Four villagers walk out of flooded Laos cave unaided after 11 days; search for two missing continues

Seven villagers entered a cave in the foothills near the village of Long Tieng in Xaisomboun province, roughly 120 kilometers north of the capital Vientiane, to search for gold and other valuable minerals. A flash flood blocked their exit. One additional villager escaped and alerted authorities, triggering an international rescue operation.

Rescue teams from Laos and Thailand were joined over the following week by divers from Finland, Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, France, and Australia — several of whom had participated in the 2018 cave rescue in northern Thailand that saved 12 schoolboys and their soccer coach. The team navigated more than 200 meters into the cave and discovered five chambers. The five trapped survivors were found in the fifth chamber on Wednesday, a full week after they became trapped.

On Friday, the first of the five — identified by rescuers as Khamla, Mued, Ee, Ing, and Laen — was guided through a narrow flooded passage to the surface by an expert diver. The remaining four waited for conditions to improve, then navigated approximately 260 meters (about 850 feet) of tunnels on their own, some sections still at least a meter deep with water. "Sometimes we had to dive, sometimes we had to crawl," survivor Mee Singfamalai, a 23-year-old barber, told CNN. "The passage was just about the size of a person." The men emerged one by one Saturday, with videos posted online showing some collapsing at the cave entrance before being wrapped in foil blankets and fitted with oxygen masks.