Officials have announced that twelve boys as well as their soccer coach, who were lost for 10 days in a cave in Thailand, have been found alive.
“Thai Navy SEALs have found all 13 with signs of life,” Narongsak Osottanakorn, the governor of the Chiang Rai province, told reporters.
Rescuers are currently working to extract the team from the cave.
Cheers came from the searchers when a Thai military official announced the rescue at a base camp near the mouth of the cave,
Everyone had been praying and working hard for such an outcome.
The rescue has been deemed miraculous and came during a lull in the torrential rains that had hampered the agonizing search.
The lull also gave rescuers confidence to push forward in an part of the subterranean labyrinth that they had hoped the boys and their coach were waiting to be saved.
A diver from Belgium who is part of an international team that had been searching the dark and wet underground web of tunnels in the jungle of northern Thailand told reporters that fresh writing discovered on a wall of one of the passageways confirmed that rescuers were headed in the correct direction.
The 12 boys, all between the ages of 11 to 16, and their coach went missing after they entered the Tham Luang Nang Non cave for an excursion on the 23rd of June.
Officials believe that the team got trapped when monsoon rains flooded passages and blocked their pathway back to the entrance of the cave where their bicycles were found.
Rescuers were hoping to find the group in the dryer part of the cave, but that wasn’t the case.
Divers had to pull themselves along with rope against very powerful currents in the cave’s water. The visibility was extremely poor and one rescuer described it as swimming through coffee.
The rescue operation gripped the attention worldwide, as people across the region collectively prayed for a miracle in the search that had entered its tenth day.
Crews of geologists have been drilling into the grottos to create potential escape shafts closer to the area where rescuers had hoped to find the wayward party.
Crews have also been working above ground to pump flood waters out of the cave in order to give rescuers better access to search passageways.
Before the announcement of the rescue, officials conceded they were in a desperate race against time and weather. Meteorologists were forecasting a 30 to 40% chance of thunderstorms in the northern region of the country by Wednesday.
Roughly 1000 volunteers and rescuers, including a U.S. military team, established a base camp near the mouth of the cave. Family members of the soccer team were also in the area monitoring any news from rescuers at a makeshift shrine.
