Handsome Creepy Eel said:
Limestone caves actually purify water. I have no idea if this cave is that kind of rock.
12 kids trapped in Thai Cave Complex
- Thread starter Richard Turpin
- Start date
Limestone caves actually purify water. I have no idea if this cave is that kind of rock.
Mercenary said:
What do you mean by it doesn't make sense?
Come on. These things move fast and nobody really knows what is going on; that's how things are in the real world when people are facing tragedy.
There's nothing even remotely "fishy" about this. It's a god awful accidental state of affairs. What possible conspiracy could this be??
The theory is that they tried to return and were trapped by water that damaged the cave walls...they were essentially running for their lives...their school books or whatever rubbish was in their bags would just slow them down.
Mercenary said:
The thing that really jumps out at me is that this "Youth Soccer Coach" keeps taking these kids on "outings" far from their parents. Kids that play soccer usually like to play soccer, not go spelunking. I hear they care a fair amount about winning as well....which you get by practicing, not spelunking. I hope he is thoroughly interrogated at the end of this.
Saweeep said:
About 4 months, but not with children. In Thailand, is it common for sports coaches to take young boys on multiple outdoors trips away from their parents, for things that have nothing to do with their sport? Back home, this would definitely make me suspicious. Road trips for competition make sense, interconnecting caves, not so much.
Cobra said:
I can appreciate your sentiment.
My post was 25% black humour / 75% cynicism.
Sometimes, I just need to vent and this forum is about the only place I can do it and not be ostracised.
Dodgy said:
While I like to play "let's point out the shortcomings of the retarded foreigners" as much as anyone else, I also have to chalk a lot of this up to simple bad luck. Coulda shoulda seen it coming? yeah, but probably nothing's going to happen.
As I understood it, it was a part of a team initiation rite, get to the end of the cave and back. How many people here have done something that would be perfectly fine with 99% likelihood as has in the past, but otherwise could have catastrophic consequences for social proof, inclusivity, or even for just convenience?
It reminded me of some passage I read in Scott's Antarctic expedition like 100 years ago. Taking a short cut across an ice flow and camping over night. They had gone over it before, they'd only be out there a matter of hours, so it seemed like a reasonable risk. Naturally the ice broke off, they found themselves floating out to sea, and by mere chance it happened to get close enough again to jump off.
Same thing here. To accomplish such a feat, you need almost the perfectly wrong timing. Over the rainy season timeline of a year, literally a few hours sooner or later would have avoided this whole thing. They either would have been able to exit fine beating the rains, or not be able to get in there in the first place due to them already having started. Over the time span of thousands of hours, there was maybe a several hour window in which to orchestrate this.
^ I hear this loud and clear.
Among all the other outlandish, not so brilliant things we used to get up to, my younger brother and I used to run across the slightly domed railing of this bridge down the road from our house on boring summer afternoons:
[attachment=39422]
I believe it spans few hundred feet in the air. There were two bridges there in succession and we'd run down both of them.
Thinking back sometimes, I often feel a bit of horror pondering the risk we were taking for a cheap adrenaline rush - mostly thinking what if my younger brother had slipped and fallen because he was emulating my crazy ass. I doubt I'd have ever forgiven myself. I doubt my hard-working mother would have ever forgiven herself to think we could be responsible for each other without adult supervision.
Then again, Jordan Peterson talks in 12 Rules for Life why this type of daredevil activity is important for young males in a society like ours, or any society, for that matter. I think we should find ways to channel it that aren't quite so risky and pointless, which is largely owed to our culture's inability to properly guide male development, but I also largely agree with him.
I remember one time in Laos, a kid younger than these ones served as my GUIDE in a cave. They'd wait outside caves that were completely undeveloped and take travelers through for a fee - there were passages we had to crawl through with the rock scraping our backs, and there were pits the kid would toss a rock down so we could listen to it fall and fall and fall before maybe hitting bottom. At times he would jokingly disappear and act like he was going to abandon me there...little fucker. lol
Point being that youngsters in this part of the world often live very daring lives and take a lot of risks with little oversight from adults. Highly dependent on social class, of course.
It might be hard to imagine it if you didn't spend your childhood outdoors. But if I'd have grown up around caves, I have no doubt my circle of brothers and friends and I would have been burrowing around in them, pushing the limits and going places we really shouldn't go. If you grew up in an urban area you probably challenged yourself in other ways.
It's the nature of young males to do so.
In any case, none of this is to detract from the important part here: I hope someone a lot smarter than me comes up with a way to get these kids, and the coach, out of there safe and sound. It's not looking very hopeful, but there are a lot of top minds getting involved, and I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for a happy ending here.
Among all the other outlandish, not so brilliant things we used to get up to, my younger brother and I used to run across the slightly domed railing of this bridge down the road from our house on boring summer afternoons:
[attachment=39422]
I believe it spans few hundred feet in the air. There were two bridges there in succession and we'd run down both of them.
Thinking back sometimes, I often feel a bit of horror pondering the risk we were taking for a cheap adrenaline rush - mostly thinking what if my younger brother had slipped and fallen because he was emulating my crazy ass. I doubt I'd have ever forgiven myself. I doubt my hard-working mother would have ever forgiven herself to think we could be responsible for each other without adult supervision.
Then again, Jordan Peterson talks in 12 Rules for Life why this type of daredevil activity is important for young males in a society like ours, or any society, for that matter. I think we should find ways to channel it that aren't quite so risky and pointless, which is largely owed to our culture's inability to properly guide male development, but I also largely agree with him.
I remember one time in Laos, a kid younger than these ones served as my GUIDE in a cave. They'd wait outside caves that were completely undeveloped and take travelers through for a fee - there were passages we had to crawl through with the rock scraping our backs, and there were pits the kid would toss a rock down so we could listen to it fall and fall and fall before maybe hitting bottom. At times he would jokingly disappear and act like he was going to abandon me there...little fucker. lol
Point being that youngsters in this part of the world often live very daring lives and take a lot of risks with little oversight from adults. Highly dependent on social class, of course.
It might be hard to imagine it if you didn't spend your childhood outdoors. But if I'd have grown up around caves, I have no doubt my circle of brothers and friends and I would have been burrowing around in them, pushing the limits and going places we really shouldn't go. If you grew up in an urban area you probably challenged yourself in other ways.
It's the nature of young males to do so.
In any case, none of this is to detract from the important part here: I hope someone a lot smarter than me comes up with a way to get these kids, and the coach, out of there safe and sound. It's not looking very hopeful, but there are a lot of top minds getting involved, and I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for a happy ending here.
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I hope the coach doesn't get shit on too bad. He's young himself (25), and probably ran that cave countless times before. Yes, it wasn't the brightest thing to do but it sounds like its 99% just bad luck. I think its great that those kids had a crew and an adult male to look up to... that shit is unfortunately hard to find in the west.
^ Last article I read mentioned that if he makes it out he may be brought up on some charges, though some of the parents said they don't blame him.
It also said that he's not doing very well as he's been giving his food rations to the others...
It also said that he's not doing very well as he's been giving his food rations to the others...
Oxygen levels are running low.
They are 4 km deep.
Cant they bring a hose?
Obviously not easy. They need divers to bring 50 meters each, that's 80 dives to get in. Bring a pressure gauge into the cave to see if all the oxygen pumped in will increase the pressure, or if there are some natural channels for it to get out.
If pressure increase in cave, means eventually they need to run a hose out to the nearest free point to release the overpressure.
For part of the section to save strain on divers, get a few of these out:
Rechargeable, get some electricity in would be next operation so they wont have to bring them all the way out.
At the same time mobilize more pumps to drain the cage.
Food / communication supple to cage shouldn't be top priority at this point.
They are 4 km deep.
Cant they bring a hose?
Obviously not easy. They need divers to bring 50 meters each, that's 80 dives to get in. Bring a pressure gauge into the cave to see if all the oxygen pumped in will increase the pressure, or if there are some natural channels for it to get out.
If pressure increase in cave, means eventually they need to run a hose out to the nearest free point to release the overpressure.
For part of the section to save strain on divers, get a few of these out:
Rechargeable, get some electricity in would be next operation so they wont have to bring them all the way out.
At the same time mobilize more pumps to drain the cage.
Food / communication supple to cage shouldn't be top priority at this point.
Merc and other conspiracy theorists- if you'd even bothered to do the tiniest bit of backgound reading on this, you'd have read that teams often do journeys in to this cave system as it is some sort of ritual/experience. I don't know if you're trying to imply that the coach is a paedophile or that this whole thing is a hoax, but I see no reason to not believe the official line. Saying a young child smiling after having outside human contact for the first time in 10 days or so of being sat in the dark is 'suspicious' is just ridiculous.
I read yesterday that it's unfeasible to keep them in there and wait out the rainy season (which starts in full on Sunday), as the pumps simply aren't powerful enough to keep the water level down. Drilling isn't an option if you don't have weeks/months available.
Unless they want to drown, their only chance is to dive. The best way (in my un-expert opinion) would be to sedate them and effectively have them towed by an experienced cave diver. Having said that, could they not just attach a guide-line from the entrance all the way to where the boys are, then they just pull themselves along that?
However if this simply isn't an option and they are going to drown, I hope they give them a humane choice of dying quickly and easily instead of drowning.
I read yesterday that it's unfeasible to keep them in there and wait out the rainy season (which starts in full on Sunday), as the pumps simply aren't powerful enough to keep the water level down. Drilling isn't an option if you don't have weeks/months available.
Unless they want to drown, their only chance is to dive. The best way (in my un-expert opinion) would be to sedate them and effectively have them towed by an experienced cave diver. Having said that, could they not just attach a guide-line from the entrance all the way to where the boys are, then they just pull themselves along that?
However if this simply isn't an option and they are going to drown, I hope they give them a humane choice of dying quickly and easily instead of drowning.
britchard said:
Yep, that's one component definitely being considered if they try to dive them out.
I wonder what the British divers' gut reaction was 10 days ago, 2 miles into a dark cave all of a sudden they see a bunch of dark shapes staring at them. Probably relieved it's a soccer team and not some cult about to go temple-of-doom on them.
Jetset
Ostrich
The Wall Street Journal finally got some old French surveys of the cave and made the first scale map I've seen:
Look at those cross-sections. Almost any piece of equipment you could bring in there runs the risk of getting stuck and blocking it entirely. I'd had a notion that somewhere in the world there might be a mining drill suitable for opening it up even in wet conditions, but the twists make it look far too impractical to bring something down to the "shoulder-width" area marked Pattaya Beach.
Look at those cross-sections. Almost any piece of equipment you could bring in there runs the risk of getting stuck and blocking it entirely. I'd had a notion that somewhere in the world there might be a mining drill suitable for opening it up even in wet conditions, but the twists make it look far too impractical to bring something down to the "shoulder-width" area marked Pattaya Beach.