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Elon Musk's Team Is Talking With Thai Officials for Cave Rescue (bloomberg.com)
Representatives for Elon Musk are in talks with Thai authorities about aiding in the rescue of a boys' soccer team stuck in a cave, said a spokesman for the billionaire. From a report: Musk's companies could help by trying to locate the boys' precise location using Space Exploration Technologies or Boring Co. technology, pumping water or providing heavy-duty battery packs known as Tesla Powerwalls, the spokesman said. It's unclear whether Thai officials will accept the offer. Twelve boys and their coach, who had been missing since last month, were found by a pair of British cave divers late Monday. Efforts to rescue them are hampered by narrow passageways and rising waters in the cave system. Most of the boys cannot swim.
I'd hate to be the guy having to decide how to get those kids out. No good options at the moment. I don't see how batteries would help, I'm sure they already have batteries and are apparently running power/communication to the boys location.
I wonder if there is a flexible pipe with a wide enough ID to pull these boys through. If they could snake such a pipe through the underwater sections, then pump out the water, it might be an option. I suppose that effort itself would be quite dangerous and take a lot of time to act on, if its even feasible to start with.
I made a post about drugging them here which covers that kind of thing:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Long story short, yeah, you really need them to be lucid, and the effects of drugs that normally work fine above water may work completely differently underwater. Some side effects are obvious, some not so.
I learnt the hard way early on why you shouldn't even take decongestants when diving. I dived with a minor cold, but took some decongestants and assumed it would be okay. Of course, I still had mucus stuck in the holes in your palate as we tend to when we get colds. I descended to about 5 metres and couldn't clear the pain, so ascend, descended, same problem - a typical squeeze issue from trapped air and an inability to equalise the pressure in the air pocket. I descended a bit more to see if it cleared, by about 10 metres it had, so I continued the dive (a 40 metre dive, in 2c water in a quarry in the UK, in November, with about 1 metre visibility - don't ask). This was the first and only time I suffered nitrogen narcosis, I can't obviously say the decongestants were wholly to blame, I suspect they were a contributing factor but not the only factor. Nitrogen narcosis affects people in different ways, but for me, subconcious was telling me I couldn't breathe and I felt this overwhelming urge to take the regulator out my mouth so I could breathe, whilst I was conciously trying to fight that instinct and tell myself don't be fucking stupid, if you take it out you drown, calm down, keep breathing through it, your fine. Horrible feeling having to fight your own instincts to not drown, but nonetheless I made it through it okay by reminding myself I'm alive, breathing fine, a little bit cold but otherwise okay, keep going, all is good.
When I came back up I hit 10 metres and it started hurting near my palate again at the top of my mouth, so again descended to try and clear, went away, ascended, same problem at 10 metres. Running low on air I decided to try and ascend slowly, hurt for a few metres and again at 5 metres it eventually went away. Finished the dive, thought nothing of it.
Now I'm not really sure to this day why it only affected me in that 5 metre window, normally if you have a pressure equalisation issue it only gets worse if you keep going in the direction it started hurting in (i.e. up or down), but for whatever reason it did.
I didn't put two and two together as to the cause and effect until about 6 months later, but long story short after that dive I lost my sense of taste for about 3 months, and was scared shitless it was permanent. The doctors had no idea because I hadn't even remotely connected it to the idea it was to do with the diving, but essentially I'd damaged my palate and the worst part is, even chocolate was like eating tasteless mud, it's really the only way I can describe it - no sweatness, no real flavour at all, just flavourless melted chocolate.
So the lesson here is that even common medicines can increase your susceptibility to problems when diving, and things like valium I suspect have never really been trialled on divers (see my above linked post for the other physicological changes that could impact it), and that if you can't equalise, you can risk some really serious damage, so you have to be able to a) equalise and abort the dive if you can't, b) be lucid enough to make it clear you can't equalise.
Any dive training you do will absolutely and always iterate that you should never do it on medication precisely because almost all meds are untested under the physiological changes divers face, and because you need to be aware and conscious to immediately call out and react to problems because otherwise they'll often only get worse. The cave diving community take this sufficiently seriously that they have a rule- anyone can end a dive for any reason at any time, without question. This is precisely because everything from anxiety about a dive, through to illness,