Josh Bratchley had no food or water. No one knew if he was alive or dead, if he had found an air pocket or drowned in the murky water.
In this June 2018 photo, emergency rescue teams gather in the staging area as they continue the search for 12 young soccer team members and their coach, who went missing in a large cave in Thailand. By Meagan Flynn Meagan Flynn Morning Mix reporter Email Bio Follow April 18 at 7:13 AM The passageway at the floor of the underwater cave was about two feet high and just a little wider than a broad set of shoulders. Just wide enough for Edd Sorenson to fit.
“Everyone was concerned that this was a recovery mission,” Joey Denson, captain of the Jackson County Rescue Squad, told The Washington Post. “Cave diving is 80 percent mental,” Sorenson told The Washington Post. Surviving, he said, would require Bratchley “to have the mental fortitude to keep himself alive.”
The rope was supposed to lead the two men back to the surface, but now they were separated, a sea of silt and mud between them.Bratchley’s teammates tried to find him for hours in the tiny crawl spaces, and meanwhile Bratchley tried to find the exit. The cave isn’t necessarily a labyrinth, Richards said — but when you can’t see anything, and when sometimes only 18 inches divide the ceiling from the floor, it might as well be one.
Denson said the first 911 call came in from Bratchley’s teammates around 1 a.m. Wednesday, after they had done all they could to find him. The challenge they faced in even summoning emergency services, Denson said, was that very few are trained for the type of cave diving required for the rescue. Even the cave rescuers from Chattanooga Hamilton County Rescue Service did not have the expertise required.
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