LONDON, July 3, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Two British volunteer divers who helped
find a youth football team trapped in a cave complex in Thailand have a
history of difficult rescues around the world.
Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, who have day jobs as a fireman and
internet engineer respectively, negotiated a long and winding path through
flooded caverns to find the 12 young boys and their coach nine days after
they went missing.
“The British divers Rick and John were at the spearhead” of the forward
search party, said Bill Whitehouse of the British Cave Rescue Council, an
informal grouping of rescue teams around Britain.
“They managed to dive the last section and get through into the chamber
where the missing party were on a ledge above the water.”
Whitehouse, who has spoken briefly to the team that also included a third
Briton, Robert Harper, as well as other international and Thai experts,
described the difficulties of the search.
“They were diving upstream in the system, so they were having to swim
against the current or pull themselves along the walls,” he told the BBC.
“I gather the actual diving section was about 1.5km, about half of which
was completely flooded,” he said, adding that the total dive was about three
hours.
– ‘A job to do’ –
Volanthen, an internet engineer in Bristol in the southwest of the
country, and Stanton, a fireman from Coventry in central England, are no
strangers to difficult dives.
Stanton, in his mid-50s, told his local newspaper in 2012 that his biggest
achievement was helping rescue six British soldiers trapped in caves in
Mexico.
He and Volanthen also helped in 2010 in an attempt to find Eric Establie,
an experienced French potholer who became trapped underground in the Ardeche
region of southern France. Establie’s remains were found eight days after he
went missing.
“All of the cave rescue missions are quite shocking but the most
challenging one was in France,” Stanton said in the interview, to mark his
receipt of an MBE honour from Queen Elizabeth II.
“Myself and another diver were there for 10 days and it was really
stressful the whole time. It was a very dangerous dive and a very dangerous
cave.”
But he insisted cave diving was still only a “hobby” which he started at
the age of 18, after watching a documentary about the sport on television.
In Thailand, the team have avoided the media, with Volanthen telling
reporters when he arrived at the site: “We’ve got a job to do”.
Volanthen, reported to be in his 40s, told the Sunday Times in a 2013
interview that caving requires a cool head and that “panic and adrenaline are
great in certain situations but not in cave-diving”.