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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

#121

Post by apatters »

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.

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.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#122

Post by onetimemanytime »

apatters wrote: post #121
onetimemanytime wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#123

Post by erkkie »

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'm a techie from EU and have survived to tell the story of multiple tooth brushings with tap water in Thailand.

Sarcasm aside, I'm sure it varies from place to place, but in places I've been to in Thailand (and I live half there, half EU), tap water is fine for washing/brushing and if anything, too chlorinated (and thus not too drinkable). I still drink bottled water (or filtered water; many local friends have filters installed to their tap).

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#124

Post by setr »

sanderjd wrote: post #81
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'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?

I would imagine its based on how reasonable the fear is; I have a (minor) fear of heights that activates regardless of how safe an environment I'm in. If I'm standing precariously on a rooftop, or just standing idly on a well-secured ladder, the fear is the same (given the same height). In my case, I can still operate without much trouble (it remains there, but I can ignore it), but if it were debilitating, I think it certainly makes sense to refer to it as a phobia.

Not just a fear, but an unreasonable fear, that limits your ability to operate.

I think a non-phobia would be acknowledging that the danger exists, but also acknowledging its risk (according to the safety of your environment), and your fear rises accordingly (linearly?).

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#125

Post by jonny_eh »

PeterisP wrote: post #100
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?

It's a 2.5 km (a bit less than 2 miles) underwater swim. Right now they've been without food for 10 days and are barely able to stand. At the moment they wouldn't be able to walk the distance, much less spend many hours (it was about four hours for the experienced divers, so more for the boys) swimming underwater in unpredictable currents with no visibility due to silt, so if they get confused and let go of the strin…

Why hasn't food been delivered?

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#126

Post by JshWright »

cma wrote: post #109
JshWright wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situational awareness of an ROV operator (who can only get visual feedback (in very low visibility conditions) is far lower than a diver (Who can feel their way along). Way too easy for an ROV (which has to tow along a tether) to get itself tangled somewhere.

Is sonar an option at the kind of scales involved?

I am by no means a subject matter expert, but I'd expect sonar would be next to useless in turbulent water, close to a bunch of highly reflective surfaces. Sonar also doesn't solve the problem of a kilometer long tether getting tangled at some point.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#127

Post by wallflower »

avar wrote: post #90

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…

The actual video shot by the rescuing divers shows how calm and control the leader of the expedition acts after they encounter Harrison alive. Starts around 5:50

https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=51e_1385934620

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#128

Post by grkvlt »

hvidgaard wrote: post #36
jaggederest wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, I wonder what the pros and cons are for drilling to retrieve them or send supplies. In the mine collapse situations that I'm aware of, there was already infrastructure on hand for heavy equipment and drilling. I have to imagine that the dangers of cave diving are multiplicative - you don't get enough skill-based improvement from any given trip into/out to make repeated trips a safe option.

I'm sure I don't understand the scale of this. I would however think that you can bring huge industrial pumps and do some plumbing to a suitable place to dump the water and turn them on. Holland once send 7 million ton a day of pumping capacity to England to help them out. Could that not make a serious impact on the water levels in the cave?

Also, the pumps have to be at the lowest point, pushing the water up - a siphon has a maximum height that a vacuum can draw water up of around 10m.[0] You can't just stick the pump at the entrance and then shove a pipe hundreds of meters down the cave system, you need to take the pump down there and run the hose back to the outside.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphon

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#129

Post by cellularmitosis »

JshWright wrote: post #105
cellularmitosis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine the psychological relief of seeing a human being rather than a robot has a lot to do with it.

It has nothing to do with it... Robots are not an option because it's a zero visibility environment (cameras for remote operation are useless).

I'm happy to stand corrected. However, zero visual visibility doesn't seem like a limitation for a remotely piloted robot. Can't they just as easily use sonar, radar, or some other form of non-optical "vision"? Fishermen use "fish finders" which are non-optical, so I'd guess the tech is pervasive and cheap.

Re: British divers make contact with missing Thai football team

#130

Post by JshWright »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #129
JshWright wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with it... Robots are not an option because it's a zero visibility environment (cameras for remote operation are useless).

I'm happy to stand corrected. However, zero visual visibility doesn't seem like a limitation for a remotely piloted robot. Can't they just as easily use sonar, radar, or some other form of non-optical "vision"? Fishermen use "fish finders" which are non-optical, so I'd guess the tech is pervasive and cheap.

I don't expect sonar would work well in turbulent water, with highly reflective (rock) jagged cave walls.
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