Gluten Freeman posted:

Rescuers want to get boys out within a week, before monsoons worsen.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jul/04/thailand-cave-rescue-divers-may-attempt-to-free-trapped-football-team-this-week-live

Includes this amazing quote from a cave diving expert:

There Bias Two posted:

Honestly, sedating them would probably be safer than having them awake through transport. Can we slip them a few Benedryl tabs?

Gluten Freeman posted:

Rescuers want to get boys out within a week, before monsoons worsen.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jul/04/thailand-cave-rescue-divers-may-attempt-to-free-trapped-football-team-this-week-live

Includes this amazing quote from a cave diving expert:

ATP_Power posted:

Yeah, even shallow, open water recreational diving has a lot of hazards that are invisible to the untrained, any penetration dive has all those risks, coupled with a ton more new hazards - and that's when nothing goes wrong. Add to that the risks and challenges of deep water diving on compressed air, and you've got a situation that can kill even highly experienced divers. On air, at those depths, you have to drop down multiple secondary 'stage bottles' of air, and you still only have about 20 minutes of bottom time on the air in your tanks, those stage bottles are for the hours of decompression you have to do going back to the surface to avoid getting the bends. Additionally, while you're down there, you're also dealing with nitrogen narcosis loving up your perceptions and judgement, in addition to entanglement hazards, and an errant flipper kick could stir up muck that reduces your visibility to zero. The Shadow Divers expedition claimed the lives of two highly experienced cave divers.

quote:

It's not an easy thing to watch a person die, especially if that person is a friend. Less than an hour after the helmet cam was removed from Shaw's head, as Hiles made a copy of the video for the police at the top of the crater, Herbst watched the film of Shaw's last dive. Later, he and Shirley (who calls it "a snuff tape") examined it frame by frame, backward and forward, multiple times, to try and understand every nuance of Shaw's death.

The picture is dark, and sometimes hard to see. But along with the sounds of Shaw's breathing, picked up with perfect clarity by the camera in the stillness of the cave, the video tells the tale of Shaw's final moments. When Shaw reaches the body of Deon Dreyer, he is 12 minutes and 22 seconds into the dive, and he's been on the bottom for just over a minute. He pulls the body bag out and starts to try and work it over Deon's legs. As he does, a cloud of silt obscures the picture. When it clears, Deon's body, its head having fallen off, is floating in front of Shaw.

This was totally unexpected. Deon, as it turned out, was not completely skeletal, and he was no longer stuck in the silt. Instead of decomposing, his corpse had mummified into a soaplike composition that gave it mass and neutral buoyancy. And for some reason—no one has an explanation—the body had become unstuck from the mud as soon as Shaw started working on it. "The fact that the body was now loose, and not pinned to the ground, was not one of the scenarios that we had thought about," Shirley sighs. "The body was not meant to be floating." It's a lot easier to slip a bag over an immobile body than a body floating and rolling in front of you at 886 feet.

Shaw starts fumbling and, for the first time, lets out an audible grunt of effort.
Herbst, listening intently through headphones, heard the steadily increasing distress in Shaw's breathing and knew there was trouble coming. "Breathe slower, man, breathe slower," he urged out loud. Watching the video with a clear head, it is hard not to wonder why Shaw didn't just turn around right then and abandon the dive. In October, he had turned for the surface as soon as his breathing rate increased. Now he was panting, and Deon, who was attached to the cave line, was floating free. The body could have been pulled up. "All the options involved putting the bag on," Shirley explains. "He's sticking with his plan. Which is what you've got to do." Still, when Shirley first saw the video, he couldn't stop himself from pleading, "Leave it, leave it, leave the body now. It's loose and can come up."

Shaw, however, is responding only to the pounding of his narcosis and his determination to finish the job. He keeps working to control the body, letting go of his cave light so he can use both hands. Deon is rolling and turning in front of him, resisting Shaw's efforts to get him into the bag. Shaw has been at it for two minutes, and the cave line is seemingly everywhere. It snags on his cave light, and Shaw pauses to clear it.
At this, Shirley and Herbst bridled. A cave diver should never let gear float loose. "It's a recipe for disaster," says Shirley, who will always regret not being present when Shaw told Hiles he would put the light to the side at times. "Do not do that," he would have warned him.

Now Shaw is acting confused. He is working at the torso, instead of the feet. His movements have lost purpose. After more than two and a half minutes of work—and three minutes and 49 seconds on the bottom—Shaw pulls his shears out, fumbling to open them. The plan was for him to cut the dive tanks away as he rolled the bag over Deon. Shaw's breathing rate continues to increase. Suddenly he loses his footing on the sloping bottom. He scrambles back to the body in a cloud of silt. The grunts of effort, hateful little bursts of sound, are painfully frequent.

Shirley and Herbst guess that Shaw's narcosis was then closer to six or seven martinis. "You focus on the one thing. You don't focus on the dive anymore," Herbst says. "The one thing becomes everything. And I think with Dave it became the body, the body, the body."

Still, Shaw keeps checking the time on his dive computer. After five and a half minutes on the bottom, he's aware enough to know he has to leave, but he doesn't get far. The video shows the bottom moving beneath him. Then Shaw's forward progress stops. His errant cave light has apparently snagged the cave line tied to Deon's tanks. Shaw knows he has caught something and turns awkwardly. His breathing starts to sound desperate. He pulls at the cat's cradle of cave line, as if trying to sort it out. Every breath is now a sharp grunt. Shaw struggles to move forward again but is anchored by the weight of Deon's body. The shears are still in his hand, but he never cuts anything. The pace of his breathing keeps accelerating, and there is a tragic, gasping quality to it, so painful to listen to that Herbst and Shirley will no longer watch the video with sound.
Twenty-one minutes into the dive, the sounds finally start to fade. Dave Shaw, with carbon dioxide suffusing his lungs, is starting to pass out. He is dying. It's heartbreaking to watch. A minute later there is no movement.

Say Nothing posted:

Say Nothing posted:

Drone_Fragger posted:

Look, the big signs telling people they will die if they cave dive here, those are just for show. Now force your dumb rear end through this 18 inch wide crevice with 0 visibility and 1 hour of oxygen and find that child corpse!!!

Synthbuttrange posted:

What if we dig a well above the caves, then put a goon in the well?

spankmeister posted:

We should get you on a plane asap to Thailand because those guys clearly need your expertise.

quote:

Includes this amazing quote from a cave diving expert:

quote:

He suggested that if rescue divers could fit the boys with full-face masks and air bottles “and perhaps restrain them so they can’t move and struggle”, they could be removed “as inert packages”.

SniperWoreConverse posted:

they could just form some kind of mole society if the girls' volleyball team also gets trapped

Whooping Crabs posted:

That necrotic finger will be in my nightmares. He's permanently giving the shocker sign.

Mr. Fix It posted:

Do you want the monsters from The Descent? Because that's how you get the monsters from The Descent.

now entering North Dakota posted:

I feel like it's a bit late to run away from the out of control car after it's already destroyed your bench.

Bip Roberts posted:

it doesn't matter how good you are at football never try to intercept a fire cracker

Synthbuttrange posted:

https://i.imgur.com/IkkoVVi.mp4
Inappropriate footwear for shaking down a restaurant

Der Kyhe posted:

Swimming on the top of the core when it is filled to the fuel stack management level is actually not immediately life-threateningly dangerous if you change out of your clothes and shower immediately afterwards. And did not swallow any water.

OSHA is diving down to retrieve your keys.

FuturePastNow posted:

https://i.imgur.com/m8Kd7Lh.mp4

Zil posted:

I was waiting for a third one to show up out of nowhere.

LostCosmonaut posted:

Since we're talking about cave diving, I might as well post about Bushman's Hole.

Gluten Freeman posted:

Includes this amazing quote from a cave diving expert:

Cable Guy posted:

This is an image from forums history... posted originally by a goon that worked at a research reactor god knows how long ago.



From what I remember, the little guy was fine, just swimmin' along

U.T. Raptor posted:

You want Godzillas?

Memento posted:

Perfectly normal welding practice, doesn't even need to be Russian.

That's how they weld train tracks together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uxsFglz2ig

Humphreys posted:

And we used to steal said thermite for when we were wanting to destroy stuff in the yard while drinking.

Kennel posted:

ethanol posted:

fighting the heatwave

Kennel posted:

shame on an IGA posted:

I'm a white guy from the south and can't swim and know almost no one who can, it's an extremely reliable marker of parental income around here.