Laos cave rescue ends unexpectedly after villagers free themselves

CNN

By Will Ripley, Rebecca Wright, Kocha Olarn, Isaac Yee, Kara Fox, CNN

Xaisomboun province, Laos (CNN) — After a long and complex operation inside a flooded cave in a remote area of central Laos, on Saturday, the men at the center of the mission did something few expected: they walked out.

It wasn’t what the international rescue operation had planned for.

When the first of the trapped group of five men dived through the flooded tunnels on Friday, the efforts were paused and there was expectation it could be hours, even days before the others emerged.

Instead – after a days-long operation to pump water out of the remote caves bore fruit – the group scrambled their way out. Rescuers, who were about to launch a high-risk plan to guide the villagers out through flooded tunnels to safety, were stunned as they encountered them at the entrance to the caves.

“I was literally putting my wetsuit on to head in when they emerged on their own,” said Australian rescue diver Josh Richards, one of the expert team of divers.

The five went underground more than a week ago searching for gold before being trapped by rising rainwater. For their families, the weekend has brought overwhelming relief.

One local involved in the rescue was trying to find his own father. When he emerged, Thao Oun dropped to his knees and held him tightly. Moments later, as his father was wrapped in a silver and gold emergency thermal blanket before being placed on a stretcher, Oun wiped away a flood of tears – a release of more than a week’s worth of agonizing suspense.

Yet the joy remains incomplete for this community as two other villagers, believed to have entered the cave system earlier than the five rescued men, remain missing.

The diving team – some of whom brought invaluable experience from a dramatic cave rescue in neighboring Thailand in 2018 – had spent days preparing the trapped villagers to navigate an extremely complex and hazardous environment underground.

Narrow rock passages dropped at steep angles into flooded sections of opaque, silty water that Richards compared to coffee. In places, the route narrowed to little more than 60 cm – roughly the width of a refrigerator – forcing rescuers and survivors alike through confined, unstable channels.

None of the villagers had prior diving experience, yet they were faced with getting out of a flooded, subterranean labyrinth after being underground without food and water for nearly a week before they were discovered . While the men managed to keep up their spirits, being underground for more than 10 days took an understandable physical toll. The damp, confined environment left them caked in mud, with some of the men developing skin and intestinal problems.

Ahead of the group’s planned ascent, crouched in darkened, claustrophobic chambers and illuminated only by head torches, rescue divers Norrased Palasing and Mikko Paasi gave the men a tutorial on how to use specialized equipment to navigate their way out, demonstrating how to manage oxygen tanks and use breathing apparatus – a daunting task for novices in a high-stress environment.

On Friday, the first of the trapped men was successfully guided out through murky, zero-visibility water and chambers of rock before being greeted on the outside to cheers and relief.

While plans were underway to get the remaining four men out, emergency pumping operations ran continuously overnight Friday, which helped to lower the water levels significantly inside the cave ahead of a storm on Saturday that threatened to halt the operation.

Finnish diver Mikko Paasi, a veteran of the 2018 Thai rescue, said that the rescue team had joked during the operation that if the pumping worked well enough, the divers might not be needed. And that is exactly what happened.

“It was the best outcome, because the pumping was always the plan, and is the safest way, where nobody’s gonna get into a risk, so we’re happy that we didn’t have to go anymore, and the pumps worked,” Paasi said.

Now, the focus has shifted back to the two remaining villagers who are still missing.

Rescuers are weighing up whether to resume search operations as poor weather conditions could be approaching. If torrential rain floods the cave again, conditions could become too dangerous for divers to re-enter.

All of the villagers are understood to have entered the cave in search of gold, part of an informal mining economy that has expanded across parts of Laos in recent years, particularly in remote limestone and river basin regions where formal livelihoods are scarce and enforcement is limited. This sits within a wider surge of unregulated, small-scale and alluvial mining across the Mekong basin, consisting of hundreds of suspected sites operating entirely outside of formal oversight, according to the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank.

The dangers of this informal economy are well-documented. In the northwest mountainous Xieng Khouang province in 2021, seven people were killed during an illegal gold-digging operation when heavy rains destabilized the ground and triggered a catastrophic shaft collapse.

Human rights groups and regional NGOS have long warned that economic desperation in rural communities – where a lack of wage labor and vulnerable subsistence agriculture leave few alternatives – drives locals to take life-threatening risks.

The record-breaking surge in global gold prices has only intensified this drive. Lured by life-changing payouts, prospectors are taking even more extreme risks by entering deep, unreinforced caves and pits – even in the treacherous rainy season.

Laos state media covering this week’s incident have heavily emphasized warnings against illegal mining, highlighting the strict environmental and safety hazards it poses to rural communities, casting a shadow over the future of the rescued men.

While their survival is being celebrated as miraculous, their triumph could soon be overshadowed as authorities look to crack down on the expanding illicit gold trade.

For now, however, such anxieties are being held at bay, as the rescue has given these men a second chance at life.

CNN’s June Jeong and Angie Puranasamriddhi contributed reporting.

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