Laos Gold Miner Rescued From Flooded Cave in Perilous 2-Hour Dive After 9 Days Trapped
A gold miner in Laos was pulled from a flooded cave in a harrowing two-hour rescue operation Friday evening, ending an ordeal that spanned nine days underground. The miner, whose name has not yet been released, is the first of seven artisanal miners to be brought out alive since monsoon rains flooded the cave system on Aug. 7.
Lead rescue diver Mikko Paasi, a veteran of the 2018 Thai cave rescue that saved a youth soccer team, described the mission as a “trust-me dive” — the rescued miner had never used scuba gear before. Paasi told CBS News in an exclusive interview that the extraction required the miner to be “sandwiched” between two divers through narrow, pitch-black passages where the tunnel narrowed to the width of a hubcap. The diving portion itself took only about 10 minutes, but the round-trip journey from the entrance to the trapped group and back takes a trained team roughly five hours.
“I got him through the restrictions and everything, and he’s healthy and he’s alive,” Paasi said. “Today we were lucky, but not lucky — everything worked out as we planned. But there’s a lot of moving parts that can go wrong.”
The rescue operation highlights the extreme dangers faced by artisanal miners in Southeast Asia, where unregulated small-scale gold mining is common. Laos’ monsoon season, which typically runs from May to October, creates a “ticking clock” for any cave rescue, Paasi noted. Five days of pumping water out of the cave had limited success, forcing rescuers to turn to scuba diving as a “last option” — one that put both the miners and the divers at “quite high risk,” Paasi said.
Of the seven miners trapped since Aug. 7, five were located. The rescued miner was the first to be extracted. The fate of two others remains unknown; Paasi said the team has stopped searching for them, believing they are either dead or trapped in spaces too narrow for divers to enter. The four remaining miners are still inside, and a new extraction timeline is being developed with fresh personnel and equipment arriving at the scene.
The 2018 Thai cave rescue — which involved many of the same divers — set a precedent for such operations, but Paasi stressed that every cave system presents unique hazards. In Laos, the water is murky, the rock is sharp as knives, and the fear of suffocation is the primary cause of panic. “Panic or uncertainty inside that environment could be fatal,” he said.
The rescue team has requested immunity from prosecution from the Lao government in case of fatalities during the mission — a sign of the legal and ethical complexities that accompany these high-stakes operations. Josh Morris, another leader of the Thai cave rescue who is now advising the Laos effort, said, “Finding them was difficult, but finding them, in a way, was the easy part. You have to have a whole practiced, well-thought-out plan to move people in conditions where the risks of serious problems are very high.”
The rescued miner was brought out at 8:37 p.m. local time Friday, according to Rescue Volunteer for People, a local humanitarian group. Officials plan to release his name once his family has been notified and his condition stabilizes. Paasi expressed optimism that the remaining miners could be extracted without further diving if pumping operations succeed, but he acknowledged, “The environment is so hostile that anything can happen.”