Two cave diving scientists have been rescued after becoming trapped in a cave system at the source of the Huowang River in Baise, located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China.
The operation, which took 69 hours to complete, is being reported in the Chinese media as the first successful cave-diving rescue in the country.
Five aquatic biologists made their way through the karst structure on 5 February to study and photograph the rare fish and shrimp that inhabit the caves.
Two members of the team failed to return, however, and were reported missing at around 7 pm that evening.
The caves are reported as a complex system with narrow passageways containing numerous air chambers, with depths reaching up to 30m in the part of the system the scientists had been diving.
A 13-person team comprising divers, firefighters and medical personnel was dispatched to search for the missing divers, using 200m-long reels to navigate through the murky waters in which visibility was reduced to under 3m.
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The rescue divers were partly guided by noise created by the trapped scientists banging on the rocks.
The first of the missing divers was found after approximately 4 hours of searching in an air pocket 16m below the surface water level and around 300m from the entrance to the cave system. It took a further 90 minutes to extract him from the cave.
The team would make another twelve dives into the system over the next three days searching for the second missing diver, hampered by the number of passageways and chambers in the system.
They would visit at least 10 air pockets during the exploration and had to struggle through waters with strong currents and the difficult topography of the cave system in the process.
The second scientist was eventually located at around 7 pm on 8 February in an air pocket 28m below the surface water level and approximately 500m from the entrance.
He was in a weakened state and barely conscious after his ordeal, however, the complex nature of the small passageways made it impossible for the other divers to pull him free.
One of the rescue divers stayed with him to help keep him conscious, while a teammate left to fetch fresh tanks and glucose to provide the trapped man with enough energy to swim through parts of the system along with them.
It would take nearly two hours to extract the second diver from the cave, and he would say later that he began to experience ‘near-death hallucinations’ and believed he was approaching his ‘final moments’ before the rescue team located him.
No information has been provided as to how the divers became separated and lost, although the fact that the search team had to explore a number of different passageways would indicate a major failure of whatever system of lines the scientific divers might have been using to navigate.
There is no information as to what decompression procedures or recompression treatment he may have received after spending three days trapped in a 28m-deep air pocket other than that the diver was taken to hospital where doctors confirmed his ‘vital signs were stable’ and he was later discharged ‘in good health’.
