The discovery was announced publicly at approximately 10:40 p.m. on July 2. The relief worldwide was immediate and intense. The search phase of the operation was over. Thirteen people who had been missing for nine days, in a flooded cave, were alive.
The rescue phase now began. It was, by any technical assessment, more difficult than the search.
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## The Problem That Remained
Finding the team resolved one uncertainty while creating a new set of challenges. The team was approximately four kilometers from the cave entrance, separated from the outside by multiple flooded passages, sitting on a mud shelf with no food and depleting air. Getting them out required moving all thirteen people — most of whom could not swim, let alone dive — through the same flooded passages that had challenged the most experienced cave divers in the world.
The options were examined systematically by the rescue command under Governor Narongsak.
Waiting for the water to recede was the most conservative option: keep the team supplied, sustain them through the remaining monsoon season, and extract them on foot when the cave drained in October or November. The problems with this approach were multiple. The cave’s air supply would be an ongoing concern; as more people breathed in the closed space, oxygen levels would decline. The team’s physical and psychological condition would deteriorate over weeks and months of confinement in darkness and cold. The monsoon season is not predictable; the cave might not drain fully until well past October. And the ongoing risk of a sudden rise in water levels — a large rainfall event pushing a surge of water through the system — could overwhelm any position the team could reach.