Here's a great write-up of the story from the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ti ... t-national
If you can't read it because it requires a subscription, the best final part is quoted here:
"Ideas came from every corner: a network of corrugated pipes the boys could crawl through; floating them out in body bags. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk began construction of a custom kid-sized minisub.
But rescuers were focused on three possibilities: diving, drilling and waiting.
Multiple crews scoured the slopes for a spot to bore an access hole. After testing more than 100 sites, only 18 were deemed even remotely viable. And even drilling into the right hole could cause a deadly cave-in.
Waiting out the rains was quickly dismissed by many of the rescuers. Unsworth cautioned them that flooding from northern Thailand’s monsoon season can last into winter, raising the possibility that the kids and their guardians would be perched on the cold, dripping slope for five months. Feeding them would require some 2,000 meals. And oxygen was proving to be a critical need just two days in. With more adults in the cave, O2 levels were dipping.
Saman Kunam, a retired Thai navy diver, was working to fix that on the night of July 6. He and his team were staging oxygen tanks along the flooded passage, with tubes to pipe it to the boys’ chamber. Navy commanders paced outside the cave’s mouth as hours dragged by without word from the team. The divers finally emerged seven hours later, carrying a lifeless body: Saman’s own tank had run out.
After officials announced his death at a morning briefing, even some of the boys’ families questioned the viability of having their sons dive out. They suggested that waiting for the dry season might be best, Nopparat, the coach, told The Post. The jubilation that erupted after the boys were found drained away.
Prayuth Jetiyanukarn, the robed abbot of the hilltop Buddhist monastery where the assistant coach often slept, penned a short letter to the young man, slipped it in a plastic tube and gave it to a Thai diver who promised to carry it in.
“Be patient. Try to build your encouragement from the inside,” it read, according to the abbot. “This energy will give you the power to survive.”
Save most or lose all
1:28
Trapped Thai soccer team receives dive lessons
Rescue teams in Thailand gave crash courses in swimming and diving on July 4 to a trapped soccer team as part of preparations to extract the team from a cave. (Reuters)
Inside the cave, though, were 12 soccer players, still trapped in deteriorating conditions. Preparations for a water exit were building.
Rescuers built a mock-up of the tight passage with chairs. They practiced with local boys of the right size in a school swimming pool, perfecting the muscle memory they would need in the cave, said the U.S. Air Force officer.
Inside the cave, the boys and their coach told their rescuers they were ready to go.
“They were the ones who needed the least convincing,” said U.S. Air Force Maj. Charles Hodges, who led the American team and was so new to his new posting that his belongings had not arrived in Okinawa, Japan.
On July 6, the American military and Thai SEALs took a jointly concocted plan to senior Thai government officials. The interior minister was among those who arrived at the cave entrance by motorcade. Using Unsworth’s maps and his understanding of the chamber’s topography and hydrology, they pressed their point to about 60 representatives from the civilian government: It was time to act, even though they fully believed that some of the boys would not survive the swim. Their message: Save most of them now or lose all of them soon.
“You can wait until that finite window of time is over,” Hodges said he told Thai officials, “and I can almost guarantee you that all of them will die.”
The Thai interior minister requested that Hodges and about eight others go into a private room. He wanted to hear their plan again. Hodges explained the mission’s two parts, emphasizing it would take an entire day of preparation before the first boy would be pulled through the water. The Thais would continue to search for a drilling site if the diving plan failed.
They got their green light.
Hundreds of rescuers with equipment swarm the area around the cave on July 6, the eve of the mission. (Linh Pham/Getty Images)
On July 7 — two weeks to the day since the boys went missing — the rescue plan, while not publicly acknowledged, was underway.
Air tanks were stashed along the muddy passageways, enough for the 12 boys, their coach, the four SEALs who had embedded with them, and the 18 divers who would carry them out. Riggers strung a web of static ropes for hoisting the cocoon-like stretchers over vast fields of jagged rocks.
By 10:30 a.m. on July 8, the core team of 18 divers was in the water: Among them, Brits, Thai SEALs and diving buddies from the Gulf of Thailand beach resort of Koh Tao.
One group made its way to the final chamber. By the time the divers emerged, the players and Coach Ek, as Ekapol was known, had elected the boy who would go first. Officials have refused to identify him, but friends and parents said he was Mongkol Boonpiem, a 13-year old with a lucky name: “the auspicious one.”
The wet suit, the smallest they had, still did not cling to his emaciated frame like it should. They readied the mask, attached to a tank filled with 80 percent oxygen. The rich mixture would saturate his tissues, making him easier to revive if he stopped breathing.
Richard Harris, an Australian anesthesiologist and cave diver, gave the boy a final assessment. The boy was given what Thai and American participants described variously as a muscle relaxant or anti-anxiety medication. A panic attack in a chokepoint no bigger than a manhole would almost certainly be fatal.
Finally, the boy was swaddled in a flexible plastic stretcher — akin to a tortilla wrap, Hodges said — to confine his limbs and protect him from the cheese-grater walls. And then, with his teammates watching, they pulled him under the murky water.
The original plan had called for two divers — one in front of the stretcher, one behind. But that configuration was scrapped as too bulky for the shoulder-width passages and elbow turns.
“Having that second person provided you nothing,” the U.S. Air Force officer said.
Instead, a diver kept the swaddled boy in a body-to-body clinch for as much of the swim as possible, the officer said, handing the boy over to a fresh diver after his designated stretch. Keeping the child warm was critical.
“Even then the divers would get cold,” the Air Force officer said. “That is a lot of time in the water, and water is constantly running in there because of the flow, so that pulls that body heat away even if you have a wet suit.”
The worst portion of the swim was the last one, a deep tubular swoop that held the water like a sink trap. All told, it was a grueling two-hour trek through muck-filled passages.
“It is crawling through mud and underwater tunnels, and you can’t see your hands,” said Erik Brown, a Canadian diver who was among the 18.
But it was the end of the deadliest part.
“Fish on!”
The divers lifted the boy, and the crew at the edge of the water pulled him out. Their dry, final passage out was lined with more than 100 rescuers. One of them, the U.S. Air Force officer, put his ear to the boy’s mask.
He was breathing. And now, the rescuers could, too.
“It was a huge weight off our shoulders,” the officer said.
'It was a little dicey'
1:23
First boys emerge from Thai cave
The first boys from a group trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks emerged from underground on July 8. (Reuters)
They got three more out that day, four the next and five on the last. They were hard to distinguish with their face masks, apart from Coach Ek, who still had his wolf-shaped ring on a finger. With each repetition, they grew more efficient.
On July 10, a helicopter’s lights shone down on the town of Mae Sai, its whir breaking through the night sky. Celebrations erupted — the last boy was alive, on his way to the hospital. Rescuers cracked open beers, hugging and trading high-fives.
Then they caught themselves. Four Thai navy SEALs were still in the deepest chambers, making their way out after volunteering to keep vigil with the boys.
Disaster almost struck.
The pumps had held the water at bay until the last moments, when one of the industrial-sized hoses burst, pouring water back into the cave. The divers who stayed made a run for it.
“Guys started diving down this hill and trying to get out,” said the Air Force officer, who was the very last person out of the cave. “It was a little dicey.”
In town, drivers honked car horns in the streets. Family members rushed to the eighth floor of the hospital in Chiang Rai, an hour away. There, crowds gathered behind barriers flanking the entrance and cheered every arriving ambulance. Inside, doctors declared the Wild Boars in good health overall, releasing video of them waving from their group ward.
After 21 days together in darkness, they were still side-by-side in the bright fluorescence of a welcoming world.
Panaporn Wutwanich, Jittrapon Kaicome and Katcha Rerngsamut contributed to this report. "
