BANGKOK — A soccer team of 12 Thai boys and their 25-year-old coach trapped deep in a cave complex are being given rudimentary diving lessons on Wednesday even though none of them know how to swim.
The 11-day drama has riveted the country and much of the outside world after the young soccer players, ranging in age from 11 to 16, disappeared while exploring the vast Tham Luang cave complex and then were trapped by rising floodwaters.
Divers finally found them huddled on a patch of dry land in one chamber, but getting them out remains a dilemma. The 2.5-mile journey through winding, flooded passages is only something for the most experienced divers.
Thai authorities are also hoping to remove enough water, so perhaps the boys could escape by foot. After pumping out 120 million liters, water levels have already fallen by 30 to 40 percent amid unseasonably sunny skies, they said Wednesday.
If the boys can be trained up and the water sufficiently reduced, an extraction could happen within days, they added.
At the rescue site on Wednesday afternoon, Thai soldiers conducted their first evacuation drill — locking arms as they formed a column from the cave’s entrance to a field, where 13 ambulances were waiting to bring the group to the hospital.
The drill simulated what a rescue would look like and how the boys would be transported to a hospital when they are eventually freed from the cave.
More rains are predicted for the weekend, however, and Thailand’s monsoon season will stretch until September, causing some officials to predict it could be months before the boys get out.
Videos released Wednesday by the Thai navy, which is overseeing the effort, show the boys in apparently good spirits, introducing themselves to the camera, with their palms pressed together in the traditional greeting.
Another video shows a Thai doctor, who spent the night with them in the cave, treating their cuts and bruises and joking with the boys, many of whom appear to have new clothes and were wrapped in foil, heat-retaining blankets.
[Meet the British ‘A-team’ divers at the center of Thailand cave rescue]
Thai authorities have emphasized that they will not endanger the boys’ lives during the extraction and will only do it when it is “100 percent safe.”
“The water is very strong and space is narrow. Extracting the children takes a lot of people,” Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan told reporters, according to Reuters. “Now we are teaching the children to swim and dive.”
After days of solitude, the boys are now receiving a string of visitors, including rescue divers and health professionals and they are being fed liquid, high-protein food.
Divers are also attempting to string a fiber-optic cable through the caves to give them phone contact with the outside world and their families.
The boys were first found by a pair of British divers who described a harrowing three-hour round trip through narrow passageways flooded with water while trying to fight a strong current — indicating the magnitude of the challenge to bring them out along the same route.
The world’s attention has been riveted to their story, which echoes the tale of the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped for 69 days nearly a half-mile below the surface in 2010. Engineers there eventually drilled a vertical hole to reach their chamber, and all the miners were pulled to the surface one by one.
The complexity of the Thai cave in the northern province of Chiang Rai with its honeycomb of chambers and passageways, however, makes drilling a hole as an escape route an unlikely option.
“They shouldn’t be ashamed to be scared,” Omar Reygadas, one of the trapped Chilean miners, told the Associated Press. He ascribed his comrades’ survival to faith, prayer and humor. “Because we were scared, too. Our tears also ran. Even as adult men, we cried.”
Jittrapon Kaicome in Chiang Mai and Paul Schemm contributed to this report.
Read more
A boys’ soccer team trapped in a Thai cave has been found — nine days later
Rain, high water complicate cave search for Thai soccer team
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news
Read Again https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/thai-authorities-put-together-rescue-plan-for-trapped-boys/2018/07/04/756cab9c-7ef9-11e8-a63f-7b5d2aba7ac5_story.htmlBagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Thai authorities hope for diving lessons and good weather to save trapped boys"
Post a Comment