WEBVTT 00:00:00.720 --> 00:00:25.060 Welcome to the Caving Stories Podcast. Episode one: Trapped Underground. Three cave rescues against the clock. Every story in this episode comes from Caving Stories on YouTube, where these stories are animated. Find the channel at youtube dot com, slash, at caving underscore stories. 00:00:25.160 --> 00:00:39.440 It was the twenty-third of June, twenty eighteen, at Tham Luang cave, in Thailand. A youth football team, the Wild Boars, had decided to explore the cave, to celebrate some new members joining the team, and one of the players' birthdays. 00:00:48.160 --> 00:00:55.360 There were twelve boys, aged between eleven and sixteen, and their twenty-five-year-old coach, Ekapol Chanthawong. 00:01:07.160 --> 00:01:23.080 The cave stretches about six and a half miles. Every year, in the July monsoon season, it floods completely, and the water rises up to sixteen feet. Sudden floods there had already led to disappearances, and in that season, going in was strictly forbidden. 00:01:25.160 --> 00:01:32.920 At the entrance, the boys left their bicycles and backpacks. They had no idea those things would become the key clue to where they had gone. 00:01:35.160 --> 00:01:45.960 About an hour later, as they tried to head back, the seasonal rains, which usually arrived in July, came early. The water flooded the cave fast, and blocked their way out. 00:01:46.010 --> 00:01:54.110 With no other option, the coach led the group deeper in, looking for higher ground, somewhere to escape the rising water and wait for rescue. 00:01:54.160 --> 00:02:07.049 They reached a place called Pattaya Beach, and for a while, they were safe. But the water kept rising, and pushed them even further into the cave. As time passed, fear began to spread among the boys. 00:02:07.099 --> 00:02:17.110 Outside, the parents noticed their children had not come home, and they alerted the authorities. The police found the bicycles and backpacks at the cave entrance. The boys had gone inside. 00:02:17.160 --> 00:02:32.400 But without the right equipment, or specialized people, a rescue was hard even to begin. On the twenty-fourth of June, the Thai Navy SEALs took over. Visibility underwater was terrible, and the divers had no experience of cave rescues. 00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:50.200 The heavy rain kept coming, and Thailand asked for international help. The story spread around the world. Cave diving experts and volunteers from many countries rushed to the site with specialized equipment, and soon, nearly a thousand people were involved. 00:02:52.160 --> 00:03:05.110 A large pumping system was installed to bring the water down, but the relentless rain made it almost useless. On the twenty-ninth of June, an electrical leak in the pumps left three rescue workers with minor injuries. 00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:13.110 Underwater drones with thermal imaging went in to look for signs of life. At first, they found nothing. 00:03:13.160 --> 00:03:24.600 Experienced divers felt their way along the walls in the dark, laying guide ropes to make the path in and out safer. At every air pocket, they surfaced and called out, hoping for an answer. 00:03:27.160 --> 00:03:40.760 When rescuers finally reached Pattaya Beach, it was completely under water. They found only a few pairs of the boys' trainers, and despair spread through the team. Many believed that after so many days, no one could still be alive. 00:03:42.160 --> 00:03:53.296 But two British divers, John Volanthen and Rick Stanton, refused to give up. On the second of July, after nine days of searching, they pushed even deeper into the cave. 00:03:53.346 --> 00:03:59.110 About two and a half miles from the entrance, they found them. All twelve boys, and their coach. Alive. 00:03:59.160 --> 00:04:11.420 Nine days without food, in total darkness. They were weak, thin and exhausted, but they could still answer. They had survived by drinking the water that dripped from the cave walls. 00:04:24.240 --> 00:04:40.190 When the rescue team reached Mark, they brought everything a man pinned in rock could need. Supplies. Communications wire, to set up contact with the surface. Food, water, heat packs. And most important of all, tools to open up the passage. 00:04:40.240 --> 00:04:49.190 The problems started right away. Even the smallest rescuer could barely reach Mark's head with one hand. 00:04:49.240 --> 00:05:01.900 The hammer drill, their main tool for widening the passage, could only be worked from awkward positions, and that limited what it could do. Each attempt to remove rock won them a small victory, measured in fractions of an inch. 00:05:07.240 --> 00:05:17.900 After every change to the rock, they tried to pull him out. They rigged webbing around Mark's wrists and pulled, while he pushed with his legs. Each failure made the ordeal harder to bear. 00:05:19.240 --> 00:05:35.820 Hour ten brought a crisis. Cold, dehydration and stress set off uncontrollable shivering. Every shudder scraped him against the rock, opening new abrasions. The pain grew worse, especially in his hips and shoulders, where the pressure points had turned into deep bruises. 00:05:44.240 --> 00:05:57.190 The rescuers recognized the signs of advancing hypothermia, and worked even faster. They passed in more heat packs, and covered whatever parts of him they could reach with emergency blankets. 00:05:57.240 --> 00:06:12.690 The drilling ran all night, in shifts. The noise rang painfully around the tiny space, and rock dust filled the air, stinging Mark's eyes and lungs. But every chunk of limestone that came out brought him a little closer to getting out. 00:06:12.740 --> 00:06:28.190 By hour fifteen, enough rock was gone from the critical corner that Mark could pull his knees up slightly. For the first time in more than half a day, he changed position. That small victory gave him the will to keep going. 00:06:28.240 --> 00:06:42.880 At a quarter to six in the morning, on the eighth of October, after eighteen hours without moving, the last attempt worked. As the rescuers pulled on the webbing around his wrists, Mark felt his body slide forward, through the S-bend they had widened. 00:06:47.240 --> 00:07:07.190 Moving again, after so long, sent waves of pain through muscles that had been pressed against stone for hours. Freedom didn't bring relief. It brought a new kind of agony, as blood flowed back into cramped muscles, and damaged skin dragged against the rock one last time. 00:07:07.240 --> 00:07:17.600 In the small chamber beyond the squeeze, the rescuers wrapped him in emergency blankets and got warm fluids into him. Even so, the journey out took twice the normal time. 00:07:21.240 --> 00:07:44.930 When Mark finally came out into the early morning sunlight, something had changed for good. Passages he used to see as challenges to overcome were now possible traps, to be judged with new respect. 00:07:44.980 --> 00:07:56.930 In Nutty Putty Cave, there was a section they called the corkscrew. The few who had made it through were small and flexible, and it took all their skill to work slowly through its panic-inducing twists. 00:07:56.980 --> 00:08:14.930 Past the corkscrew, the passage angled up for another five feet or so, then dropped over a rock ledge, with a sharp ninety-degree bend to the left. Until then, cavers had used the small space after the corkscrew to turn around, and head back through the hard part. 00:08:14.980 --> 00:08:29.260 Five years earlier, a caver named Brock Clark had got stuck in that corkscrew section. He was only five foot seven, and weighed a hundred and forty pounds, but he got wedged trying to turn around. It took rescuers fourteen hours to free him. 00:08:31.980 --> 00:08:51.930 Now John was in that exact spot. He was six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds, and he knew turning around here was not an option. The space was twelve inches high, with no room at the sides to curl his body for a turn. 00:08:51.980 --> 00:09:07.930 So he pushed forward to the ledge, and squeezed over the top of it. It was tight, but he thought he could see the passage open up below. He sucked in his stomach, pressed through the squeeze, and pulled himself forward on the rocks ahead. 00:09:07.980 --> 00:09:21.930 Now he was moving headfirst, angled downward. But ahead, it looked like there was room to turn around. What John didn't know was that no one had ever crossed that ledge before. He was in completely uncharted territory. 00:09:21.980 --> 00:09:42.930 Jammed tight in every direction, he kept his cool. There was an opening ahead. He was sure of it. He thought he was in part of the birth canal, where plenty of cavers had felt stuck, and been fine once they reached the other side. 00:09:42.980 --> 00:09:58.930 Past one more tight spot, he began to slide down. He was almost doing a handstand, holding his body up, trying to work out how to push himself backwards. There was still no way to turn. And now, he was upside down. 00:09:58.980 --> 00:10:14.930 Gravity was pulling two hundred pounds of him against the fading strength of his arms. He shouted to his brother Josh not to follow him, and to go back out. They talked through his options, and settled on moving forward, to try to turn around. 00:10:14.980 --> 00:10:28.880 He was collapsing onto his head and shoulders now, and he had to get out of that vertical position. His headlamp caught a hole in the floor ahead. It might lead to a bigger space. That gave him some hope back. They'd be laughing about this over Thanksgiving dinner. 00:10:33.980 --> 00:10:47.680 He made a slight turn, and headed for the hole. Exactly how he got into it is unknown. Maybe he slipped, hit his head, and went in already wedged. Or maybe he looked in and misjudged it, taking a dead-end fissure for an opening. 00:10:53.980 --> 00:11:11.930 Either way, John ended up in a small opening at the bottom of that tunnel, just eighteen inches by ten. Not much bigger than a laptop screen. He was wedged almost completely upside down, at a seventy-degree angle. 00:11:11.980 --> 00:11:26.540 For a while, he tried to push himself back up and out. It cost him everything he had. One arm was folded under his chest, the other trapped against a rock at his side. None of his straining was going to move him the five feet back up to the shallow tunnel. 00:11:33.980 --> 00:11:44.380 His calves and feet were still free, up in the passage, but his legs were jammed into the narrowest side of the hole, just eight inches across. He started shouting for Josh again. 00:11:44.980 --> 00:11:57.520 Josh knew what his brother had gone in to do, so the shouting was a bad sign. He made his way back in through the corkscrew, feet first this time, following John's voice up and over the ledge. What he found there stopped him. 00:12:04.980 --> 00:12:10.140 He could see his brother's legs sticking out of the rock, as if the cave had swallowed him whole. 00:12:13.980 --> 00:12:21.360 Josh couldn't pull him out. Neither could anyone who came after him. John was four hundred feet from the entrance, and a hundred feet down. 00:12:33.130 --> 00:12:47.080 John was wedged deep inside the cave, unable to move. Outside, a rescue team of a hundred people mobilized. The passages had so many sharp corners that they had to install heavy-duty pulleys at every single turn. 00:12:47.130 --> 00:12:56.420 Carrying a single piece of equipment into the cave took nearly an hour. And pulling him out of that seventy-degree crevice would very likely break both of his legs. 00:12:57.130 --> 00:13:10.420 By now, John had been hanging upside down for more than twelve hours. Blood was pooling in his head, unable to get back to his heart. His face was swelling beyond recognition, and fluid was building up in his brain. 00:13:11.130 --> 00:13:19.820 Gravity was pressing his organs down onto his lungs. They were too compressed to expand, and his heart was working harder and harder to beat. 00:13:23.130 --> 00:13:34.040 To keep John conscious and fighting, the next rescuer into the hole was Ryan. He'd been caving since he was four years old, and his father was one of the founders of the Utah Cave Rescue Team. 00:13:36.130 --> 00:13:50.980 Ryan crawled in just above John, fed him water through a long straw, and lowered down a two-way radio. John's parents and his wife, Emily, took turns talking to him. Emily begged him to hold on. But by now, John was starting to hallucinate. 00:13:52.130 --> 00:14:08.080 At four in the afternoon on the twenty-fifth of November, John had been upside down for nearly twenty hours. The pulley system was finally ready. Eight rescuers knelt in a line, gripping the rope, with Ryan at the very front, right by John's ankles. 00:14:08.130 --> 00:14:22.620 The rope pulled taut. The rock gave a faint, terrifying creak, and John's body inched upward. But no one knew that the back of the rock arch holding the rope had a razor-sharp edge. With every pull, it was slicing the anchor rope open. 00:14:25.130 --> 00:14:41.080 On the next heave, the rope snapped. The recoil fired two steel carabiners and a heavy pulley back like bullets, straight into Ryan's face. Half of his face was mangled, and his tongue was nearly cut in two. 00:14:41.130 --> 00:14:47.880 Ryan collapsed, unconscious. And John slid back down into the crevice, his head slamming against the rock. 00:14:50.130 --> 00:15:06.380 When Ryan came to, his mouth was full of blood, and his partners had to drag him out of the cave. Outside, his father Dave, with twenty-nine years of rescue experience, was terrified to see his son carried out covered in blood. But he knew John's situation was far worse. 00:15:08.130 --> 00:15:23.900 After Ryan was sent to hospital, Dave crawled into the hole himself. He tried to rebuild the shattered pulley system, and drilled new anchor holes into the rock. But by then, John had stopped responding, and could no longer help. That was the end of the last hope of rescue. 00:15:24.130 --> 00:15:40.080 At eleven fifty-six that night, after twenty-seven hours trapped, John was pronounced dead. Medical experts say a normal person would survive only about eight hours in that position. John lasted more than three times as long. 00:15:40.130 --> 00:15:50.420 It was the seventy-degree angle, and a hook-like ledge of rock snagging his ribs, that made it impossible to get him out. Breaking away the rock around him was considered, and rejected. 00:15:53.130 --> 00:16:04.080 John's body could not be recovered. His family agreed to let the cave become his final resting place. 00:16:04.130 --> 00:16:19.560 On the ninth of December, two thousand nine, rescuers used explosives to collapse the ceiling near his body, and sealed every entrance with concrete. Nutty Putty Cave was closed forever. 00:16:19.610 --> 00:16:34.020 Thanks for listening to the Caving Stories Podcast. If you want to see these stories animated, subscribe to Caving Stories on YouTube. Search for Caving Stories, or go to youtube dot com, slash, at caving underscore stories. See you underground.