Saisombun Province, Laos —
After a long and complex operation inside a flooded cave in a remote area of central Laos, the men at the center of the mission did something few expected Saturday. they left.
It was not what the International Rescue Mission had planned.
Work was halted Friday when the first of the five trapped men descended into a flooded tunnel, and it was expected it would be hours or even days before the remaining men emerged.
Instead, the group scrambles out after the water level recedes, surprising even rescue workers who had planned a high-risk strategy to lead the villagers to safety through a flooded tunnel with zero visibility.
“I was literally trying to dive in my wetsuit when they surfaced on their own,” said Australian rescue diver Josh Richards, one of the team of international divers.
The five people went underground in search of gold more than a week ago, then became trapped in rising rainwater. For their family, the weekend brought an overwhelming sense of relief.
One of the local residents who took part in the rescue was trying to find his father. When he came out, Tao Un knelt down and hugged him tightly. Moments later, Own wiped away tears as her father was placed on a stretcher, wrapped in a silver and gold emergency thermal blanket. This was the release of more than a week of painful suspense.
However, the community’s joy remains incomplete as two other villagers who are believed to have entered the cave before the five rescued remain missing.
The diving team, some of whom brought valuable experience from a dramatic cave rescue in neighboring Thailand in 2018, spent days preparing the trapped villagers to navigate the highly complex and dangerous environment underground.
The narrow rock passage drops off at a steep angle, and Richards compared the flooded sections of opaque silty water to coffee. In some places, the route narrowed to just over 60cm (about the width of a refrigerator), forcing rescuers and survivors alike to navigate narrow and unstable waterways.
None of the villagers had any diving experience, but they had been underground for nearly a week without food or water before being discovered, and faced the challenge of escaping from the flooded underground maze. The men managed to keep their spirits up, but being underground for more than 10 days naturally took a toll physically. The humid, confined environment caused caked-in mud, and some of the men suffered skin and intestinal problems.
Ahead of the planned climb, crouched in a dark, claustrophobic room and illuminated only by headlights, rescue divers Norased Parasin and Mikko Persi instructed the men on how to escape using special equipment and demonstrated how to manage oxygen tanks and use breathing apparatus. This is a difficult task for beginners in a high stress environment.
On Friday, the first trapped man was brought to safety through a chamber of murky, zero-visibility water and rock, to cheers and relief outside.
Plans were underway to rescue the remaining four people, but water levels in the cave had dropped significantly on Friday as emergency pumping operations continued overnight and Saturday’s storm threatened to halt operations.
Finnish diver Mikko Persi, a veteran of the 2018 rescue mission in Thailand, said the rescue team joked during the operation that divers might not be needed if the pumps were working well enough. And that’s exactly what happened.
“It was the best outcome, because the pump was always planned and it’s the safest way to put no one at risk. So we’re happy that we don’t have to use the pump anymore and it worked,” Parsi said.
Now the focus is back on the remaining two villagers who are still missing.
With the possibility of bad weather approaching, rescue teams are considering whether to resume search operations. If heavy rain floods the cave again, conditions could become too dangerous for divers to re-enter.
All villagers are understood to have gone into the caves in search of gold, part of an informal mining economy that has expanded across Laos in recent years, particularly in remote limestone and river basin areas where formal livelihoods are scarce and enforcement is limited. According to the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, it is part of a proliferation of unregulated small-scale alluvial mining that is expanding across the Mekong Basin and is comprised of hundreds of sites suspected of operating completely outside of formal oversight.
The dangers of this informal economy are well documented. In 2021, heavy rains destabilized the ground during an illegal gold mining operation in the northwestern mountainous province of Xieng Quang, causing a catastrophic shaft collapse that killed seven people.
Human rights groups and local NGOs have long warned that economic desperation in rural areas, where a lack of wage labor and fragile subsistence agriculture leaves few alternatives, is putting local populations at life-threatening risks.
Record-high global gold prices are reinforcing this trend. Seduced by life-changing rewards, prospectors are taking even more extreme risks by venturing into deep, unreinforced caves and holes, even during the dangerous rainy season.
Lao state media coverage of this week’s incident emphasized warnings against illegal mining, highlighting the serious environmental and safety risks it poses to rural areas and casting a shadow over the future of the rescued men.
Their survival has been hailed as a miracle, but their victory could soon be overshadowed as authorities focus on cracking down on the growing illegal gold trade.
But for now, such fears have been kept at bay as the rescue gave them a second chance at life.
CNN’s June John and Angie Pranasamridhi contributed reporting.
