The recent successful cave rescue of a boys soccer team in Thailand captivated the public. What are your thoughts about their ordeal and the rescue operation?
Jim Dunn, SVM editorial page editor
Caves have long captured my imagination, and not necessarily in a good way. I read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain as a youth, and found the part where Tom and Becky Thatcher become lost in a cave quite disturbing.
Later, while in college, I wrote a research paper on the 1925 sensational news coverage of Floyd Collins getting trapped in a Kentucky cave and never making it out alive.
None of that stopped me from taking tours of caves in Kentucky (Mammoth Cave), Missouri (Mark Twain Cave) and Wisconsin (Cave of the Mounds). When the guides get your tour group deep into the cave and then shut off the lights, you experience what true darkness is.
So I followed with interest the story of the 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach trapped in the cave. I was happy when the missing group was found by the British divers, and worried about how they would ever get out of the partially flooded cavern. After a former Thai navy SEAL diver drowned, I thought it would be much better to try to dig a rescue shaft than go out the way they came.
But I was wrong. The diving team pulled off an amazing rescue, the kids and their coach are now doing fine, and I’m filled with admiration for everyone involved.
Kathleen Schultz, SVM news editor
People just love a good stuck-in-a hole story.
Remember Baby Jessica, fell into a hole – OK, a well – 30 years ago? It took 58 hours to pull her out. The whole entire world was flippin' transfixed.
Nathan Woessner of Rock Falls was 6 in July 2013 when he fell in a hole in a sand dune in Indiana. It was one of our top 10 stories that year, and he was stuck only 3 hours.
Late last month, it took 30 hours to pull a deaf puppy out of a hole in Alabama. Google "deaf puppy hole." You get 32,300 results.
Just last week, reporter Vinde Wells, (note the irony of that name) wrote a story about a fawn that fell in a hole in Polo, and was found after a tractor nearly fell into that same hole. Then the tow truck guy called to pull the tractor out of the hole fell into another hole.
That one got a whole lotta traffic on Facebook.
Those Thai kids were lucky. They were stuck in a hole they shouldn't have been in in the first place, and managed to get out without having to knaw holes in each other to survive.
Given the amount of publicity they're about to face, though, they might want to find another hole to crawl into until the whole thing dies down.
Peter Shaw, Shaw Media trustee, corporate strategy coordinator
It is difficult to imagine what all who were connected to this incident went through.
Imagine being one of the kids in the cave, having no idea whether help was coming or whether they would ever make it out again. They were trapped for 10 days.
Imagine being the coach, fighting the guilt of bringing the team into the cave while trying to provide calming leadership to survive as long as possible.
Imagine being the parents, confused as to how this could have happened (they were supposed to be playing soccer, after all), and wondering whether you had said goodbye to your child for the last time.
Imagine being a rescuer, especially after one already lost his life, inching through tiny spaces and displacing the accompanying fear.
I’m sure there will be a movie, but I’m looking forward to the stories from these individual perspectives.