Thai Navy and British divers make contact with Thai football team
The 12 boys and their coach have, at the time of writing (3 July 2018), been in an underground cave for nine days
The 12 boys and their coach have, at the time of writing (3 July 2018), been in an underground cave for nine days, while Thai Navy SEALS worked with cave diving experts from the UK, and US Air Force rescue and survival specialists to locate them. They went missing after entering the six-mile-long Tham Luang cave and becoming trapped by rising flood waters. Monsoon rains have prevented divers from finding them until now, when two British divers located the team. Although the boys and their coach have been found safe and well, and a diver has been sent down to reassure them that a rescue effort is underway, none of the boys can swim, and the flood waters won’t subside for several weeks, until the monsoon rains are over.
Bill Whitehouse, Vice-Chair of the British Cave Rescue Channel, was reported to have said the rescue mission is made even more complicated as there will likely only be a short window in which the flood waters will lower sufficiently to effect a rescue, while the small space in which the victims currently are makes drilling down to them complicated. Diving conditions, he added, remain ‘very difficult’.