Cave diver interested in Thai rescue
Middlesex Township police officer and certified cave diver Conrad Pfeifer has a unique perspective on the rescue of the 10 Thai boys and their soccer coach, and he would like to clear up a term in the news that is annoying him.
“They're not oxygen tanks,” Pfeifer said emphatically. “They're air tanks. They contain what you and I are breathing right now.”
Pfeiffer, who teaches dive instructors, said breathing pure oxygen is fatal at a depth of 20 feet below the water's surface.
“It's driving me batty,” Pfeifer said.
Due to his decades of experience diving in flooded caves and as a board member for International Underwater Cave Rescue and Recovery, Pfeifer was able to explain the basics of what the crack British diving team is doing in their successful effort to rescue.
He said the British divers were called in because their expertise is in “sump” caves, which have chambers that rise and fall and become choked off in low areas if water rises.
The cave containing the trapped boys is a sump cave, Pfeifer said.
He said from what he can see on television and the Internet, the British sump cave divers are proceeding by the book and according to their training.
“They are the absolute best team to be there,” Pfeifer said.
He explained that it appears the distance from the mouth of the cave to the trapped boys and their coach is about 3 miles.
About 1,000 total feet of that distance is under water, he estimated.
“I'm guessing they're swimming about 1,000 feet, but it takes them three hours of walking to get to (a sump),” he said.
If Pfeifer could have one question about the operation answered, he said it would be how did young boys in soccer clothes and flip flops traverse a cave chamber that rescuers need climbing and repelling equipment to traverse?
“How did they get there?” Pfeifer wondered. “I think they took another passage (once inside the cave).”
A full story will appear in the Butler Eagle.
