Both of those stories garnered world wide attention, but one of the positive unintended consequences of those tragic events was that they scared many "adventure seekers" enough that they stayed away from cave exploration, which is a "good" thing.
About 30 years ago I became trapped in an alpine cave in a way very similar to Floyd Collins, when a football sized piece of marble fell from the ceiling about 30 feet into a virgin body sized phreatic tube I was exploring.
It landed on my ankle, pinning it so I couldn't move forward or back, and the passage was so tight that I couldn't move my free leg to dislodge it, and yes, Floyd Collins entrapment was the first thing I thought of.
Thankfully, I had two things in my favor, one was I had a caving partner on the surface who knew where I was, and I could communicate with, so if I couldn't self rescue she could hike the 5 miles back to a road end and get help (no cell phone service back then).
And two, I was an experienced caver, so I remained very calm, and kept working my free foot in order to attempt to dislodge the rock pinning my ankle, and after about 10 minutes I was able to somehow with great effort, shift the rock enough that I could move deeper into the cave.
I crawled forward another 15 feet to a pit about 20 feet deep that I was able to free climb into so I could turn around and head back out, and was able to push the rock ahead of me and I got out just fine.
It didn't phase me one bit, as I'd had much more serious life threatening events in caves previously (almost "flat rocked" in Lechuguilla Cave, NM), but I was well aware that it could have been a serious situation as it got down into the 20's at night in that location, so hypothermia was a real possibility.
The lesson here for non cavers is, don't explore caves alone, especially if nobody knows where you are, and get proper training before doing so, from a local "grotto" (chapter) of the National Speleological Society https://caves.org/ .
Yeah. I have low-grade anxiety that at some point dang will retire or something will happen, like when digg imploded and reddit got popular. In the meantime, I enjoy these caliber of discussions here.
/. already jumped the shark for me, back when it got bought around 2013. Around the same time that somebody forked the slashcode and started https://www.soylentnews.org/ which is somehow still going. It just lost its luster. I was glad to find HN after that.
About 30 years ago I became trapped in an alpine cave in a way very similar to Floyd Collins, when a football sized piece of marble fell from the ceiling about 30 feet into a virgin body sized phreatic tube I was exploring.
It landed on my ankle, pinning it so I couldn't move forward or back, and the passage was so tight that I couldn't move my free leg to dislodge it, and yes, Floyd Collins entrapment was the first thing I thought of.
Thankfully, I had two things in my favor, one was I had a caving partner on the surface who knew where I was, and I could communicate with, so if I couldn't self rescue she could hike the 5 miles back to a road end and get help (no cell phone service back then).
And two, I was an experienced caver, so I remained very calm, and kept working my free foot in order to attempt to dislodge the rock pinning my ankle, and after about 10 minutes I was able to somehow with great effort, shift the rock enough that I could move deeper into the cave.
I crawled forward another 15 feet to a pit about 20 feet deep that I was able to free climb into so I could turn around and head back out, and was able to push the rock ahead of me and I got out just fine.
It didn't phase me one bit, as I'd had much more serious life threatening events in caves previously (almost "flat rocked" in Lechuguilla Cave, NM), but I was well aware that it could have been a serious situation as it got down into the 20's at night in that location, so hypothermia was a real possibility.
The lesson here for non cavers is, don't explore caves alone, especially if nobody knows where you are, and get proper training before doing so, from a local "grotto" (chapter) of the National Speleological Society https://caves.org/ .