Rescue crews in Thailand are working against the clock and Mother Nature to free the remaining boys who have been trapped inside a cave with their adult soccer coach for more than two weeks. After a brief dry spell, monsoon rains resumed during Monday’s hours-long extraction and don’t show any sign of letting up soon.
“Today was the best day, the best situation in terms of the weather, the health of the boys, our water management for our rescue effort,” said rescue-operation head Narongsak Osottanakorn after the first four boys were rescued from the flooded Tham Luang cave complex in Chiang Rai province Sunday.
Videos by PopCulture.com
The dry weather allowed workers to pump almost a foot of water from flooded portions of the cave to help in the complicated and dangerous rescue. But Monday, the rain set back in while four more youngsters were extracted from the cave system, bringing the total number of rescued boys to eight.
The first boy to emerge Monday was seen on a stretcher around 4:30 p.m. local time (5:30 a.m. ET), CNN reports. He was taken to the same hospital in Chiang Rai where the first four boys rescued Sunday are being treated.
Two more boys reportedly left the cave complex a short time later and were transferred to a medical facility on site, followed soon after by a fourth boy, says an eyewitness stationed at the entrance to the cave.
The 12 boys, all part of a youth soccer team, went missing with their 25-year-old coach more than two weeks ago. They were discovered last Monday by British volunteer divers huddled on a narrow rock shelf deep within the flooded caves. Since then, Thai and international divers and specialists have been strategizing how to safely extract the boys and their coach.
The flooded nature of the caves means that parts of the route of the dive are particularly dangerous, not only to the young boys, but also to the experienced divers, one of whom died last week while transporting oxygen tanks to the cave.
Osotthanakorn, the former governor of Chiang Rai, said Monday’s rescue involved many of the same divers who brought out the first four boys on Sunday. Officials said late Sunday they’d need to pause the operation for at least 10 hours to fill oxygen tanks that had been depleted during the first phase of the mission. Efforts were again suspended for the day Monday after the second set of four boys were extracted.
The boys rescued Sunday are recovering in a nearby hospital and had not yet seen their parents. CNN reported Monday that family members said they hadn’t been told which boys had been pulled out and which still remain in the cave 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from the entrance.
Thailand’s Health Secretary said last week that the rescued boys would need to be quarantined for one to two days before being allowed to see their families.
“We have to quarantine them for a little while due to fear of infection,” Osotthanakorn said.
“The next step is to make sure those kids and their families are safe because living in a cave has a different environment which might contains animals that could transmit any disease,” a hospital statement said.
