{"id":702575,"date":"2026-05-29T16:54:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702575\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T16:54:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:54:10","slug":"essentially-diving-in-coffee-australian-diver-among-team-rushing-to-rescue-people-trapped-in-flooded-laos-cave-laos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/702575\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Essentially diving in coffee\u2019: Australian diver among team rushing to rescue people trapped in flooded Laos cave | Laos"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Australian cave diver is part of an international team that has been flown into Laos<\/a> from around the world to rescue seven people stuck in a remote, flooded cave.<\/p>\n

The group entered the cave in Xaysomboun province, central Laos, to hunt wildlife and search for gold more than a week ago, but heavy rain blocked the cave entrance. Five of them were found alive this week<\/a>, but two remain unaccounted for \u2013 and the rescuers, some of whom were involved in the rescue of a young Thai football team<\/a> in 2018, still need to extract the survivors from the inundated passageways.<\/p>\n

Kengkard Bongkawong, the head of operations for Metta Tham Rescue, a Thai group, said on social media that searching for the two missing men would be even more challenging, requiring teams to dive through a 30m narrow tunnel, checking along the way for any intersections. \u201cThe next mission will be harder,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Extracting the five survivors will also be challenging, due to low oxygen supplies, more rain and a lack of dive experience among the people who are trapped.<\/p>\n

Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n

Divers with a specialised skill set to handle the extremely narrow conditions in the cave were flown in from around the world on Friday. They will be taken by a military helicopter to the remote and hostile jungle terrain where the men are stuck.<\/p>\n

Australian cave diver Josh Richards, who leads a cave exploration team in Australia called the Soggy Wombats, a marsupial known for its burrowing, flew in on Friday to help with the rescue operation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty awful, by the looks of things,\u201d Richards said. \u201cWe\u2019re predominantly dealing with clay and mud walls, which are particularly unstable and unpleasant. That mud and clay also [affects] the water; you\u2019re essentially diving in coffee. You\u2019re not going to be seeing anything through it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all being done by touch and feel, following the lines that have been laid through the mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Josh Richards says there are similarities with the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand, but also \u2018glaring differences\u2019. Photograph: Josh Richards<\/p>\n

Richards said he was not a \u201cphysically large guy\u201d. He said his fellow international divers, who had been asked to support the rescue team, were \u201call fairly small, we\u2019re all fairly light, and we\u2019ve all spent a fair bit of time underground, squeezing into small places\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very comfortable underwater with a regulator in my mouth, twisting and turning and doing all those bits and pieces, contorting myself around in order to get into particularly nasty places,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd unfortunately, this mine sounds like it\u2019s one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other diving specialists are reportedly arriving from Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and France. A diver from Malaysia joined the mission on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Richards said the rescue plan was now being developed among the divers, \u201cthat will be as safe as possible for everyone involved. There\u2019s a lot of different ideas being thrown around\u201d.<\/p>\n

As sections of the tunnel between the miners and the surface are completely flooded, the team on the ground was also trying to pump out as much water as possible in a two-pronged approach, Richards said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they\u2019re not able to pump all that water out, and there are sections that are completely flooded, that\u2019s \u2026 why we need to be there to potentially get these folks through short sections, where they\u2019ll be using scuba equipment,\u201d he said, \u201cand they almost certainly have never used scuba equipment before in their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MomentMoment rescuers find five villagers trapped in flooded Laos cave – video<\/p>\n

For people who are familiar with the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand, Richards said there were similarities but also \u201cglaring differences\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Laos cave is a \u201cconsiderably\u201d smaller site in terms of length and the physical size of the tunnel itself. The Tham Luang cave is kilometres long, with numerous air chambers where rescuers could set up base stations. Thai rescuers could pump out huge amounts of water, but were also dealing with much more water.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis site is about 350m long. It is much, much smaller, but at the same time, the actual tunnels that we\u2019re trying to squeeze down into are considerably smaller again,\u201d Richards said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, there\u2019s similarities in that you\u2019ve got a group of folks who are not trained cave divers, but are stuck in a cave, and flooding is a concern, but it is a radically different environment that we\u2019re dealing with, and also not dealing with kids is another factor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heavy machinery is being used to clear a route to the cave site, so that equipment can be transported more easily.<\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Rebecca Ratcliffe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Australian cave diver is part of an international team that has been flown into Laos from around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-702575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}