A couple more articles from the UK press:
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They were taking a rest in the tents erected in front of the Tham Luang caves at the end of a gruelling day’s diving when they learnt the terrible news.
“Someone came over,” Ivan Karadzic recounted. “He said, ‘Did you hear what happened? Saman is dead.’”
Saman Kunan, 38, was a former Thai navy frogman who had perished underwater in the caves that day as he took part in the attempt to rescue the 12 local boys and their football coach who had been trapped by floods. The boys had been found four days earlier but no one was yet sure how they could be brought out alive.
The rescued boys and their coach with a picture of Saman Kunan, the Thai navy diver who died trying to save them on July 6. They were not told of his death until Saturday
“It made the whole thing much more serious,” Mr Karadzic said. “This was not just another diver. For me, the gravity of the situation multiplied. If a well-trained military diver can die, then I can die too. For us as civilians, it told us, ‘This is real.’ ”
In the days since the rescue of the young footballers much has been learnt about some of the men who extracted them: the
expert British cave divers who planned and led the operation and the Thai navy frogmen who provided most of the manpower. But one group has received little attention: the motley team of scuba instructors and amateur diving enthusiasts from all over the world who answered the call to help with the rescue.
They came from Belgium, Canada and France, as well as Thailand, bringing with them specialist equipment unfamiliar even to military divers, much of which was lost in the caves when they flooded dramatically after the last of the boys was freed. And, along with the Thai frogmen, it was they, not the American commandos, who spearheaded the operation to save the boys.
Among them were Mr Karadzic, a 44-year-old Dane, and his Finnish friend and business partner, Mikko Paasi, 43. They teach diving on the island of Koh Tao off Thailand’s east coast, and are volunteers for the local rescue service; both have dived in caves in Thailand and Indonesia. When word came that specialist equipment would be needed for the rescue they hastened to the other side of the country.
From the moment they entered the cave they realised that these were conditions like none they had encountered before. The challenge was not great depths of water but the horizontal distances to be covered underground before diving even began, in the most difficult conditions.
“When I went in there, I thought, ‘My God, this is really tough’,” Mr Karadzic said. “Steep inclines and incredibly muddy. I slipped many times and I was exhausted. It was incredibly challenging.”
The water in flooded caves that has been filtered through limestone and undisturbed for thousands of years is typically clear, but this was a normally dry cave, recently flooded, and the mud and detritus in the water made it completely opaque. “When you turned your lamp on underwater the only difference it made was to turn the black to yellow,” Mr Paasi said. “If you held your hand to your mask you could just make out your own fingernails — nothing more.”
However, they found themselves with an advantage over the Thai and American military divers. “They have awesome equipment and training,” Mr Karadzic said. “They are huge, strong guys. But they are soldiers and they don’t train for caves for the simple reason that no one would ever be stupid enough to invade one.”
Eventually the decision was made to extract the boys through the flooded passageways. The day before the operation began, the 100 or so divers who would be inside the caves took part in what the US military calls a rock drill, an acting out of the steps to be taken by each of the participants on a large-scale diagrammatic model of the terrain, recreated with plastic water bottles.
“It’s one thing to know what you’re supposed to be doing on paper,” Mr Karadzic said, “it’s another thing to see it and to act the whole thing out. We repeated that drill several times so everyone knew what they were doing.”
The following day, they went into action. Mr Paasi and Claus Rasmussen, a Danish diver, were positioned at the jokingly named “Pattaya Beach”, a stretch of muddy sand one dive away from the chamber in which the boys were stuck. Mr Karadzic and Erik Brown, his Canadian friend, were in the preceding chamber.
Their job was to help the British divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen as they brought the boys through and then to strap them on to stretchers to be carried over the unflooded, but perilously rocky, sections. They had to wait for hours, standing in cold water, sometimes up to their shoulders.
“I saw a little yellow glow in the water,” Mr Karadzic said. “I didn’t know what would come out. Then I saw the British diver and the kid, and the kid had oxygen bubbles coming from him so I knew that he was breathing and that it was OK.”
Mr Paasi said: “I blocked everything out while it was going on. I never looked into anyone’s eyes or asked anyone’s name. It was pure focus. There wasn’t room for any emotions.”
The boys had been sedated but were conscious, and the two men talked to them calmingly in basic Thai.
The physical demands of the operation were enormous. After the first day Mr Karadzic had to pull out on doctor’s orders, having had exhaustion and dehydration diagnosed. Mr Paasi had trench foot and now suffers from skin rashes and ear infections caused by fine silt particles in the water.
Moments after the last of the trapped boys was freed, they witnessed the final drama — a spurting of water from a ruptured pipe and the sudden failure of the pumps, causing a surge in water levels. They fled the cave, leaving behind much of their valuable equipment.
“It was so strange that it happened just moments after they were all out,” Mr Paasi said. “It was as if the goddess of the cave was saying, ‘You got the kids out, now this place is mine again.’ ”