Craig Challen: Thai cave rescue

you know this is a really good news story but and I think you know there's such a wide interest in it because there's something you know for everyone obviously there's something in it for the thing the adventurers and specifically the cave divers the mothers have got an interest in this and the kids have gotten the normal man in the street who that's completely beyond his normal experience but everybody seems to just have their their interests captured by and you know anybody or well I've now got the unusual experience if I get recognized when I go walk down the street and everybody wants to come up and talk to me about it it's just a really weird thing and of course we had absolutely no idea how big a story this was while we're in Thailand we've been interested in it because we cave dives is caving story and you know we had some direct communication with the British guys that were on site before us as well so we've taken an interest but we didn't know that it was all over the newspapers and the TV worldwide there are a lot of reporters on site and our hundreds of members are reporters on site that we were protected from them you know a friend friend of mine was in Russia for the World Cup and he told me that the Ty Cobb Rescue had pushed the World Cup off the front pages of the newspapers in Russia so when they've happened we knew that we had a bit of a story on their hands as a result of that has some familiarity with the story and I'm not going to just do a blow-by-blow expose of exactly what happened because we'll probably just be telling you a lot of stuff that not already I'll leave time for questions at the end because I have found enduring talks that are the most productive time has been the questions as always a few new ones and we'll see how we go so feel free to ask anything you want so this is the sign at the entrance to the cave and you probably can't read that but it says danger from July to November the cave is in flooding season the boys went on the 23rd of June and that was regarded in that area as a perfectly acceptable thing to do even the cavers every bit about concern Unsworth there's the Godard subsequently became famous a British paper over there who was the first real person of claiming expertise on the site and the one that got everybody else interested in what was going on here he was actually going to go caving in this cave the next day on Sunday the 24th of June it was all said and he said there's no reason why he wouldn't have gone so it's not like these boys did something really stupid going in there it was just an adventure but they went off on there wasn't the first time they've been in there and it just went a bit long that had had a bit of a bad luck there was I think principally some of the Western media was on a bit much search to find a scapegoat they were looking for you know particularly the coach as to whether he would have any culpability one of the really pleasing things that came to me now that this was in the Thai culture they don't have this blame culture that we seem to have visited on us in western countries these days you know they're all everyone that we had any contact with was at this very fatalistic attitude of well what will be will be and you know people are going to live their lives and let's just get on with it instead of having to worry about who we're going to find responsible for this so that was a really refreshing thing for me I have the previous slide just showing us no doubt many of you aware but the cave is right up in the most northern part of Thailand right near the border of the n-nah and Laos and very mixed cultures up there it's tropical rainforest there rainfall spent two and a half meters a year so they quite used to that and this is the cave itself obviously so just for clarity because it is important for the risk of the story the boys were 2.4 kilometers inside the cave so the entrance there's what's essentially a dry section for the first three chambers and this guy's ypres bet 500 meters in a chamber 3 which was the dive base there is one duck under between chambers to a chamber 3 where you have to a short dive about 10 meters and then from there this is after the flooding so this was all dry when the boys went in and I've got to say they did really well to get in 2.4 kilometers and if we've gone in caving so I do dry caving as well we would have thought that was a pretty sporting afternoon out to get 2.4 kilometers into the cave and then back out again there's some pretty tight restrictions a lot of cruel ways some of it would have been wading through stagnant water that's in the cave all the time anyway after divers chamber 3 there's a series of just cut underwater cave passage and then what we call canal passage which is where you can't get out of the water but there's air above the water so you can either wait or swim through with your head in here that works down all the way through to chamber 7 now this is where I was stationed during the rescue there's water here so that from where the boys were about 300 meter on some of diving then they have to come out of the water have all their kid taken off get carried across a dry section of a bit 50 meters which is beaches through some shallow sort of bubbles and then over a rocky section then at this point back in the water again and get dived out the whole trip from here back to chamber 3 it was about a three-hour journey on the first day we did get quicker and so we really listed our game over the three days of extractions and we were down to not much more than two hours by the third day so when we rolled up we were faced with this there's no pictures that really show though just how busy the site was I've got no idea how many people were there on site we've heard everything from five hundred people to ten thousand I think they were probably about a thousand people there several hundred journalists and lots of volunteers directly also I'm going clean the wallet rented the cooking and then all the masses of time military so occasional weird Thailand very martial Society I've got a military government at the moment anyway but even without that the army in particular they impose themselves on everything that happens services as we subsequently found out very rigid hierarchy that you have to work your way through in order to get any decisions made or get reaction it was a very busy place lots of ambulances this gives you an idea of what the conditions were site become fact you can see that is just about six inch thick mud the whole thing was pretty bad even at the beginning of the rescue by the time you had a thousand people running around and rain every day just got worse and worse about the day before we arrived they were on ten I spent the whole day bring in truckloads of gravel leaves that are rated based stuff they put that down in most places that were heavily trafficked life's got a lot better after that but I can tell you it was still pretty horrible that's another picture of bump we were confronted with with this sign I would say anybody that's had anything to do with oxygen it's not that dangerous really but they were pretty convinced that it was going to blow the entire campsite tookies them come we thought this was a little bit of using it's probably a bit more of a divers in joke take a photo of that okay so this is our working map that we had up in the dive center of power planning there's a pretty complex operation there weren't that many people involved so the core of the recovery operation was the four British divers and the two of those Rick Stanton and Jonathan Antin they were the two first on-site and that's a normal thing with cave rescue because the British have a great organisation the British address their council they do a lot of rescues in the UK and so a couple huge caving areas in Somerset and up in Yorkshire and they always seem to be doing a rescues because of this they've got this really good structure and organization around ER now most of the rescues they do most the stories that I hear seem to be of sheep that are forward into sinkholes or something like that I would say minimize recovering a sheep you still got an uncooperative patient and we just might be you know in various degrees of extremists and they do get a lot of practice at rapid call-out and deployment get into action do the job that needs to be done and then they go home again and these guys have been involved in the only two other cave diving rescues that I'm aware of and so lots of caving rescues happen as in dry case usually when somebody gets injured they fall down a pitch but they'll break the leg or something like that need to be hauled up out of the cave that's that's a common thing there's lots of entrapments in caves because of water usually the case with that will be people go caving in the dry cave it'll rain outside they'll get trapped in there they'll wiped out for a day or two and then the water will go back down and they'll walk back out again so that also happens all the time there are at least three or four of those that I'm aware of last year in fact two of those happened in Mexico at the same time in two case next door to each other two members of the same expedition that's a common thing the only two cave diving rescues that I'm aware of that have been done one was in Yorkshire and a cave called sleep skill where two guys went in Saturday afternoon it rains water started coming up this is a cave of floods completely so the water in about 12 hour period will go right up to the roof so they were going to drown they were like one of the wives called it in though they had a native back home and the cave rescue guys went in these guys were not divers so they had to basically teach them their dive and dive them out got them at one o'clock in the morning and the same Sun came up the next day the cave was completely flooded the other one that happened was in Mexico on the guy that was Rick Stanton one of those leader that was on site in Thailand British military they weren't really cavers but they had some caving experience they went to Mexico and went into this cave where they were gonna sleep the night and then come back out again the cave flooded they were stuck there so Rick came out from the UK with Joyce and Melanson and they went in we're going toward the guys to dive and but I've dealt with them and that was agent there in both of those cases you had adults that were you know either experienced cavers or at least familiar with the cave environment they spoke English and they were you know generally competent sort of people I mean you hope the military and they're fairly cool heads and also the distance involved was about 250 meters in both cases so compare that to the Thai rescue where we had non-english speaking children with you know none of us have gotten even a word of Thai so there was no communication to go on apart from via translation 2.4 kilometers inside the cave and they're barely comparable situations what we've got with our schema here these post-it notes represent the the divers of the different nationalities and when when we're working on the plan will close these and each station where we going that's the entrance to the cave it's a really pretty kind basically we really enjoy we would have enjoyed the first part but it was just absolutely littered with junk all the way through so you probably would have heard a lot about attempts to pump all the water out of the cave you can't really gain an appreciation of the scale of this but I'd say this room is probably about 20 meters across 15 meters high freqs and those I would say six or 8 inch imposes so they're massive and there was a huge amount of water being pumped out of this cave whether it made any difference or not I don't know I can only have helped our feeling was that at this it was really keeping up with the water that was just seeping into the cave further up any right and I don't think it probably made a difference to the we would have gotten out anyway but you know it can only have helped and you know when they they were trying everything right when this situation first appeared the the ties they didn't know what to do so they would just have a go they had thousands of people up in the hills looking for alternative entrances to this cave they had a huge big drill rigs that they were about until it was called off because they realized that was futile but they were about to disassemble these drill rings get and fly them in by helicopter up up to the top of the hills and start drilling down from the top of the hills the problems with that were first of all was 26 and 800 meters above when the cave was to to weather the terrain above was and the second thing is that there was no really accurate survey of the cave say they were they would have been guessing as to where to plan the drills complete waste of time not everybody wants to feel they're contributing those are the pumps these are massive things these are about this sort of big and when they were carrying these things in this photos around if they'd have about 10 guys of the big pole that all put that on their shoulders and carry theirs into the cove that must have been a horrendous experience and when we were diving back through the last part of the summer we would hear these things from probably about 50 meters away just as harm that it get louder and louder and you say you knew you were getting pretty close to home this is in chamber 2 now I will say that there's lots of photos of everywhere up until chamber 3 and there is virtually nothing from inside the cave and what there is is a particularly poor quality so we're pretty much all gonna see stuff from just into as far as dive base I did have a head mount video camera on the last day and which would have had some fantastic footage but when we got out on the last night we just threw it out all their gear on the ground and went off to drink beer thinking we'll look after that the next day came back the next day and the camera was gone so I don't know where that ended up I had to buy myself a new camera but I'm not nearly as upset about that as missing out that footage because it would have been a pretty good Oreca anyway that's gone so when you're walking in a lot of it is the sort of what we call stream passage so you walk about three or four hundred meters up this sort of stuff it's quite easy to walk through about probably a foot deep and don't need both of them and also you're gonna climb up a few of these mud banks as well and the mud in this place is pretty horrendous so it's it's all you can do to climb up this stuff even with a hand line on your feet slipping out in front of you pretty easy to get back down you just slide down so you can actually see here this is just approaching the area between rechamber 2 & 3 the water gets deeper and then and the roof comes down and you have to dive up though for about 10 meters or so towards the last day the water level did drop down a couple of feet and so you could actually walk through doing what we call it caving of roofs if which is where there's just talking about six inches or so above as long as you hold your face up you can breathe as you go through so that's obviously what these guys are gonna do no dive gear there this is dive base that's pretty much what it looked like they had massive resources in here so lots of like big huge power cables going in there about as thick as my risk to run those pumps and also you see on the next slide of their stacks and stacks of dive cylinders here so we reckon we had about 400,000 dive cylinders and we would just go and pick up with what we wanted for the day so we were using three cylinders each we're just going to grab them off the pile use them for the dive in fact they would carry them down to the water for us we'd clip them on and go and then when we got out at the end of the day throw them on the ground and these things would transport themselves outside get refilled and then bring themselves back up again and plant themselves on the top of the pile don't I wish that real life was like that but not to be there were probably about three or four dozen of the Thai Navy SEALs camped in this train for 3 24 hours a day so they were there for the duration I don't really know what they were doing they were very helpful to ask them they're really good at carrying heavy things these are a couple of the European divers so I was about to say before the core of the dive team was the four British divers and the Australians myself and Richard Harris and then there are another five of what were called the European divers so for the most part they were dive instructors living in Thailand expats are all cave divers not it's sort of medium to high level not not elite level guys but really confident divers so a couple of Danes of German a check and there was also Canadian I don't know how he got included in the European divers but that's that's where we were so this is Ivan and Eric they're just having a little bit of a rest at the end of the day this is the only photo I've got for you tonight of what it's like actually inside the cave you can probably go in an appreciation of the colour of the water the first dive that we did we could see moderately well I'm probably a couple meters or so that progressively deteriorated and by the last day the visibility was down to about 10 centimeters so basically you might as well have had your eyes closed coming out for that two kilometres in fact some people do find it easier in those conditions to just close their eyes because you're not trying to see and struggling against this poor visibility I don't think that to look at you your computer or your watch you seriously have to have it in front of your face like this this is a chamber for which is one of the or the first small chamber you can just pop your head up swim about 20 meters and then you go back underwater again that's been all there is to say that this this is our guideline as well so whenever we cave diving we always run a continuous guideline to the surface in case you do need to come in visibility conditions normally it's about three mil braided line so it's not very strong it's just there for guidance but what we put in in this occasion is 8 mil rope and so you could actually drag yourself a lot more stuff it was really good that was by far the quickest and the easiest way of getting out this is a pretty reasonable representation of how we brought the boys out the only criticism I would have of this graphic which came from the BBC is this big looping line here we try and take the line as tight as we can so that otherwise you just ask him to get tangled up in this line here but the patient what we call the inner package was all the self-contained unit so he had his cylinder attached for the front of him a there's a buoyancy compensator that he had like a vest around his neck so that could just be inflated or deflate a little bit to it just say as neutrally buoyant in the water full face mask and he'd be carried along so this was a preferred way of transporting the boys with them in front of you and below you because that way you could protect them the divers are wearing a helmet the boys are not because they've got full face masks on you can't put a helmet on at the same time so they had really very little protection then a neoprene hood and after the first day we realized what a beating they were taking so we were stuffing foam polystyrene and the top of the hood as well and that gave them the bit of protection but you're coming out blind and there's this big stalactites hanging down from the roof you don't see them coming and so you'll be swimming along you're trying to you know you're not obviously going as fast as you can but you still going to expedite the process they're going to keep a reasonable rate of progress and you just be swimming along and also banging your head hits here and swim on another 20 meters and it happens again listen it seems no way that you can avoid it if you think that after the first couple of days you'd start to learn where all these things are but they still come out to get you by swimming with the patient below it's like this we stood your best chance and try and get them behind you as well stand the best chance of protecting them that was really one of the reasons why they didn't need to be anesthetized because these guys like copped and actually flogging they really didn't I reckoned they would have been pretty sore without it so that's a reasonable representation a couple of days before this is so also from the BBC the media experience was quite edifying for me I'm cynical enough to know that you shouldn't believe anything at all that you rated a newspaper or see on TV nevertheless you you fall into this trap you know you see it you think oh I suppose they must be true because why would they lie about it there was so much stuff in this whole experience that was I don't know whether to call it bizarre or ridiculous or deceitful or what I mean when you see a drawing like this then you just think this technique was never suggested and and could never be suggested it's completely impractical some of the stuff we saw reported was just if you'll excuse me it was booked I don't know why they do this well I do these guys got deadlines to to meet and they've got to file something because there's such interest in it and so they'll just ask someone anyone whether they've been you know in a cave at some stage in their life and saying well what do you think about this how would you do it and that person will venture an opinion probably in all innocence oh you know I probably have one one dive behind and one diver in front and the diver in front would carry the boys cylinder and then the boy would swim along behind and he'd be tethered to one of the divers so there are yeah that sounds reasonable and they'll go away and report that and that becomes the received wisdom and anybody that hasn't done cave diving wouldn't know any better and so that is it's the way it's done the only thing I've got to say in the BBC's defense is that that graphic is a lot better than the next one this one I don't even know what to say I started counting the things that were actually wrong with this and I stopped at about ten I thought what's the point of continuing so if I could point at a few of a stupider things they've got their guideline along here and they've actually drilled anchors into the wall of the cave so somebody's being across 2.4 kilometers of cave underwater drilled holes at the wall and fixed all of this this line to the cave they're walking now I mean this is just you know some of it is deep some of those shallow in that none of it is walkable you know the justification for that is since divers can't use scuba things in this environment well we something is fairly successfully this guys just got a scuba tanks like underneath this arm here so these things weigh when they're full of air about 18 kilos or so so you try and sling an 18 kilo weight underneath your armor for three hours see how you're going if you can then you're a lot tougher than me this is I don't know what this is I think it's a common stable that's going through the the cave here hey that's it's just ridiculous so you know how anybody that calls themselves a reporter can put this I don't know it was a bit of a lesson for me what happened when they extraction started so this is on Sunday the 8th of July 9 o'clock in the morning they rounded up all the media off the site and move them out of the site and that had a couple of effects that the immediate effect was the anticipate one which was the life got a lot better for us up until then we had not been able to move around the site freely at all because we've just get mobbed by these guys and we ended up so we had AFP on site with us and they weren't allowed to dive because they were in cave divers but they ended up being bodyguards for us as we're moving around the side really after the media were moved out we can run around and do what we want to which was really good but the side effect which I hadn't expected that makes sense in in hindsight is that the quality of the reporting actually got a lot better after that day and I think the reason for that is that this high authorities got wiser about what they were doing and decided we'd actually better start releasing some information you know in a metered way and they had something to go on and that the truthfulness of it after some day you've got a lot better and started improving over the three days I think probably the the other aspect of it is that you know this has been going on for two weeks by the stage and they've run out of things to say completely so once the extraction started there was something real for them to report on and it got a lot better from what we can see this is a chamber 3 one of the boys I think this is on the last day in the stretcher so we did not use a stretcher while we were swimming them out they went into a stretcher when they reached the surface and we looked after there so there is a person inside there it's a little bit hard to see and there he is packaged up a lot better so he is still gotten the full face mask on for the rest of the trip okay there's his cylinder so we were breathing air while we were diving these guys we wanted to give them oxygen we couldn't get enough pressure of oxygen and the cylinders they didn't have any oxygen booster pumps for us so what we did was we've got as much oxygen in and then we topped it off with there just to get extra pressure in the cylinder so ended up they had 75 to 80 percent oxygen which is good enough these stretches are fantastic I've seen them before I've never seen them in use they're called skins and it's just a very light polycarbonate I think she that rolls up the ends roll up to perfect they feed and heads and then you can just drag these things or carry them pass them hand and they're in a rescue scenario these are the best things out a few pictures of getting them out the last 500 meters they had a high line setup up here and these were reaped by the cavers and climbers from Chiang Mai that came down they did a really good job - this is very professional the rigging that they put in place this trip out of the last chambers after the outside took about 25 to 30 minutes and there were hundreds and hundreds of people so basically just passing these guys from hand to hand or up the zip lines you may have seen photos like this of all these hundreds of volunteers on site cooking up this wonderful massive quantities of Thai food we didn't see any of this I don't know why but they said I don't know whether and all gone home by the time we got out of the cave each night or why time or they just thought we didn't want it or anything but all we got was KFC I am NOT a fan at the best of times but I thought oh I suppose it's a bit of a treat the first night the second I thought I've been off this by the time this had been the only thing we got to eat for four days I was thinking I was gonna start looking like a chicken it's not really what we are not the best working food I don't think but that was what we had so we were happy we don't have the worst problems in the world here on the second night of extractions and it looked like this was all actually going to work so we had I always out of the cave by then the thing I can't stress to you enough is of this and what the limited prospects for success were so we honestly thought that we were going to have casualties and we thought there was a pretty reasonable chance we're going to have 13 casualties that none of these guys we're going to come out alive the nesset izing people and sticking their heads under water and swimming them out through a cave for three hours is not something that you and that is so you may have picked up on the fact that everybody was very secretive about the whole anesthetic thing and in hindsight Saints to the village know why with the cycles are bound to come out anyway but everybody involved from the divers Harry my dive buddy who's an anesthetist at the I had quite a lot at stake professionally I would say and the tile thorgy's everybody thought we're just going to be starting with you know live people inside the cave and we're going to be bringing out dead ones and there was no appetite whatsoever to be a full and frank with people about exactly what the plan was you know it's not like we were gonna get out of it and nobody was gonna know if it didn't work but we just weren't really feeling old about publicity and that was generally shared I mean the the authorities were very reserved but the end of the second day we've got a tout it's all going well and then everybody starts to cluster around but it get interested and we were about to go home on the second night home a little hotel down the road so we said to our guys that we're looking after us like call up the van we're going to go and came back ten minutes later and said the Thai Prime Minister is coming and they've closed the roads I thought no we're going to be here for hours we did not want to meet the Thai Prime Minister you know we just want to go home to bed we got ten hours to spend in the cave the next day it's already about 10 o'clock at night we just need some rest looks like we were stuck there and then Harry in this moment of divine inspiration says could we get an ambulance out that's possible I've gotta talk to the hospital so there's a field hospital just at the top of the camp we can talk to the doctors and listen yeah look we can get an ambulance see you guys right there so we wait and about ten minutes later the same day rolls up luck and we're like the doors popping and there's there's 12 nurses in the back of the ambulance who keep this company on a truth Bank so these are a real fans of ours and we had a great time in the back of the ambulance I took us all the way back to the hotel which is Bamberger 25 minute drive or so that's not what we were expecting though you get these little bonuses in this line of work the next day so it's three days of extractions got the fire out from the last day and then the next statement we said we'd like to go visit the boys so we went off to Chiang Rai Hospital is massive hospital there and that's really quite good 1,500 bed hospital and they had a whole floor to themselves which had been reserved that that started locking us down as soon as the extractions look like that we're going to actually happen and so they're all there pretty happy and the families are all on the other side of a glass wall and they're not allowed to meet with the kids and I didn't know what was going on there because we said I want to visit the boys and they said come right this way and not just straight off to the ward we're going to shake hands and have a little chat bit of a cuddle and carry on there were pretty good kids I knew one of them really spoke in English but we had a good time and that was pretty satisfying but the families are still stuck out there and they weren't allowed to see them for seven days after the rescue I don't know how you'd go trying that with any mothers in Australia it is the service in before us is very hierarchical Society and I think people just accept that you're gonna do what you get told there I have a lot more faith than a lot of other people do in these kids to just return to normal life I think well if you really want to screw the kids up you know it's probably don't worry too much about the locking them in a cave for two weeks but keep them away from their families second days afterwards that all probably do it for you one thing about these kids is they were making up the lost time with the eating so we showed up they knew who we were they pause for about 10 seconds have a chat and then they chow down again they were really a lot more interested in food than they were in us you may have heard of the episode this B crazed California billionaire now we were in the cave when he turned up so we didn't get to meet Ilan he was actually on site with his submarine and this is it in a pool I think this is in California at SpaceX the actual shell of the submarine is it's a lithium aluminium alloy and it's part of one of their rocket boosters I think it's the something to do with the that the pre mixing of the fuel before it goes into the combustion chamber to say ultralight you know super high-tech alloy whether it's simple for the caves or not I don't know I can report to you that this plan in case you're harboring doubt was completely impractical there is no possible way this could Everett worked I'm tempted to really say you know with my mouth and gate is this the best that some actual literal rocket scientists could come up with it really my interpretation is you've probably noticed in life there is a temptation for people that are experts in one thing to think that they're experts in everything and this seems to me to be a clear case of that I don't know if any of these guys had ever been in a cave before or not I mean we would like to own this because it could have some application in really big long range cave diving where you want to transport a lot of equipment through the cave but as a rescue item no chance you can see that the cylinder itself all looks pretty flesh but it's just got some canned straps here holding these cylinders on and some normal divers weight belts to to wipe it so they've been awful lot of buoyancy in this a light alloy is not something that you really want to make a submarine outdoor because it's going to sink so all you've got to do is an extra leave anyway to make it neutrally buoyant in the water there appeared to be no mechanism whatsoever for monitoring the patient or monitoring what he was breathing to so normally for this sort of apparatus you use a rebreathing over under you recirculate the gas scrub the carbon dioxide from it and then add oxygen as it's needed for metabolisms there was none of that as far as we can see all from we've had reported from any of the people that were there at the time so it was never going to work I mean good luck to me right everybody wants to contribute of the cynical amongst us might suggest that was more of a marketing exercise than an actual whole part of attempt to get those guys out of the cave but who really knows you know the really dumb strange aspect of the whole story was later on which you've probably all heard about where now I've got to say that though nuns with the the British guy he was a bit rude in his assessment of this super artists and he didn't you know hold back in his opinion of a lot ask so I don't think that is justification for someone that has got immense wealth and power in the world picking on some little guy and that seems completely unreasonable and lest you have any doubt there is absolutely no suggestion of any evidence whatsoever is doing anything untoward in Thailand in backing that would say that the British government and the Thai government have both been very happy to associate themselves with him and I'm sure that wouldn't have happened with doing some background checks just in case there was a grain of truth and I'd say he just seems like a straight-up guy I'm very happy to be his friend I think this day long is I did actually quite like the idea of owning a Tesla not allowed to now so it's a turn out the window there is an aviation aspect to this story you'll be glad to hear with when we turned up to leave and go back to Australia so this was the site there's a picture of all the bust up and the airport on all the billboards and everything all carrying on and I said there's going to be a ceremony okay kind of ceremony we were getting used to ceremonies by the stage and they took us into a side room and gave us a little training session so we were going to be presented with a gift from the king we had the the Kings representative who is this guy here that I take from his uniform to be some sort of Admiral so what we had to do and they were very strict on this and we had to practice it a number of times so you have to walk up to this first mark on the on the floor and you have to bow to the portrait of the king then you walk over to the Admiral and he's got the gift this gold bowl here so you shake hands with the Admiral and then you take the gift out of the bottle they were very careful to say don't take the dog bowl just take it out in a bowl and then you have to walk backwards because you're not allowed to turn into your back on the portrait of the king walk backwards to this mark here and then bow again and then you're allowed to turn it and walk back to the group or the next person is up so we did that I think we modeled by and did a reasonable job but there were two women in the in the Australian group in the Foreign Affairs Snuffy they got taken aside for a separate briefing where they were told how to curtsy to the portrait of the king the curtseying I gotta say was real flashed or if we did a better job with the bow in that I suppose that was probably fairly or addictive all we got out on the tarmac and we're presented with our personal transport back to Australia as a taxpayer I don't know if I'm all that happy with this I can tell you as an adventurer it was a great adventure and these things are absolutely enormous as a c-17 in case you haven't picked it inside you can fit several buses and all there is is a couple pallets of gear and a few people lined up and down the sides and that was it so off we went there were a couple of what looked like high school kids flying it they seem to do a fairly confident job that was that trip back to Australia we said on the jump seats in the back until we got bored after about 8 hours or so and they had the emergency evacuation stretchers in the back they're always in the back of those planes so learn to lay down on them and had a bit of a sleep until it was time to leave they have the front again that was a pretty fitting into the adventure I think and gives us an angle to be here tonight and I'm happy to take any questions so you've got what I Nancy last question first we have a sign that if you need to ask the question you wouldn't understand the answer for us we just wandering around in the bush and we see water flowing underground we've just got to know where it comes from yes so it's all a bit of fun for us so it wasn't the first time they'd been in the cave this was a thing that and kids do and people do in that area and it's not an unreasonable thing I mean there's not an inordinate amount of danger you know rest of its not withstanding no but it's an accepted thing so that better soccer training it was one of the guys birthdays and so they just decided for the afternoon they were going to go off and go with a cave it's certainly something I've done as a kid there are a couple of diseases that you can get in case the worst one is probably leptospirosis which you can catch from battle this cave was flooded bats don't fly around underwater so there was not going to be any leptospirosis in this cave they might have kept the kids isolated but they let us run around the countryside it was just ridiculous and you can't transmit leptospirosis from one person to another it's actually core from the meds here at them there was no basis whatsoever on them yeah I've heard that that was just a relation for it that it's not true they decided themselves so there has been a lot of question of debate about you know how did Harry decide who was coming first and all that sort of stuff that's all completely fabricated so we told them the first day we got there we dive in they were told them what was going to happen we took a note in that have been written by the Thai doctors saying exactly what the plan was and what was going to happen to them you don't have anything to eat on the morning give you a tablet than half an hour later again an injection in one leg and you get an injection another leg and then you've got to go to sleep we're going to stick you under water and you're gonna wake up in hospital they all thought when they got out there we're gonna have to ride their bike so and so thank shows the ones that lived further away so they would be as late home one thing I want to make clear is there was not really any great danger to it in the cave divers this is not really radical stuff weapon if much knulla caves on this and yeah we've gotten a death wish or anything like that so it was unbelievably dangerous for the boys but for us not so we had every confidence or I've got to get out so when that to be very clear as far as the search goes that was done by the two British guys John Blanton Rick Stanton with the help of Ben Roma months there's an expat Belgian so he was there for the first few days and then he left the site and they just progressively worked their way into the cave laying line they had a pretty good idea of where they would be if they were alive it was the only plausible place where they could be after the water and they could have retreated to you so what we subsequently found out when we visited them in hospital is that garni to this point where they were eventually found they're on the way back out again when they noticed the water was starting to come up in some places so they started running for the exit they've reached us up where the roof came down to the water so they had to dive under and the coach tried to rope with them so he tied that around his waist he tried to dive under and see if they can get through back up to err realize that was futile that wasn't going to happen so then they knew about this chamber nine sight that it was higher there so they ran back in to there they said that they got halfway out I don't think that's laws really I think he went a few hundred meters because I would have hit water long before halfway out so the search was over nothing magical about it to start at the beginning and progressively start working into the cave and so they got in there when they first got outside the British the cave was in pretty much full flood and luckily the water did drop over a couple of days and they were because it was under water when I was in full flood and that was what we were really worried about and what put the tide pressure on all of this was we knew this monsoon was coming these rains were going to be there any day and you know we'd be lying in the hotel at night listening to the rain on the roof and really wondering if we were going to be going in there the next day or not it was about a 12 hour reaction time in the cave and when the rain fell too when the water level started rising and that could have been any day and if that happened then it was was all over he might have heard some suggestions that they couldn't stay in there for the four months of the wet season and they supplied enough food that was not not plausible and we consider that as an option for about 10 minutes and we actually started working out how much food it would take and there was not enough physical room in the chamber where they were to get enough food to last them for four months so that was never going to happen quite conference you know what horrible infections and all other sorts of melodies they would have had so I thought that was not a survivable there was quite a lot of publicity in the media about that as well and that was based on oxygen monitor that went in the cave with Rick Stanton and they measured the levels at 15% I don't think that was true and I think it is very questionable the calibration of that monitor because when we were in there we didn't notice it when you don't notice the low oxygen levels be certainly notice building carbon dioxide and we had no sense that the air was bad but it was pretty stinky in there but with you know 13 people having been in there for two weeks there's no no sense of co2 build-up or bad air and when you've got flow in a cave especially this board has come from the surface it's fairly close to the service it's got high oxygen levels dissolved in the water anyway so that does tend to replenish the oxygen in the cave and also carbon dioxide is very soluble in water so that tends to get carried out by flowing water in the cave as well so I don't think that was really a concern question first they had no consciousness whatsoever it was surgical level anesthesia afterward eliminated every other way of getting them out and we knew that we were they were going to have to be dived out the question was would we be able to bring them out conscious you know could they essentially be taught to dive this was very influenced by another episode that happened so I told you before about the short dive between chambers 2 & 3 initially and I'll just expand on that meant so initially you could walk through there and the water level came up and you had to dive to get back when one of those flood pulses came through everybody piled out of there but there were four tie pump workers or electricians or something that was stuck in there left behind that nobody realized they were there and the British when they dived in there they found these four guys and they had to dive them back out because I didn't know when this water was going now this is way before the boys had been found and so they died these guys out and this is for 10 meters and two of those guys were completely freaking out at panicking and so these are you know adults and they've got to spend I've know what 15 seconds 20 seconds of the water and they were not handling that at all and so based on that and just what we know in this situation I mean the cave is a bit of an unnatural environment and everybody that dives in these can but they like this sort of stuff okay but a lot of people really don't I see lots of head nodding so I think this Agreement and them in the crowd here you know quite apart from them just panic if they panicked they see if it would have been all over you know they just got to not even take the face mask off but just dislodge it enough while they're waving their hands around to get water in then they gonna drown there's nothing the diver can do to help them in that situation and also they quite possibly take the diver out with them because rescues underwater attempting those is often a way of ending up with two bodies floating around in there rather than just one so we were very concerned about that these guys were copying a real flogging on the way out as well I mean there was you know it was pretty the physical process and there was nothing we could do we've minimized it as much as we could we couldn't stop it completely so we started with are we going to sedate them and then it just progressed from there two to four level of anesthesia there's not without a great deal of apprehension but I think it might side we can say it was the right decision main anesthetic agent was ketamine there's no reversal for that so they have to it's metabolized fairly quickly so usually about 45 minutes they wake up but they all had most of them about three or four top-up doses and as you give more top-up doses it has a cumulative effect so they take longer so on the the first day apparently someone took some hours to wake up after that we got a little bit less aggressive with the subsequent doses of anaesthetic and they did better better most of them are taking an hour to the last ones a couple of the bigger guys they woke up a bit quicker so virtually by the time they reached the field hospital they were starting to wake up then that was a lot better they were a bit deep than that they work out under water halfway down yeah look I can't really speak to the the incident itself all I know is that he ran out of gas what I will say is that the it does demonstrate that in the cave divers to deal in these situations so he was a Thai Navy SEAL these guys are very competent okay and they're very confident underwater and they're not nobody's at all but they did not have the specific skills required to operate in this environment and a lot of these guys that they're gas management was pretty hopeless to non-existent in a way they deserve a great deal of admiration because they would have had to go into these conditions knowing that they didn't have the skills and they weren't equipped to do this and they still did so you know in a sense you could say they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause and that is the biggest obstacle in Congress is is to get the emergency services to exceed operations to civilian divers and just to you know add to that story the for Thai Navy SEALs that read with the boys in a chamber nine we found out on the second last day that they didn't have any gas to get back out again they used all their gas getting in and so we had to take in on the last day extra syllabus so they could dive out and you know it's it won't surprise you to know that has caved on this we do actually pay quite a bit of attention yes yeah I just they didn't have training they were to quit the tune to mainly really no we were a little bit protected from that especially after the first night we were there and which was when the plan was being finalized we were getting ready they kept us up until about two o'clock in the morning with the meeting after meeting after meeting and we spent a bit after that and said we've got to be protected from this because we're going to operate all day long and they're pretty you know hard days the ultimate decision-maker was the time minister for the interior or something like that there was a whole structure around him but there are a lot of interest parties as well and we became aware that there was some sort of our G by G going on between the Navy and the army and they were jostling for position as in the sample of that you know the Navy of médicos started off in charge of the field hospital and then one day we rolled up to the site and they were out and the army were in charge of the field hospital and the the Navy you've been given this little tent over the side and they're all sitting there with their arms crossed pretty and grumpy I really don't know how well coordinated it was you know a lot of it was driven by they just didn't really know what to do and so they were trying everything and so they were there are a lot of you know don't delusions and people just giving stuff a go on going off down their own path we just tried not to get involved in that because we had our job to do Hey well two rolls so first of all I'm the only person in there that's got any sort of an aesthetic experience apart from Harry so your honor our profession and Anessa sizing dogs not that different to any surprising children as I don't know so Harry was in a chamber nine he would knock the guys out with one of the British guys he would be getting them kitted up making sure their breathing all happy that go through for this initial 300 meter dive and come out at chamber eight where I was stationed so my job was to get all their kit off them assess their medical condition so depth of anesthesia make sure they're still breathing obviously first of all I'm just you know secretions and their general condition about half of them at that stage had their first top-up dose and on the first day I was also teaching the other divers how to do anesthesia and you really gotta admire these guys so you had a fireman to IT guys and a rope access worker and we're teaching them on the fly how to assess depth of anesthesia and whether or not to give up top-up dose and then just do it for the night before they all gave the first injections they'd ever given in their lives which we were teaching them how to do that into a plastic bottle they got through that and away they went that was the first part of my role the second part was just transporting them over this event 250 metres or so of chambers seven and eight and then get them killed and back up again on the other side check that everything was okay and then set them off down the line [Music] okay someone Ludum to the British cave rescue council earlier so they have a mechanism when one of these events happen where they will contact the authorities in the target country and at the same time contact the British Foreign Office and they'll say we've done this before we have a structure in place we strongly advise that you get us on site and that all happened in somewhat less than a 24 hour period after they became aware that these guys were in so it was 48 hours before John Vaillant phonetic Stanton were on the site and they started searching it was day 9 when the boys were found and so the next morning after that they were in touch with us and also in touch with other guys from the UK I'm Jason Melanson and cristal arrived from the UK today before us where I've done the sixth on the Friday what's the call we now it all happened pretty quickly and I've got to give some credit to Foreign Affairs pretty easy to slag off the government once the call went out they knew that we wanted to be mobilized that all happened very quickly and very efficiently and I was super impressed with defend the whole way through they have got some really switched on people working for them really well-organized they knew what to do and even if they didn't know what to do when we wanted something to happen it just we know the British guys from we've done stuff with them in the past I'm in particular extension whom we know very well so he really asked for us military were on site there was a deployment from Okinawa and these guys they call them Air Force pararescue so they're the guys that go in if a plane gets shot down or crashes or whatever in hostile territory they will parachute in there all paramedics and extract the pilot in the crew with the aircraft obviously cabe risk is right up their alley they had MRIs the combat rations meals ready-to-eat so that's what went in they they repackage them took out all the rubbish they don't need refrigeration they're all in sealed plastic packages so the British guys took as much of that in as they could they thought that they had enough for two or three weeks but these little blokes did nothing but eat once they got their hands on the snow and you know by the time of the last day of extractions it was all that gone and we actually found out afterwards that some of them when they've been coming out they'd stuff some of the spoon down and they wet so it's because I wanted to take it home with them a little bit surprised I think you know they were a bit confused that they were speaking English they didn't know what was going on because they all started chattering away in Thai the British guys had no idea obviously what they were talking about as I'm sure they were pretty pleased with all scenario as well and the guys only stayed there about 20 minutes on that first day because there was nothing I could do they had no food with them they just got going again listen there'll be people coming back at that stage they thought their role was over they thought that the Thai military would do the extractions they thought they were saying goodbye to them and you know I may or may not be they for eternity so we do please all join me in thanking [Music] you

Channel: OldFliersGroup

Views: 23,308

Rating: 4.8493152 out of 5

Keywords: Old Fliers Group, Jandakot, Royal Aero Club of WA, Craig Challen, Richard Harris, Thai cave rescue, Jason Mallison, Elon Musk, British Cave Rescue Council, DFAT, Vern Unsworth, John Volanthen, Rick Stanton, Ben Reymenants, MRE, Sked, Thai soccer boys, Tham Luang, C17, 2019 WA Australian, Australian of the year

Id: IJGfsd8YHOI

Length: 61min 34sec (3694 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018