Search continues for two missing gold miners as hope fades
Rescue efforts in the flooded cave in Laos focused entirely on two miners whose whereabouts were unknown in the complex system of tunnels and rooms.
Stranded villagers Bay and Lup, two unemployed young men from the small village of Nampha, a few kilometers from the cave site still teeming with volunteers and rescue teams.
Bay, still in his teens, and Lup, 33, went down to the cave to search for gold around 7pm on May 20, independently of the five men released over the previous two nights.
Although the time to save the two men is not quite up yet, he is quickly moving towards that point.
Expert divers have explored almost the entire system. Finnish rescuer Mikko Paasi said last week that one of the areas left to search was completely flooded, meaning if Bay and Lup had been there they would have died.
Another man, 33-year-old Keo Huangpasert, entered the cave with the missing couple that night, but managed to escape after nine hours of hard work trying to find open passages leading to the cave mouth.
Huangpasert’s legs were in bad shape due to a car accident, so Bay and Lup got on first, he said. Soon Huangpasert was on his own.
“About 100 meters into the cave, it was narrow and I couldn’t get my legs through it,” he told this imprint.
Huangpasert stayed in that area overnight searching for gold until the rising water worried him around 9 a.m. on May 21.
“Some of them were gushing out from a large hole in the cave wall,” he said.
“I had to fight my way out.”
According to a villager, such expeditions to the cave began only two months ago, when news began to spread that someone had found gold there.
Huangpasert’s first entry into the cave was just a week before the inevitable expedition. His share of the gold was equivalent to about $60. This was an important trophy for the men, who ate enough small amounts to kill themselves.
The five known survivors were found huddled together on a rock by Paasi and his Thai counterpart, Norrased Palasing, on Wednesday afternoon. By this stage, pumping efforts had failed, so it was up to the divers to extract the first person in a 37-minute operation on Friday night.
However, the pumping started to yield results towards the end of the week. More expert divers arrived from around the world, including Josh Richards from Australia, on Friday.
But miraculously, these were not needed for extraction. The remaining four men, weak and drenched, surprised everyone by emerging from the cave themselves on Saturday.
“It was just shock, pure shock, to be honest,” an elated Richards told Seven’s. Sunrise program.
“We were waiting to get everything set up. I had literally just made preparations… to get them food, medicine.”
“There had been some changes to the pumping system in the morning… [and] Apparently the pump had drawn enough water from that sump that the miners decided they didn’t want to be there anymore and managed to get themselves out of the sump we were diving into and get out.
“They had rescued themselves… and no one knew they were coming because there was no one in the cave; it’s very dangerous to be in the cave when the pumps are running.”
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Zach Hope is a Southeast Asia correspondent. He is a former reporter for the Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
