The heroes of the Thai cave rescue
macleans.ca
macleans.ca
It's one of the few anaesthetics that doesn't cause respiratory depression, overdosing is practically impossible, and it's also injected intra-muscularly, rather than intravenously, making it easy to apply in the dark and underwater by an untrained person.
These factors are also why it was used extensively in the Vietnam war for battlefield surgery.
Interesting that, as usual, the media has labelled it as "horse tranquilliser". It's used more extensively on humans than on animals, and is used on all different mammals, not just horses.
I mean, the article makes clear that Dr. Harry is an anesthesiologist and that anesthesiology is a very serious discipline, so I don't think the author meant to suggest they were carelessly administering medication meant for animals instead of humans.
http://wildpro.twycrosszoo.org/S/00Chem/ChComplex/Tiletamine...
Apparently that’s less common in kids.
I would have thought they’d go with a benzodiazepine instead. It has all those benefits you mention without the post-emergence delirium.
Ketamine is very safe, and some nasty side effects are preferable to death.
Not sure why you’d want them so sedated that they are semiconscious.
It doesn’t take much to keep someone from freaking out.
You'd also want to stop them from moving about and potentially causing trouble.
I was taught 20 years ago that it was still given to children as an anaesthetic because it's very safe and they tend to either not experience the "trip" or are not bothered by it, thinking it's a dream.
If so, I would agree ketamine is much safer. But if you’re just trying to keep them from freaking out, 5mg is diazepam will do the job and respiratory depression isn’t much of an issue.
The horse tranquilliser thing needs to stop.
There are so many things that could have gone wrong during that time, my god man ... random diver dudes (i.e. non medical) giving needles putting people out - this was as dangerous as anything else.
"I really want to try and inspire kids to get out and about, get them off their screens... ...and get outside and build up a bit of confidence and resilience that comes with adventuring and taking a few risks."
As long as said risks don't involve getting stuck in an underwater cave and triggering an international search and rescue mission!
Basically the entire rescue operation sounds like it was conducted under a fog of war. No one was ever officially in charge, no one was legally authorized to do what they did (such as the medication of the boys).
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-16/thai-cave-rescue-aust...
“I don’t give a fuck what you do, just get them the fuck out of there. Now.”
Perhaps nobody wanted to say in his face that he must not try again, but it was an informal method that the team had to say it anonymously.
I could see why they would be hesitant to use him.
I wonder why Europeans were so well represented. I wouldn't have necessarily imagined that would be the case. Is it simply because most European countries are relatively wealthy?
They don't want to be Europeans anymore, though - and they voted to that effect.
It's a bit like saying Japan doesn't want to be Asian.
So I dunno... sometimes categorization is complicated.
We just refer to the lot of us as Kiwis after the small and the flightless native bird. What the hell does that have to do with anything I don't know.
Maclean's is a Canadian publication and I think many Canadians have a special interest in the UK, and I think the demographics of Maclean's readership likely reinforces this.
Additionally, I would guess that this is some semantic ambiguity introduced via morphological clipping where the author is using European as a shortened form of Continental/Mainland European. It's a fairly common device used to remove excess verbiage especially when reusing the same terms over and over. Pragmatically, when in context being contrasted against Briton, it becomes more clear that the author means Europeans other than Brits.
A similar example could be "all squares have equal sides whereas rectangles do not". It is pragmatically more likely that I mean _non-square_ rectangles even though my wording is ambiguous or straight up incorrect taken at face value.
So I'd guess it's attributable to the psychological primacy of the UK amongst the readership of this publication, semantically confused via a common morphological device, and ultimately disambiguated by the pragmatics of contrasting a part with its whole.
I've heard this usage in Australia; I can't find a free Australian dictionary so no citation. Australian English maintains more British-isms than American English. I imagine Canadian English may be the same.
It’s pretty common in British English, and so I guess Canadian English as well, to say European and to mean continental Europe. That’s not any kind of political statement, something recent, or anything to do with Brexit, it’s just a shorthand of speech.
In Briton cave diving is largely done to move between flooded sections of dry cave, so most cave divers are dry cavers first, and diving is just used to bypass sumps.
Also most British cave diving is done solo (so without a buddy that most systems recommend.) in quite tight conditions.
Caves in mainland Europe tend to be larger and the diving philosophy is different. There you will find team diving prevalent.
There happened to be a UK crew, and then another crew of Europeans, so 'team UK' 'team Europe' makes sense. If they were event eating/living apart, then the distinction was made on the ground, not by the author.
If there were a bunch of Swedes (Thailand is a disproportionately popular destination for Swedes) it might have been 'Team Sweden' / 'Team Europe' as well.
"I wonder why Europeans were so well represented."
Because Europe is considerably more advanced in many ways than a place like Thailand - and also bigger and richer. The 'talent pool' for these things is going to be massively larger'.
To compare: Thailand is 70M people with 7K GPD per capita. It's kind of poor, not 'technically developed' is my nice way of saying they don't have all of the civic, academic, social, industrial foundations that other, richer countries do. And so a lot people in villages do not create the surpluses that say, a European IT consultant has to adventure in their spare time. I think also, that 'different sports for different cultures' - it might just be that 'caving is not a thing' in Thailand or he region.
https://skedco.com/product/sked-basic-rescue-system-internat...
Musk is trying to get the case dismissed as being just a big joke, after he repeatedly challenged Unsworth to sue him.
Musk really screwed the pooch on that one.
...it still won't be the most expensive time he ran his mouth on twitter, said false things, and had to pay a big settlement that year.
(Musk had to pay a $20m fine to the SEC for making fraudulent statements on Twitter. Musk is on record that the fine was "worth it". And I guess if you're billions, maybe a really satisfactory tweet really is worth a few million.)
The US has a law (SPEECH 2010) that means English libel cases can't be enforced in the US unless they meet US law.
That would be fun. Extradite Musk. Classic.
Not sure if the case could be filed in Thailand. But if it was, Musk would be convicted for sure. The rescuers are all heroes in Thailand and what Musk said was very offensive and designed to do nothing other than defame the rescuer. Nothing would come of a conviction as long as Musk never visited Thailand again since nowhere would extradite him.
There's still zero evidence that any of Musk's claims are true, and I believe a few of them have always been trivially falsifiable, eg, Musk mentioned a child bride, but the diver's partner is 40, which isn't really what I'd consider a "child". And so on.
The court cases are ongoing, and unlikely to move fast. But at this point the best Musk can hope for is a procedural win I think, and that's iffy.
I believe his lawyers were recently advancing the argument that the First Amendment lets you lie about people on twitter, so it doesn't matter if all the twitter claims were lies. If that argument works, that would be a procedural win, aka "it doesn't matter if I did it, because X".
Jumping back-and-forth in time, repeating side stories again and again, introducing new characters, and then re-introducing them, skipping major parts in the middle, only to come back to them later (or not).
All in all, it's a story well worth a good Atlantic article, or even a movie script - but I'dthink long and hard before putting time in the future to reading an "article" by this "journalist".
He basically told me one of many training astronauts have is in a long dark corridor that is submerged underwater of course to simulate low gravity. However the whole thing inside is wrapped in a plastic bag, for lack of better explanation. Just imagine huge condom big enough to fit people in it. When the shit goes down, you push emergency button and whole thing fills in with air in less than 90 seconds. Since its inside cave/corridor, air has no way to push the condom outside/up, so whole water is flushed out quickly.
He told me all they had to do is put a thick foil underwater, glue 2 sides together, making long sealed condom, and then pump the air in, making a way for kids to crawl through, with no need to dive or know how to swim, almost like they have those tubes on children's playgrounds. That's all.
What does it mean "glue 2 sides together"? Underwater? For 800m? Completely air and water tight?
Does untrained people be "confortable" to craw in a dark tunnel for 800m or the children would have freak out in the middle?
1. strong current messing with your construction
2. vertical sections and obstacles that will make your tunnel impossible to crawl through
3. corners, sharp outcrops etc. that might cause damage to it
4. sections that are too long for your construction to be stable even in good circumstances
If you managed to somehow solve all of the above with your design, you're still left with a construction job in an environment where people died just trying to traverse it.
There's like a myriad reasons why this is a bad idea and will much more likely result in awkward failure or even death instead of a success.
Let's not even talk about getting this assembled out of sturdy-enough materials before everyone is dead anyway.
And even if you manage that: One tear in that construction and you can guarantee the death of any child still in it.
If I had to choose I'd go with the professional cave divers and on-scenes experts rather than the dreams of some guy a thousand miles away with questionable, hardly-relevant credentials.
Which sounds like a great recipe for panic and death.
And if you're protecting for that (e.g. by walking through the tube with breathing equipment), you're just making the situation more difficult and less like anything anyone has experience with.
Given that:
a) there was continuous pumping to remove incoming water that would be overwhelmed if there was additional rain,
b) the location was remote,
c) "pushing the water" out would have flooded the location where the boys were when the non-existent tube was inflated,
d) the path to the boys was so treacherous that one very experienced diver died while replacing oxygen tank replacements,
e) after the last person was rescued (the coach), the Thai and other divers still in the cave almost died as the pumps failed while they were making their exit, and,
f) no such "thick foil... making long sealed condom" was either available locally or offered by anyone.
In other words, typical "Monday morning coaching".
Several options have been duly considered and politely dismissed. The kids won’t be confined to airtight metal coffins, as Elon Musk has proposed, or made to crawl through a several-kilometres-long inflatable bouncy castle tube, as one Bangkok construction company suggested.
The plan they enacted, even if it might have had a lower chance of success (and I don't know that it did), was much more resilient.
One of the really important things the article explores in detail (but never calls out explicitly) is how many backups and fallbacks there were. Air tanks spread across the whole cave, multiple support stations with extra people. There were many opportunities to adjust to changing conditions. Even if getting one kid out went wrong, attempts at rescuing the others were mostly independent. All of this adds up to a pretty damn good chance of at least partial success.
That's not how simulating low-gravity works. You need to be in the water yourself. You can't be in a pocket of air underwater for that.
Stanton and Volanthen actually had to rescue four members of the Thai rescue team, who had fallen asleep in an intermediate chamber and become cut off by flooding. There was no lack of willing on the part of the Thai rescuers, but they simply didn't have the level of expertise necessary to coordinate a rescue of this level of complexity and technical difficulty.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-02/thai-cave-boys-wild-b...
As a side note: a movie based on these events is being produced.
https://variety.com/2018/film/news/thai-cave-rescue-movie-un...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/asia/thailand-cave-...