Trapped 54 hours in a cave, he made it his mission to go back underground
When George Linnane finally emerged from the darkness after 54 hours trapped underground, he had a broken leg, a broken jaw, and a clear sense of purpose. He was going back.
The 43-year-old from Bristol had been exploring Ogof Ffynnon Ddu in Bannau Brycheiniog National Park — also known as the Brecon Beacons — when a fall left him badly injured. What followed was the longest cave rescue in UK history, with more than 300 volunteers involved.
Ogof Ffynnon Ddu, one of the UK’s most demanding cave systems, reaches about 902ft (275m) below ground and contains 38 miles of passages.
Speaking to the BBC World Service, Linnane said the ordeal was as mental as it was physical. “I was in survival mode,” he said. “At points during that I thought I might not make it.”
The trip was meant to be a straightforward five or six hours. But deep inside the system’s twists and turns, everything changed. “One second I was caving, the next minute, the world went mad.”
When he came to, he could tell his leg was badly broken and some of his teeth were missing. He later learned he had also broken his jaw and three ribs, dislocated his collarbone, lacerated his spleen, collapsed a lung and fractured a scaphoid bone in his wrist.
Ten rescue teams from around the UK worked together to bring him out. More than 250 volunteers were underground, with another 50 above ground supporting the effort. Some rescuers spent 12 hours at a time underground, Linnane said.
Even during the rescue, he was thinking about the details of everyday life. He asked for messages to be passed along, including one to the garage that was due to take his car for its MOT test. “Don’t take my car, because my partner is going to be needing that,” he said. “I did also try to send out an ‘I love you’ to my partner as well.”
When he reached the surface, he recalled: “It felt like Wales. It was wet and windy. Emotionally I was really pleased to get out of there.”
Linnane said he felt “lucky to be alive” and “very lucky” to still have his right leg. He also knew, almost immediately, that he would return underground. “I always wanted to get back underground. I kind of made it my mission. I decided this very early on while I was still in the hospital,” he said.
The recovery was slow. “At the beginning,” he said, “progress was very, very slow.” He had to learn to eat and walk again, spending four weeks training his jaw to chew. “I just wanted to be able to eat my Christmas dinner with my teeth rather than sticking it in a blender,” he said.
He started by walking to the end of his driveway and back, then a few hundred meters up the road. After just over four months, he was able to get into a swimming pool. Six months after the accident, he was back scuba diving — the hobby that first led him to caving.
Nine months after the fall, he returned underground for the first time and eventually went back to the cave where he had been injured.
Linnane also set his sights on joining South and Mid Wales Cave Rescue Team, the group that coordinated the operation. “I wanted to be able to help the next poor soul this happens to,” he said.
He is quick to defend a sport he says is often misunderstood. “When people think of caving, they think of small passages and crawling and misery. And that’s really not what it’s about,” he said. “We do that stuff. But we do it to get to the good stuff, pretty amazing things that 99.9% of the population will never see. It’s another world down there. It’s like being on the moon or another planet.”
“Caving is a very safe sport, generally speaking, for people that know what they’re doing,” he added. “It’s as safe as crossing a road. But things do happen occasionally. And when they do, there is only one team of people, one type of person that is going to get you out of there. The fire service can’t do it, mountain rescue can’t do it. The only people that can do it is other cavers, because they’re the only people with the skill set to do it. Cavers rescue cavers.”
His return to the underground is a reminder that UK cave rescue depends heavily on volunteer specialists — and, in his case, that survival can sometimes be the beginning of a new mission.