I'm saddened that the US citizens are so abandoned by their government that they have to rely on the random goodwill of a PR-hungry billionaire to restore what is fundamentally a human right. Access to clean water.
This is not a solution to this problem. It's a stopgap that muddies the underlying issue.
Honestly I was very impressed that he immediately went out trying to solve the problem and put his money where his mouth is. I wish more people were like that. His biggest problem was that he was on the opposite side of the Earth and he doesn't have Thunderbird 2 to deliver it in time, nor did he have much chance to get input from the actual rescuers as to what they actually needed.
The world would be a much better place if more billionaires were like him and Bill Gates.
The rescue may have wound up using something similar to the sub idea.
There are reports that the kids were administered an anti-anxiety drug so they wouldn't panic, and strapped to a stretcher wearing a full-face dive mask. That would kind of be an open submarine.
There are conflicting reports on this though, as an earlier report said the kids swam through the deeper parts but were carried on a stretcher through the drier parts. However it seems like it would be easier to just keep the kid on a stretcher, especially if there was some risk of the sedative/antianxiolytic drug having an unusual effect on the kid.
The one constant about the Thai rescue was that the reporting was absolute garbage. I heard so many conflicting reports that I doubt anybody not at the scene has a total grasp of the details.
At one point I was reading an article on CBS about how the coach was first out because he was in the worst health, and hearing a report on NPR about how the coach was going to be last. Kids were out, then they weren't, then they were again, then they had contracted some kind of fatal disease, then it was a precautionary quarantine, etc...
Hopefully whomever writes the book gets his information firsthand.
This is not a solution to this problem. It's a stopgap that muddies the underlying issue.