Introducing... Global News' What Happened To...? The Thai Cave Rescue
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Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. Hey everyone, it's Nancy. Today I want to introduce you to another podcast I think you'd like from my colleague Erika Vela. It's called Global News, What Happened To?,

In this unique podcast, Erica revisits news stories that captured the world's attention and talks to the people at the heart of those stories to find out what's happened since new headlines took over.

This season, she covers the Thai cave rescue, the downing of Ukrainian flight PS-752, and the 2011 Vancouver riots. Search for and follow Global News What Happened To wherever you're listening right now so you don't miss a single fascinating story. I hope you enjoy this preview. It's known as the Great Cave of the Sleeping Lady.

When you approach the 10 kilometer long cavern, you're met by a statue of a beautiful mythical princess. According to ancient legend, she fell in love with a stable boy and together they became pregnant, but their love was forbidden. So the couple ran away to the cave. Needing food and nourishment, the stable boy went off to find some, but he was captured by the princess's father and killed. The princess soon learned of his death

Overcome with grief, she took her own life by stabbing herself. The blood became the water that flows through the cave and her body is the mountains that are said to look like a sleeping woman. Her spirit is said to watch over the cave. Five years ago, 12 boys and their soccer coach became trapped inside.

Thousands of people prayed at the very statue, hoping for a miracle. I'm Erika Vela, a journalist with Global News, and this is part one of Global News: What Happened To: The Thai Cave Rescue. Mention those three words to almost anyone, and they likely know exactly what you're talking about. The Thai Cave Rescue became an international spectacle that drew in people from all over the world.

News stations across the globe were monitoring the developing situation out of Thailand, hoping for the best but expecting the worst. In June 2018, a soccer team made up of boys between the ages of 11 and 16 years old and their 25-year-old coach found themselves trapped inside the Tam Luang cave in Thailand.

Before we get into how the soccer team became trapped, I think it's important to know a little bit about Thailand and its caves. The country has both wet and dry caves. Tam Luang is the fourth largest and it's located on the border with Myanmar and it's classified as a wet cave. It's mainly made up of limestone, but the western part has granite and a river that runs through it with water levels that change with the seasons.

Monsoon season in Thailand usually begins in July and ends in October. And during that time, the cave is closed to the public as parts of it flood with water from the surrounding area, causing the water levels to rise up to five meters. In 2018, monsoon season came early. On June 23rd, the Wild Boars soccer team finished practice. There are reports that the team went to the cave for an initiation.

Regardless, the 12 boys, accompanied by their 25-year-old coach, biked over to Tan Luang Cave to do some exploring. They dropped their bikes and bags at the entrance and walked in with no more than the jerseys on their back and flashlights in their hands to explore the stunning rock formations inside the 10-kilometer-long cave. As they walked deeper and deeper inside, water levels began to rise, blocking access to the outside world.

When they turned back, they realized they were trapped. No food, no escape. What's worse, no one knew where they were. In a matter of hours, parents realized the boys were missing and sounded the alarm.

Vernon Unsworth was living in Chiang Rai province. The British caver spent six years exploring the Tam Luang cave, and when word got out that the boys were missing, he accompanied park rangers in the search, only to find out that the fast-flowing floodwaters had blocked cave access. The Thai Navy was alerted and sent a team of its elite SEAL unit to help along with the pumps in an attempt to drain the cave.

At the same time, rescuers searched for other openings that could be a potential escape route for the missing boys. Despite these efforts, officials determined early on that they were going to need external help, and they were going to need it fast. Vernon Unsworth knew just who to call. Rick Stanton is one of the world's most renowned cave divers.

He's a former firefighter, but adventure has always been intriguing to him. I was brought up in the 60s and 70s watching documentaries on the television such as Jacques Cousteau. I was always interested in diving. I was interested in fish and I was quite good in the water. I was quite a good swimmer and I was a kayaker. And then when I was 18, there was a documentary on British television called

specifically about cave diving in England and that absolutely fascinated me and resonated with me.

using diving equipment, but to explore where no one had ever been before. And they were doing it in England. Whereas at that point, I thought exploring was something you did if you went to the moon or the deepest ocean or the most remote part of the planet. But it was actually possible for an amateur to do it on your own doorstep in a cave. So that's really what attracted me to it.

On Monday, June 25th, 2018, he got the call. I was contacted by a friend who lives there in Chiang Rai to say there was a football team that had gone in a cave and hadn't come out. Now, she didn't mention the water and the flooding aspect of that. I just assumed they'd gone in, got lost because it's a 10 kilometre long cave and it would just be a question of searching for them.

but then she said she thought it was serious and they were trapped by floodwaters. At the same time there was a British, there's a lot of fortuitous events surrounding this rescue, there was a British caver who lived in Chiang Rai and he was an expert on that cave

and he was involved from the early onset in that rescue on the Sunday and when things were not going well and they were not being able to advance by diving he said to a governmental minister you need proper experienced cave diving rescuers and he suggested our names so immediately the two ministers acted on that rang us up got us on a plane from Heathrow to Bangkok that very evening

Vernon Unsworth suggested Rick and John Volanthen, another expert British cave diver. They arrived in Thailand and they were immediately ushered some two and a half hours away. When we arrived on site, it was complete chaos. There was hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people milling around. Not necessarily all with the same sense of purpose or direction. And I think there was possibly a somewhat lack of control of everyone. But

We were lauded as the experts, but that as may be, the rain was pouring down, the cave was continuing to flood. We weren't sure even if the boys were alive, if they could have found any sanctuary.

It was sort of, for those first few days, it was sort of impossible to make progress. The conditions were nothing short of treacherous. You could not really see more than six to 12 inches in front of your face, depending. There was a strong current. The cave is quite complex. If you were to walk through it, you would not be able to imagine how we could navigate blindfold. And that's what most people say. However...

We have got decades and decades of experience in going through a cave underwater where you can't see. And it's not feeling every inch, it's using clues, sticking in the current maybe, or not searching every elk, just knowing about a cave that helps. But you could not swim against the current as such. You had to be pulling on the floor or the wall. It was untenable to swim all that distance.

against the current. Shortly after they arrived, John and Rick went on a reconnaissance mission to see what they could find before the cave flooded any further. And on that occasion, we found four pump workers who had been abandoned when the cave had been evacuated, and we needed to rescue them, which we did successfully. Look, they were only short

sections underwater maybe 20, 30 feet, but a few of them, and they all panicked to some degree or another. And that was the first indication, in case we hadn't known that beforehand, that bringing someone out a long distance wasn't going to be very easy. The bigger challenge became the ever-changing water levels and the worsening conditions.

The cave was continuing to flood to the point that we could not dive beyond the third chamber. It was impossible to progress. There was a narrowing of the passage and the current was so strong. So we said it is impossible to go upstream. And then the authorities said, well, in that case, then there will be no more diving. And diving was the only thing we could bring to the table, if you like. And if there was no more diving, there was no point in us being there.

Where we had failed to comprehend what would happen, and this is another fortuitous event, it stopped raining on that Friday and the water receded in about 36 hours to a point, the current that is, not the level, to a point that it was possible to proceed upstream of Chamber 3.

A few days earlier, the soccer team just walked into the cave. Now rain and water from the catchment area, which was approximately 10,000 acres, was coming in and there was no way to stop the flooding. That wasn't all. The cave has narrow passageways that experienced divers like Rick had trouble getting through. Some were so narrow that it was difficult to get scuba tanks through. Plus, there was a strong current.

In an effort to get control of water levels inside the cave, small pumps were brought in. But they weren't effective in making it possible for Rick and John to get in and dive through the cave. The Thai government had to get water management experts to help create a plan to lower the water levels before more diving could take place.

Thanet Natissary is originally from Thailand, but he moved to the U.S. when he was a teenager. He visits Thailand often. In June 2018, he was working on government projects and was scheduled to fly back to Illinois in early July. But then he heard about what was happening at Tam Luang. Instead of coming back home, I got a call from the military to fly into Chiang Rai and help them out with the water management aspects.

Tanette arrived the night of June 27th.

At the time when I arrived at the campsite, nobody knows either they were trapped in the cave or they were just like lost in the forest. First couple of days when the diver attempted to go into the cave and the current was so strong. One of the divers was saying that when he turned his head around, the current would just kind of rip off his mask. It was that strong. So

If the current is strong, I mean, no matter how good the diver is, they will have a difficult time and put their life at risk. So really the solution was to somehow stop the currents so the diver could continue to search for the buoys. And in order to do that, first pumping out the water, second is stop it from going into the first place. This seemed to be the most logical way of dealing with the situation.

Tanet gave me this analogy: imagine you had a large container that was continuing to fill up with water. Pumps would work like a straw, slowly sucking the water out. When Tanet arrived at Tam Luang, there was a small pump removing water, but they would need more pumps to do the job effectively. But one of the roadblocks they ran into was power. They needed electricity because gasoline pumps produced carbon dioxide.

They would also need to waterproof cables and generators. It becomes a logistic problem to find the proper equipment that's waterproof enough and safe enough for them to run the pump inside the cave. So I think at the end, we managed to have only six small pumps inside the cave to pump out the water. And it didn't really have any effects beyond chamber three.

So pumps were one way to reduce the amount of water inside the cave, but it wasn't going to be the only thing they had to do. They also needed to slow down the current and bring the water levels down.

Let's go back to that container analogy. Diverting the water would be like turning off a garden hose that's flooding water into the cave, but that would also prove to be immensely difficult.

Tenet said teams were sent out to sandbag and pipe areas that fed into sinkholes underground, creating small dams to force the water to run into the pipe and divert it away from the cave. In total, Tenet said his team had reinforced 26 locations on the north side of the cave.

The third way teams were attempting to lessen the current in the cave was to decrease the water table. Tenet said the ground was saturated with water, but by building a series of wells, it would lower the levels.

So if we can create more empty space, then we need the caves, which means more water could technically fill up those gaps. In theory, it's going to help out some degrees of water situation inside the cave too. In total, Tenet estimates the water engineering team diverted close to 4 million gallons of water.

That's about the same size of six Olympic-sized swimming pools. You know, as soon as we started, I went to the water from day one. We also communicated with the caregiver inside the cave as well. I had them talk to the diver, see if they see any changes in the water situation or the water current.

So the first, I think the first day after 24 hours that we get the updated back, they're saying that the water start getting a little better. The lower the current is less stronger. So we know that we hit the right spot. And then after that, we just keep putting our manpower into it. It was really intense from day one in terms of the difficulties, in terms of engineering aspects of it.

As Tanette's team made progress, Rick and John ventured back into the cave. So we took...

enough line to get to where we thought the only chance of the boys really being safe. And we progressed upstream. So if you imagine you cannot see where you're going, you're trying to lay a line and progress against a current that you cannot really just free swim against. And at the same time feeling around for bodies, which you might have to do. We didn't want to swim past them. So that, I mean, most people could not imagine that.

And then every now and again, there was airspace and our policy was to smell the airspace. A cave has a very neutral smell and anything that's in any way unusual, you would pick up very easily. I had to take a pause here and think about what Rick was saying to me. The hope was to find the boys alive.

But the reality was, after spending days in a flooded cave, that that was looking less and less likely. There was a very real possibility that they would encounter bodies. It's traumatic to even think about. I asked Rick how he and John mentally prepared for a mission like this. We've been called upon to recover bodies on numerous occasions. And of course, I had a job in the fire service, which was

the bread and butter of fire service work is to go into a burning house where you actually can't see anything and find people. So that is really my career and my hobby, if you like, or the downside of my hobby. But, you know, it's never nice. And you have to prepare yourself mentally. I might bump into face-to-face with a lifeless body, but there's no real...

psyching up or anything like that. You just have to say, this is what's going to happen. We were the best place to do it. Just get on with it because we are also the best chance those boys have. Rick and John navigated the murky waters, squeezing through tight spaces, pushing against the drag of the current. They had reached Pattaya Beach, a possible refuge for the boys, but they weren't there.

John and Rick continued through the darkness, and about four kilometers in, they were nearing the end of the line. In an air pocket, Rick paused for a moment. There was only 15 meters left, and I smelt the atmosphere, and it was clear. That's when everything changed, because you could smell people very, very clearly.

Yeah, it was a very pungent smell. Imagine 13 boys living in a bedroom and nobody's cleaning anything. And that sort of smell, and we almost thought it was the smell of decay.

Luckily, it wasn't, but it was very, very pungent. I mean, when you're coming out of a cave, for example, you can smell the outside. You can smell grass really strong. You don't go around in your daily life smelling grass. So imagine, you know, there's 13 boys there. I mean, it was almost overpowering. Rick then heard voices and saw the dim light of flashlights in the distance. We decided to take...

all our equipment off and hide it so they didn't... We didn't know what we were facing, whether we would be mobbed, attacked, or anything like that. So we took our equipment off out of sight so we just looked like two normal people, not like aliens with hoses and cylinders and all sorts of other paraphernalia. So by the time we'd done that and John had got the camera, they were all walking down into view. The divers recorded their approach.

It's pitch black, other than the soft glow from the flashlight. How many of you? 13. Brilliant. You can see the boys dressed in their red soccer jerseys and shorts, perched on a rock. They look gaunt.

and they all walked towards us and they all seemed quite healthy considering they hadn't had no food for those nine days. But my understanding is their health would have, from that point onward, would have deteriorated very, very rapidly. Now we had the camera, it didn't belong to us. The seals had given it to us for another purpose, to film the route. There was one bit where it was clear and they wanted us to film that bit. So John took some video of them

which, I mean, you could go out and say they're all alive, but having that proof of life in that video, and let's face it, quite happy faces, and John did a bit of cheerleading with them, that was, you know, that was a golden moment, if you like. And when we came out, we only spent about half an hour with them. We knew we had to get the message out. The 12 boys and their soccer coach were alive. I mean, people say that must have been amazing.

With the excitement, soon came the stark realization they needed to find a way out for them. And time was ticking.

The boys were in good spirits, but they couldn't survive in those conditions for much longer. Rick and John had years of cave diving experience.

Now what are we going to do? Because there's no way we can get them out. Or we weren't even thinking about how to get them out. All we thought about was that's not going to even be possible at that stage. So how are they going to get the boys out safely? The only way those boys were ever coming out was the way they went in. I mean, there was no other method for it. However, it was extremely, extremely dangerous. That's next time on Global News What Happened To.

Global News What Happened To is written and produced by me, Erica Vela, with producer Dila Velezquez. Our audio producers are Rosalind Khafour and Rob Johnson. Also, special thanks goes to Drew Hasselbeck, supervising national online journalist with Global News. A special thanks also goes to Harrison Cook, our intern.

Let us know what you thought of this episode and please share it with a friend. It will help us grow the show and bring you more incredible stories. You can also help us out by giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can also reach out to me personally. We are always looking for stories. So if there's a new story you want us to revisit, you can reach me on Twitter at Erica Vela or email me at erica.vela at globalnews.ca. We'll see you next time.