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British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

theguardian.com

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Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#81

Post by sanderjd »

CloudNetworking wrote: post #37
arethuza wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a weird phobia where I'm afraid of caves - the very idea of caving in small caves where people wriggle through has always terrified me and as for cave diving.... I could not do what they have done - not if my life depended on it.... Personally, I think they deserve the very highest honours we can give them as a country.

That's not a weird phobia by any means. That's very common and it's called claustrophobia.

I've always wondered this: is it appropriate to call fears of legitimately dangerous things "phobias"? I don't like being close to the edge of deadly tall cliffs; am I scared of heights or are cliffs just dangerous?

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#82

Post by Filligree »

geomark wrote: post #53
fabricexpert wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think the coach should be commended for keeping all those boys safe and alive in such conditions. He couldn't have known the cave was going to flood, the signs say don't go in in between July and September - they entered in June. Without a strong leader this probably would have been a very different outcome already and they'd be dealing with retrieving corpses. I actually find comments like yours really…

Actually, it was irresponsible to take them on a cave tour this time of year because the rains often start in June, regardless of when the official start of rainy season is called. It's been like that as long as I've lived here, and there have been quite a few cases of cave tourists getting trapped during rainy season. So he did a good job of taking care of them once they were in trouble, but he should have not taken…

If the rains often start in June, why do the signs say July?

There may be plenty of blame to go around, but I don't think blaming an inexperienced caver is very useful.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#83

Post by de_watcher »

arethuza wrote: post #40
CloudNetworking wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a weird phobia by any means. That's very common and it's called claustrophobia.

I'm not afraid of small enclosed spaces (e.g. in a building) - I'm afraid of caves :-)

Of course. Caves aren't designed by people for people, so there are surprises there.

I haven't thought that it's a big deal until actually having to lead into a pretty tight passage without prior information about it.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#84

Post by VirtualAirwaves »

jdietrich wrote: post #44
jacquesm wrote: post #11

Those divers are super brave. This was done under extremely difficult circumstances, they risked their lives with a reasonably high chance of at least one of them not making it back.

It's skill rather than bravery. Rick Stanton and John Volanthen were the divers who first made contact with the missing boys. They are both hugely experienced cave divers and cave rescue divers; as a team, they have broken multiple records in depth and distance. This was a difficult and complex diving operation, but that's business as usual for divers of this calibre. Bravery is fundamentally incompatible with cave d…

Are the armchair diving experts on YC News _really_ arguing over whether these divers are _brave_ or not?

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#85

Post by Harvey-Specter »

icebraining wrote: post #52
chmod775 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be hard enough for a human to not get stuck somewhere in a cave. There's little chance you'll figure out how to get a robot to do the trip before the whole situation is resolved anyways. In such situations it's best to go with the simplest solution you know will work and people are trained for, instead of trying to get fancy and possibly endanger the whole undertaking (imagine a robot getting stuck somewhere a…

By robot I meant remote controlled, not self-driving. But fair point - adding another obstacle would be tragic, yes.

Visibility is basically zero, a remote operator wouldn't be able to see anything.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#87

Post by amelius »

dm319 wrote: post #25

This is great news, but sadly their lives are still very much at risk. They are too deep to drill down to, there is a lot of rain to pump out (and the rain can continue), and they can't swim (even if they could, this is a hard dive for those that can). Found this from a Bill Whitehouse: Bill Whitehouse, vice-chair of the British Cave Rescue Council which is helping the rescue efforts, played down speculation the boys…

Can't they run an oxygen hose to the place? Or perhaps bring a bunch of oxygen tanks, which could be used until they figure it out?

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#88

Post by wepple »

danilocesar wrote: post #80
cm2187 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is that surely there must be a wide enough passage for them to have got in in the first place. It may be flooded but if one can walk into them vertically, surely they should be fairly accessible to a diver horizontally. Can't they just follow / be attached to a string or something like that?

Think about thin vertical passages. You can talk trough them easily but diving would be very difficult. I know nothing about that cave, but passages between caves can be connected by tight restrictions. They might have crawled they way up. And now that restriction is flooded.

Add a bunch of regulator hoses, fins, air supply etc to someone not used to having them attached and the gap needs to be huge to not snare a hose and rip a full face mask off.

Even a semi experienced diver is far less aware of all their apparatus than a human who has been crawling around things since birth

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#89

Post by robotresearcher »

elil17 wrote: post #86

I’m curious about why they aren’t using robotics to driver food - seems like it would be safer than having human divers go back and forth

You can't drag 1km of tough power and control cable behind a little robot, and autonomous robots aren't up to the job yet.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#90

Post by avar »

There's an interesting parallel here to the incident in 2013[1] where a Nigerian ship's cook survived for 60 hours in an air bubble 30 meters under the surface in a sunken capsized tugboat.

That was also a case where someone with no prior experience as a diver had to be extracted from a situation otherwise requiring some fairly advanced dive training. From the article:

> The rescuing divers fitted Okene with a diving helmet so he could breathe while being transferred into a closed diving bell and returned to the surface for decompression from saturation. Okene lost consciousness during the transfer.

According to the BBC[2] they'll probably end up doing something similar to extract those kids. They'd need to drag them over a long distance (probably one at a time) as "dead weight", but this method wouldn't require them to learn any diving skills.

> The Thai authorities have appealed for donations of full-face scuba diving masks small enough to fit the boys in order to reduce the risk of their breathing apparatus coming loose as they travel through flooded passageways.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquanaut#Accidental_aquanaut

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44692813

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