After a week of squeezing through the dangerous, mazelike cave network, divers Mikko Paasi and Norrased Palasing emerged from its muddy waters Wednesday to find a cause for hope.
There, huddled on a rock, their headlamps still illuminated, were five villagers who had been trapped, missing — unknown whether alive or dead — for eight days inside the flooded caves in Laos.
“What a feeling!!!” wrote Paasi, who also played a role in the famous rescue of 12 schoolboys and their soccer coach from a Thai cave in 2018. “The task so far has been far from easy and everybody involved has done amazing work.”
Palasing said in an interview that finding the men was an emotional moment.
“They’re crying, they are really glad I’m there and shouting and, like, grab my hand. And they do everything that, like, super emotional and then I try to calm them,” he said, adding that he passed water and energy gel to the group because they had not eaten for several days.
Finding the villagers provided only “brief relief,” Paasi said on social media, with the five villagers yet to be extracted from the cave and two others still missing.
The survivors “are still in the terminal chamber, all healthy and in good spirits, but the extraction is still ahead and it ain’t going to be easy,” Paasi wrote on Instagram. “We need to dive straight back and bring the miners more supplies to gain strength and get ready for the way out.”
Palasing also said the plan is to help the men regain their strength while water is pumped out of the cave.
“I would say they cannot come out easily because of the water level is high. And if they were to come out, they have to do scuba diving or cave diving for sure,” he said. “But the water is no visibility. I have seen nothing. Our plan now is just to keep them supplied, let them more healthy, let them have more power.”
The moment of the discovery was captured on video by Paasi and Palasing, the latter posting it to Facebook.
The video shows the two divers waist-deep in the opaque, brown water, able to stand in the otherwise claustrophobic cave system that’s often little wider than a human body. The villagers on the rock had ripped clothes and dirty faces, seemingly stunned that they had been found alive in the race against starvation and suffocation.
Authorities said they had warned people in central Xaisomboun province, north of the capital, Vientiane, not to go into the caves looking for gold. But on May 19, a group of seven had done so. Heavy rain and flash flooding blocked the entrance, triggering a search that has folded in several Lao groups, as well as the Thai team involved in the 2018 rescue.
Another video posted by one of the groups coordinating the search, Metta Tham Kalasin Command and Control Center, showed a group of people aboveground exchanging hugs and punching the air, some of them falling to their knees and wiping away tears on hearing the news.
Bounkham Luanglath of the Lao organization Rescue Volunteer for People, which has been working closely with local authorities in the rescue efforts, told The Associated Press that five people were found safe and alive but that two more were still missing and the search for them will continue.
“I’m still shaking. Our team made it happen,” he said in a voice message to the AP.
The cave is a narrow chamber often visited by villagers searching for gold deposits, Bounkham had told the AP. He said authorities had repeatedly warned people against entering it out of safety concerns.
State-run Lao National Radio reported that Thai rescuers arrived at the site Sunday for assistance. Divers have since begun navigating flooded sections of the cave toward the area where they believe the group may be trapped.
Laos, officially known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, is a one-party communist state. Its Foreign Affairs Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
