"You can't fight nature” says veteran Tham Luang diver on Laos mission

Finnish cave-diving expert Mikko Paasi wrote on his Facebook page that, despite the rescuers' best efforts during the recent rescue mission in Laos' Xaysomboun province, they were ultimately unable to overcome the forces of nature.

Paasi, who took part in the successful rescue of members of Thailand's Wild Boars football team from the Tham Luang cave complex in Chiang Rai in 2018, shared a detailed account of the operation, which ended this week after five trapped miners were rescued, but two other men could not be located.

“Did we give it everything we had? 110% for two weeks, but you can't fight nature,” he wrote.

According to Paasi, he learned through social media on May 2nd that seven miners were trapped in a flooded cave in Laos. He said he immediately contacted Lao cave diver Alex Souliyakane and, with support from the Divers Alert Network (DAN) Europe, assembled a rescue team and travelled to Laos to assist local and Thai rescuers.

Paasi said obtaining the official permits to join the rescue operation in Laos was the first major challenge.

He wrote that the effort would not have been possible without the support of DAN Europe and Alex Souliyakane, who helped to secure the necessary approvals and to integrate the team with the Thai rescue unit led by Tingli.

Paasi described the operation as one of the most challenging of his more than three decades of diving. “The second nightmare was the first dive into the mine. Never in more than 30 years of diving had I experienced such a claustrophobic and hostile environment,” he wrote.

During an exploratory dive, Paasi and another diver reached an underground chamber and gathered crucial information that helped shape the rescue plan.

On May 27, rescuers located five trapped miners alive in a chamber deep inside the flooded tunnel, a breakthrough that shifted the focus to planning how to bring them safely to the surface.

Over the following days, rescue teams repeatedly dived into the cave to deliver supplies and monitor the miners' condition, while efforts continued to pump water out of the flooded system.

Paasi said pumping water from the mine remained the preferred strategy, but deteriorating conditions eventually forced rescuers to consider extracting the miners through the flooded passages.

When the miners' health began to decline rapidly and pumping efforts showed little progress, the team decided to attempt a hazardous underwater extraction.

Rescuers successfully brought one miner through a narrow 25-metre restriction, but Paasi said the risks involved were too great to continue. Instead, rescue teams intensified pumping operations and eventually lowered the water level long enough for the remaining four trapped miners to crawl to safety.

The mission then shifted to searching for the two other missing men, believed by their families to have entered the mine before the five survivors and possibly became trapped deeper inside.

As floodwaters rose again, part of the rescue team began searching for alternative entrances through the surrounding limestone mountain, while others continued operations near the main access point.

Conditions steadily worsened.

Paasi said sections of the cave began to collapse, air quality deteriorated and heavy rain threatened to destabilise the site further.

“Eventually, the cave began to collapse, the air quality deteriorated and, with heavy rain approaching, the rescue efforts became too dangerous to continue,” he wrote.

The multinational rescue mission was officially suspended yesterday after authorities concluded that continuing operations would pose an unacceptable risk to rescuers.

“Could we have done better? Sure, we could. Could we have done worse? A lot worse,” he wrote.

The rescue effort brought together personnel from Laos and Thailand, along with international cave-diving specialists, who worked around the clock for more than two weeks in an attempt to save those trapped underground.

Rescuers have said they intend to return if weather conditions improve, floodwaters recede and the cave system becomes stable enough for operations to resume.