Laos cave rescue joy gives way to hunt for two missing villagers

Rescue efforts at the flooded cave in Laos have turned fully towards the two trapped miners whose whereabouts in the complex system of tunnels and chambers remains unknown.

The trapped villagers are Bay and Lup, two unemployed young men from the tiny village of Nampha, a few kilometres by rocky path from the cave site, which is still teeming with volunteers and rescue crews.

Bay, who is still a teenager, and Lup, who is 33, went down the cave to fossick for gold at about 7pm on May 20 – independently of the five survivors freed over the past two nights.

While the time to rescue the two men has not completely expired, it is fast getting that way.

Expert divers have explored almost the entire system. One of the spaces left to search was fully flooded, meaning if Bay and Lup were there, Finnish rescuer Mikko Paasi said last week, they would be dead.

Another man, 33-year-old Keo Huangpasert, had gone into the cave with the missing pair that night but managed to escape after a nine-hour ordeal trying to find open passageways leading to the cave mouth.

Huangpasert had bad legs from a traffic accident so Bay and Lup went in first, he said. Soon Huangpasert was by himself.

“About 100 metres into the cave it was narrow and I couldn’t get my legs through,” he told this masthead.

Huangpasert stayed in that area looking for gold through the night, until the rising water started making him anxious at about 9am on May 21.

“Some of it was gushing from a big hole in the wall of the cave,” he said.

“I had to fight my way out.”

According to one villager, such expeditions into the cave only began about two months ago, when word started spreading that someone had found gold there.

Huangpasert’s first time in the cave was only a week before the doomed expedition. His cut of the gold was worth the equivalent of about $60. For men who only ate what meagre amounts they could grow and kill themselves, this was significant loot.

The five known survivors were discovered huddled together on a rock on Wednesday afternoon by Paasi and Thai counterpart Norrased Palasing. At that stage, pumping efforts had been unsuccessful, so it was up to divers to pull out the first man in a 37-minute operation on Friday night.

But the pumping was starting to yield results by late in the week. On Friday more specialist divers had arrived from around the world, including Australia’s Josh Richards.

Miraculously, though, they were not required for the extraction. The remaining weak and sodden four men stunned everyone on Saturday by climbing out of the cave themselves.

“Honestly it was just shock, pure shock,” a joyful Richards told Seven’s Sunrise program.

“We had been waiting to set things up. I had literally just geared up … to take them food, take them medicine.

“There’d been some changes to the pumping system in the morning … [and] obviously the pump has drawn down enough water from that sump that the miners have decided that they didn’t want to be there any more, and they’ve managed to duck themselves out and get out through that sump that we were diving through.

“They’d self-rescued … and no one knew they were coming because no one was in the cave – it’s too dangerous to be in the cave while the pumps are operating.”

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.