enough time to be ferried through the no-mount restrictions. None of the maps I've seen show a continuous swim back to the surface, it's only the low "traps" in the cave passage where water is pooling up from the rains.

The discussion seems to be going round and round as if there is a good or safe method to getting them out of that cave. Right now it seems like the options are wait months (probably won't work unless they can find a viable oxygen delivery system to replenish what they're utilizing out of the air in the cave), drill to them (seems basically impossible as they don't know exactly where they are and the topside terrain is poor for that), or swim them out.

You don't have to teach them to dive. You have to teach them to keep a regulator in their mouth in zero vis conditions. How to equalize their ears.  And lastly to always keep a hand on the pull rope or tether.

They don't even need to know how to swim if they have divers pushing/pulling them through. And you don't even have to be a good swimmer, just be able to bicycle kick with fins.

The only thing you can't teach them is to not panic.

Yep. Looks like they have 5 out last I've heard.  Good work by the rescuers.

These are great, and really highlight the sacrifices a LOT of folks made to make the amazing rescue happen as successfully as it did.

Glad I peeked in here to check out this thread; I had missed this particular thread since I was following the larger thread over in GD.