
The heroes of the Thai cave rescue - colinprince
https://www.macleans.ca/thai-cave-rescue-heroes/
======
toomanybeersies
Ketamine really was a miracle drug in this situation.

It's one of the few anaesthetics that doesn't cause respiratory depression,
overdosing is practically impossible, and it's also injected intra-muscularly,
rather than intravenously, making it easy to apply in the dark and underwater
by an untrained person.

These factors are also why it was used extensively in the Vietnam war for
battlefield surgery.

Interesting that, as usual, the media has labelled it as "horse
tranquilliser". It's used more extensively on humans than on animals, and is
used on all different mammals, not just horses.

~~~
refurb
Ketamine doesn’t get more use due to the unpleasant effects when it wears off.

Apparently that’s less common in kids.

I would have thought they’d go with a benzodiazepine instead. It has all those
benefits you mention without the post-emergence delirium.

~~~
Pharmakon
Benzodiazepines have a depressant effect on the respiratory system, and have a
risk of paradoxical reactions. In addition you’d need a heroic dose to cause
total sedation, so a benzo is usually only a component of along with an opiate
to induce “twilight” sleep. For the purposes of this dive obviously
respiratory depression was unacceptable, and doubling down with an opiate
would have been worse.

Ketamine is _very_ safe, and some nasty side effects are preferable to death.

~~~
refurb
Benzodiazepines require heroic doses before they start to depress respiration.
At low doses, like what you’d use to keep someone calm, it’s a non-issue.

Not sure why you’d want them so sedated that they are semiconscious.

It doesn’t take much to keep someone from freaking out.

~~~
Pharmakon
The whole point was to fully anesthetize them, not merely sedate them. The
risk that they’d panic or become disoriented was too great.

~~~
refurb
Seems like overkill to me! I’ve seen people given reasonable doses of
benzodiazepines be quite compliant!

------
gravelc
Incredible story. Richard "Harry" Harris and Craig Challen were jointly
awarded Australian of the Year on the weekend for their efforts in the cave
rescue. Absolutely deserved.

~~~
jimmcslim
In a post-award interview, Richard Harris described what he wanted to do as
Australian of the Year...

"I really want to try and inspire kids to get out and about, get them off
their screens... ...and get outside and build up a bit of confidence and
resilience that comes with adventuring and taking a few risks."

As long as said risks don't involve getting stuck in an underwater cave and
triggering an international search and rescue mission!

------
brandnewlow
Can someone else explain the story with "Ben"? Did he offend someone and thus
get kicked off the rescue squad? I couldn't follow the reason why he was stuck
sitting in a chair outside the cave.

~~~
macintux
From searching online the answer isn’t clear. Ben Reymenants gave interviews
during the run-up to the rescue that may have pissed someone off; on the other
hand, it was never clear that the signage was legitimate.

Basically the entire rescue operation sounds like it was conducted under a fog
of war. No one was ever officially in charge, no one was legally authorized to
do what they did (such as the medication of the boys).

~~~
talaketu
Very specifically the Australians were given diplomatic immunity, which
sidelined the legal question.

[1] [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-16/thai-cave-rescue-
aust...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-16/thai-cave-rescue-australian-
divers-had-diplomatic-immunity/9992204)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I like to imagine Chrisjen Avasarala from The Expanse saying:

“I don’t give a fuck what you do, just get them the fuck out of there. Now.”

------
RLN
I found it a bit odd that the author differentiated between Britons and
Europeans. Britons are Europeans!

I wonder why Europeans were so well represented. I wouldn't have necessarily
imagined that would be the case. Is it simply because most European countries
are relatively wealthy?

~~~
zozbot123
> Britons are Europeans!

They don't _want_ to be Europeans anymore, though - and they voted to that
effect.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Wanting to leave the EU is one thing but relocating the entire archipelago to
a different continental plate would be a tall order indeed.

~~~
alex_hitchins
But Brexit does mean Brexit... /s

------
danielvf
Even though the Elon's submarine idea wasn't used, at least one little known
piece of American engineering was used in the rescue - the "Sked". It's a
stretcher that can rolled up for storage and transportation, then unrolled for
loading, and then partially rolled up again to protect the patient on every
side.

[https://skedco.com/product/sked-basic-rescue-system-
internat...](https://skedco.com/product/sked-basic-rescue-system-
international-orange/)

~~~
shard972
Speaking of Elon, did we ever get to the bottom of his pedophile claims? I
don't see many people talking about it so i assumed he apologised and gave
them a free model 3?

~~~
Lazare
It's Musk, so he refused to apologise, doubled down on the assertions, got
threatened with a lawsuit, grumpily withdrew the allegations, saw a slightly
unflattering Buzzfeed article, blew his lid, sent the journalist a rant about
how all the original allegations were true and Buzzfeed was a pro-pedophile
publication for not agreeing with Musk 100% on everything (...not making this
up), the journalist gleefully published it (because Musk was way too angry to,
eg, get an agreement that the conversation was off the record), and the diver
promptly sued him.

There's still zero evidence that any of Musk's claims are true, and I believe
a few of them have always been trivially falsifiable, eg, Musk mentioned a
child bride, but the diver's partner is 40, which isn't really what I'd
consider a "child". And so on.

The court cases are ongoing, and unlikely to move fast. But at this point the
best Musk can hope for is a procedural win I think, and that's iffy.

~~~
felipelemos
What would be a procedural win in this case?

~~~
Lazare
A procedural win would be if Musk can convince a court that they don't have
jurisdiction (eg, the diver should have sued somewhere else), or that there's
some other reason to throw the suit out.

I believe his lawyers were recently advancing the argument that the First
Amendment lets you lie about people on twitter, so it doesn't matter if all
the twitter claims were lies. If that argument works, that would be a
procedural win, aka "it doesn't matter if I did it, because X".

------
TravelTechGuy
I really liked the story, and it's well worth telling it, and highlighting the
heroes (and anyone who was there is a hero in my book). But the writing style
was kinda hard to follow. It reads more like a stream-of-thought piece rather
than an organized story.

Jumping back-and-forth in time, repeating side stories again and again,
introducing new characters, and then re-introducing them, skipping major parts
in the middle, only to come back to them later (or not).

All in all, it's a story well worth a good Atlantic article, or even a movie
script - but I'dthink long and hard before putting time in the future to
reading an "article" by this "journalist".

------
lolc
Interesting how I missed the sedation part till now. The way I rembembered it,
they trained the boys to dive, right in the cave. But that must have been a
plan that was later abandoned but stuck with me.

~~~
joering2
A friend of mine is an engineer at Lockheed, and used to work for NASA some 17
years long. He explained to me the whole thing was more of a photo-op and
ability to over-engineer to show who's got the bigger balls, than actually to
quickly rescue people.

He basically told me one of many training astronauts have is in a long dark
corridor that is submerged underwater of course to simulate low gravity.
However the whole thing inside is wrapped in a plastic bag, for lack of better
explanation. Just imagine huge condom big enough to fit people in it. When the
shit goes down, you push emergency button and whole thing fills in with air in
less than 90 seconds. Since its inside cave/corridor, air has no way to push
the condom outside/up, so whole water is flushed out quickly.

He told me all they had to do is put a thick foil underwater, glue 2 sides
together, making long sealed condom, and then pump the air in, making a way
for kids to crawl through, with no need to dive or know how to swim, almost
like they have those tubes on children's playgrounds. That's all.

~~~
chmod775
Because that idea is totally gonna work in a real world environment where
there may be:

1\. strong current messing with your construction

2\. vertical sections and obstacles that will make your tunnel impossible to
crawl through

3\. corners, sharp outcrops etc. that might cause damage to it

4\. sections that are too long for your construction to be stable even in good
circumstances

If you managed to somehow solve all of the above with your design, you're
still left with a construction job in an environment where people died just
trying to traverse it.

There's like a myriad reasons why this is a bad idea and will much more likely
result in awkward failure or even death instead of a success.

Let's not even talk about getting this assembled out of sturdy-enough
materials before everyone is dead anyway.

And even if you manage that: One tear in that construction and you can
guarantee the death of any child still in it.

If I had to choose I'd go with the professional cave divers and on-scenes
experts rather than the dreams of some guy a thousand miles away with
questionable, hardly-relevant credentials.

~~~
ethbro
And particularly, the _results_ of any damage to an air tube -- cold, opaque
water rushing in.

Which sounds like a great recipe for panic and death.

And if you're protecting for _that_ (e.g. by walking through the tube with
breathing equipment), you're just making the situation more difficult and
_less_ like anything anyone has experience with.

------
sonnyblarney
That is an exceptional read, it's like watching a thriller. Highly recommend.

~~~
rktster
The account is somewhat farang biased. For example, there's no mention of the
Thai navy seal doctor Dr. Pak who stayed with the boys.

~~~
jdietrich
The Thai Navy SEALs worked with incredible bravery and determination, but they
simply weren't equipped to conduct a rescue of this nature. I recall seeing
some of the first news footage from the scene, seeing the equipment being used
by the Thai divers and thinking "oh shit, these guys are screwed". It was
immediately apparent that they were open-water divers operating far beyond the
limits of their training. They didn't have sidemount rigs, they didn't have
CCRs, they didn't even have proper reels and lights. Frankly, it's a miracle
that only one person died.

Stanton and Volanthen actually had to rescue four members of the Thai rescue
team, who had fallen asleep in an intermediate chamber and become cut off by
flooding. There was no lack of willing on the part of the Thai rescuers, but
they simply didn't have the level of expertise necessary to coordinate a
rescue of this level of complexity and technical difficulty.

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-02/thai-cave-boys-
wild-b...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-02/thai-cave-boys-wild-boars-
rescue-the-book-thailand-diving/10514970)

------
drefanzor
Great article.

As a side note: a movie based on these events is being produced.

[https://variety.com/2018/film/news/thai-cave-rescue-movie-
un...](https://variety.com/2018/film/news/thai-cave-rescue-movie-
universal-1202944116/)

~~~
samopus
As a side note too: a documentary/movie about finnish cave divers who went
back to cave in Norway to retrieve bodies of their deceased buddies.

[http://divingintotheunknown.com/en](http://divingintotheunknown.com/en)

~~~
stef25
If I remember correctly, those UK divers were asked to help here but refused.
The only time they did so.

~~~
notacavediver
They tried, but decided it was too risky when realizing that the recovery had
to be done from the far side:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36097300](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36097300)

------
danielvf
Another great article:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/asia/thailand-
cave-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/asia/thailand-cave-rescue-
seals.html)

------
deskamess
It is a great story but I found the article difficult to read. The writing
seemed fragmented and lacked cohesiveness.

~~~
jvm_
Every sentence could have been a tweet. It felt like I was reading a
children's book. The sentences were very short.

------
baud147258
Interesting how the parents and neighbours didn't blame the coach. I mean in
the US, he would have been sued to death the moment people learned he had
survived.

------
rv-de
I find it odd that Vernon Unsworth isn't even mentioned in the text. That's
the diver who was accused by Musk.

~~~
SECProto
That's because he wasn't involved in the rescue itself.

