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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

#141

Post by dm319 »

arethuza wrote: post #33
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.

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.

Have you read about ted the caver?

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#142

Post by willyt »

robotresearcher wrote: post #89
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.

This thing has a 2km long fibre optic tether and is battery powered. Been in use since 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafox_drone

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#143

Post by throwaway413 »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #115
trashtester wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How prejudiced of you :) Most places in Thailand have access to purified water for drinking. Here is an article from Cambodia, where they are some years behind: https://medium.com/make-a-difference/bringing-clean-water-to...

ha! They down-voted me apparently. To those that down-voted me: Not everyone can turn the tap on and get clean water. Even if Thailand has it today, they probably didn't have it yesterday. When you drink from dubious sources, unless you die as a child, you gain some sort of immunity. A techie from SF can get sick and even die, but a local can drink from the same source and nothing happens to him /her.

I’m from North Africa, and this is very true. If you haven’t grown up drinking the tap water there, it will make you very sick. But locals drink it without problem.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#144

Post by fjsolwmv »

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…

Use indentation only for code, not blockquote

> They were diving upstream in the system so they were having to swim against the current, or pull themselves along the walls. Some of the cave is fairly constricted and other points aren’t. I gather the actual diving section was about 1.5km, about half of which was completely flooded and about half of which was open. They estimated that a round trip is 3 hours.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#145

Post by robotresearcher »

willyt wrote: post #142
robotresearcher wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This thing has a 2km long fibre optic tether and is battery powered. Been in use since 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafox_drone

Cool. But that vehicle is open underwater only. These caves are a mixture of swimming, walking and climbing. Lots of power required, and very tough to teleoperate.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#146

Post by apatters »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #122
apatters wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thais mostly drink bottled water, which is clean. They aren't drinking river water or something. Most of Thailand lacks drinkable tap water. Food hygiene standards are more lax than in the West though.

>> Thais mostly drink bottled water, which is clean. They aren't drinking river water or something.Most of Thailand lacks drinkable tap water. Thanks for the inside info. But do they brush their teeth with bottled water? Do they wash their dishes, tomatoes with bottled water or with "dirty" tap water?

I think most people in Thailand do all of those things with tap water, but there may be exceptions in especially poor, isolated or rural areas. In Bangkok the debate has advanced to whether the water is actually drinkable now (in much of the city the answer is probably yes).

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#147

Post by jacquesm »

A_Person wrote: post #58
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.

That's really not so. Cave diving has well established protocols for safe navigation, gas reserves, entanglement management, and so on. There's no way they'd have gone significantly outside those protocols. Those brits are highly experienced expedition cave divers, and undoubtedly pushed it further than a weekend warrior like me would do. But they really wouldn't have been dicing with death, as it were.

How do you feel about this comment now that one of the rescue divers has died?

Not one of the Brits as far as I can tell but an ex navy seal.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#148

Post by jacquesm »

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…

I will just leave this here for your reflection:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/05/asia/thai-cave-diver-intl...

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#149

Post by jacquesm »

scarejunba wrote: post #99
prmph wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, no matter how skilled and careful you are, some necessary activities are more dangerous than watching paint dry. And courage/bravery is what motivates you to tackle these activities, in spite of your knowledge of their inherent danger. Yes, skill is required, but actually skill is associated with courage; it is the skill that enables you to assess just how dangerous the activity might be, but it is courage that…

This whole argument ranks as one of the silliest things I've ever seen.

No kidding. You can be as prepared as they come and as fit as they come and still face a dangerous situation knowing that someone else's life is on the line going in to risk your own. If that does not qualify as brave I don't know what does.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#150

Post by A_Person »

jacquesm wrote: post #147
A_Person wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not so. Cave diving has well established protocols for safe navigation, gas reserves, entanglement management, and so on. There's no way they'd have gone significantly outside those protocols. Those brits are highly experienced expedition cave divers, and undoubtedly pushed it further than a weekend warrior like me would do. But they really wouldn't have been dicing with death, as it were.

How do you feel about this comment now that one of the rescue divers has died? Not one of the Brits as far as I can tell but an ex navy seal.

Given that I'm sitting at home watching TV - and they're all busting their asses off in the cave - it's hard to discuss this without being disrespectful to them - which I certainly don't want to be. But anyway...

Looking at some of the photos, lots of the gear they are wearing is ordinary recreational gear - nothing like what an experienced cave diver would use. So it raises the question, in my mind, as to whether their navy seals actually do have any formal training in advanced cave diving. Combat diving is unlikely to be the same thing.

So the very unfortunate incident might actually support my previous comment, not contradict it. Cave diving is very dangerous to the untrained or improperly equipped. But proper training and equipment can mitigate those dangers. The two brits would not have been wearing anything like the kind of gear in the photos :-(

Again, kudos to the people on the spot, doing their best.

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