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Thai authorities are racing to finalise rescue plans to retrieve 12 boys and their football coach from a Thailand cave before storms forecast for the end of the week, after which an extraction will become “almost impossible” for months, according to one coordinator of the international rescue effort.
New footage emerged of the children on Wednesday morning showing them being treated by Thai navy doctors who spent the night more than four kilometres inside the cave complex where the boys have been stranded for the past 11 days.
The boys, none of who can swim, are being trained in how to breathe through diving masks but none have made any attempt to get through the water hemming them in.
Authorities said they appeared mentally and physically healthy after receiving food and water supplies, but were yet to speak to their parents after the waterproof seal of a phone sent into the narrow, muddy cave system was breached, ruining the device.
“We are trying to get the kids and parents in touch, then a lot of pressure will be relieved,” an army spokesman said on Wednesday.
Ruengrit Changkwanyuen, a coordinator of the Thai contingent of the international diving team that located the boys on Monday night, said the boys were safe on high ground near an area known as Pattaya Beach.
“But rescuers have to work quickly because by Friday a storm is coming, and if the rain starts again the cave is going to be fully flooded,” Changkwanyuen said. “If that happens it will be almost impossible to send supplies or keep in touch with them.”
Thai officials said on Tuesday that no extraction was imminent. “Today we won’t be able to,” said Narongsak Osatanakorn, the governor of province Chiang Rai at a morning briefing.
He said more water was being pumped out of the site than was seeping in and divers were working to seal holes in the rocks around the boys.
Authorities had drawn up several plans to rescue the boys, including drilling into the rock and pulling each one through the complex with a diver, he said, but no plan had yet been committed to.
The Thai military has been conducting evacuation drills at the site surrounding the mouth of the cave, which the boys entered with their coach after soccer practice on 23 June.
Soldiers linked arms and formed a path leading to 13 ambulances posted at the site. It is understood a parent of each of the boys and a mental health worker will accompany each one to the hospital after they are retrieved.
“We are fully confident every one will come out but not all at once,” Osatanakorn said. “Those who are ready first and then the others.”
Additional reporting by Jacob Goldberg