Sounds like the rescuers are up against the clock.
I just read that the submerged portion is about 1.5km long, and it took the cave divers 3hrs to reach them. Cave diving is not trivial at all. It's bloody dangerous. It's not realistic to expect young boys the age of 11 who have never touched scuba equipment before to just put on the equipment and follow the divers out. A 3 hr dive in that circumstances involves switching air tanks etc underwater.
It would probably be nearly impossible without making the whole thing collapse is my guess.
They're looking for alternate routes in. There are other caves in the area so people are surveying them to see if there's any connection or way of making a connection.
They've been pumping out something like 1.6 million gallons a day, and its still not enough.
I was thinking about that and my guess is that there's probably thousands of entry points for water to leach into the cave system.
From the looks of it there's ground water coming in as well. So they're pumping it and trying to get it lower while they can. They've diverted surface streams etc into the fields, to try and stop some coming in. But once it starts raining they won't be able to do much.
It's about 1000 meters from the surface (height), so drilling seems to be an impossibility. It's fascinating and very disturbing at the same time
You know the type of technology used for the channel tunnel? Would eat it up
Not to mention the dont want to crush the kids with falling rocks
I've got literally no idea mate.
You can survive weeks without food, it's water you need every 6/7 days.
Water level drops 1cm per hour and massive storm forecast predicted to be enough to flood the cave completely
I don't think they'd expect the kids to do any swimming. It'll be more about keeping them still/calm while being pulled/pushed along by real divers. So a lot of breathing exercises, how to get the mask back in place if it gets dislodged etc - scary but a decent option. They'll want to keep them as small as possible while protecting them from the rock.Water level drops 1cm per hour and massive storm forecast predicted to be enough to flood the cave completely
Currently trying to teach kids that can't swim how to dive
As far as I'm aware, it's about 6K completely underwater so rebreather practice is essential to avoid panic. They will deffo leave them where they are for up to 6 weeks unless it becomes imperative that they have to move them. If the predicted rains do come, and the cavern they are in floods, then the whole network of tunnels (their escape route) will be filled with treacherous currents as well as the "no air" problem to deal with – a big ask for experienced divers, let alone divers with a class of young kids that can't swim and their teacher in tow.
Even if you could get over the logistics of shipping in a mini TBM, building it and establishing power, water supply etc at the same time creating a break in point for the machine, usually a shaft to the required depth of the machine with a balk wall they can jack off for launch, you'd be looking at around a month, probably two, before they could get going and then you'd only progress at 100-200m per week so you'd be way beyond the period for just waiting for the rainy season to finish and the caves to dry out normally. On top of that depending on the strata of the rock/soil an EPBM machine might be the only one capable of drilling and that could potentially collapse or flood caverns with the pressure balance if they hit fractured rock or cavities.
Unlikely, you'd need to cover virtually the entire mountain or any attempts to block water in one place would only see it enter through another rock fissure or cavern and potentially make matters worse in the cave. Pumping out some of the flooded U bends on the access route and epoxy sealing any fissures to prevent them refilling might make some sections of the extraction easier but plugging the entire mountain would be impossible even if a monsoon wasn't bearing down on them.
So with heavy rain forecast in the next few days is it simply going to come to the point where they quickly decide to get them out? The alternative looks like hoping the rain forecast isnt so heavy that it floods the cave.
The whole thing looks terrifying. I guess it's all about finding the least bad options.
They're closing off underground waterways that feed in, and trying to re-route surface water streams that feed into those underground fissures to give them a chance of getting the water levels down. If it starts raining hard, they'll lose that control.
Yeah I was thinking earlier of a big oil drilling rig, but I suppose it’s nearly impossible if only for logistical reasons. You’d have to blow up a small portion of the mountain to create a pad and build roads that could handle a caravan of heavy trucks. This would create instability in the cave network below, and it’s not like the Chilean situation where they had a large area to go if something caves in or when the last drill bit breaks through.
