On May 19, a group of seven men entered a cave in the Xaisomboun province of central Laos, hunting for gold deposits in the rocky underground terrain. Heavy monsoon rains struck while they were inside. The exit flooded. The men were sealed in.
What followed became one of the most watched rescue operations since the 2018 Thai cave rescue, and it is not over yet.
The rescue team had hoped to be able to pump the water out of the cave, but five days of those efforts had not succeeded. The scuba option became the last resort. Finnish cave diver Mikko Paasi told CBS News the decision came with significant risk for both the miners and the divers. The waters inside are murky, filled with dead ends and knife-sharp rocks. Panic in that environment could be fatal.
Paasi and his fellow divers essentially sandwiched the first miner between them to lead him through the partially submerged cave. He described it as a “trust-me dive”, conditions that challenge world-class divers, with no time for detailed training. “It’s not a nice place to dive,” Paasi said. The first man emerged alive on Friday after a two-hour operation in near-total darkness.
Saturday brought a development nobody had predicted. As divers prepared to go back in and retrieve the remaining four men, the situation resolved itself. “I was literally about to head into the cave myself when all of a sudden we heard all these cheers and spun around, and four very muddy miners just suddenly emerged out of the cave on their own,” Australian cave diver Josh Richards told ABC News. The sustained pumping effort had finally lowered the water level enough for the men to crawl out unaided.
Social media video showed them hugging each other and crying on land as medical teams rushed in to assess their condition. Five of the seven are now safe. Two remain missing deep inside the cave system.
As of Sunday morning, heavy rains have refilled the cave to the second chamber, preventing divers from re-entering until pumps can lower the water again. Paasi told the Associated Press that the five survivors reported a narrow crack in the fifth chamber, the deepest point rescuers have reached, that may lead to a sixth chamber. “This was the only place that we haven’t checked in the mine,” he said. “It gives us hope.”
With two men still unaccounted for and rains complicating every hour of the search, the race is not over.