Between the two of them, Pete Contenta and Ronny Phillips have enough diving experience to span several lifetimes.
From recovering evidence, vehicles, and bodies submerged in brackish water over 30-plus years with the Galveston Police Department to combing the hulls of “banana boats” for contraband to their membership on the dive team that recovered debris from the space shuttle Columbia explosion, Contenta and Phillips have a wealth of experience conducting risky, harrowing deep-water dives.
But when it comes to the daunting task facing ateam of divers in the Tham Luang cave in the Chiang Rai province in northern Thailand — rescuing 12 young boys, ages 11 to 16, and their soccer coach stranded in an isolated chamber roughly a mile and a half from the cave’s entrance — both Contenta and Phillips, many years into retirement from their posts as public safety divers, could only express disbelief and admiration.
“My hat’s off to ‘em,” Phillips said in a phone interview. “They’re doing a Herculean task in there. I think if they take their time and probably just [rescue] one or two children at a time and work them through, I think they’re gonna be alright.”
Four of the 12 children were brought to safety Sunday by foreign cave divers and Thai Navy SEAL divers who navigated a treacherous, circuitous mile-long underwater route with few air pockets, dangerous currents and limited visibility. The cave system, located in the bowels of the Doi Nang Non mountain range, has experienced severe flooding as a result of Thailand’s monsoon season, which runs from July to October, and more rain is expected in the coming days. News reports indicate that it will be at least 10 or 20 hours before more boys could be rescued.
“It’s very unforgiving. There’s very little room for error,” said George Veni an experienced cave diver and the executive director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute. “When you’re open-water diving in a lake, river, or sea, during problems, you come up for air, easy enough. In a cave, you can’t do that because you come straight up and hit the rock ceiling.”
Offering advice
Contenta and Phillips have both been tracking the news of the rescue mission from their homes thousands of miles away in Galveston County. They share a natural empathy and familial affection for their diving brethren.
“We’ve already lost one rescue diver down there,” Contenta said, referring to one volunteer rescue diver, Saman Gunan, a retired Thai Navy SEAL who died after losing air while placing spare oxygen tanks along the route to the chamber where the boys are stranded.
Both Phillips and Contenta still dive recreationally. Contenta is a member of the Bay Area Divers, a group of recreational diving aficionados, while Phillips dives occasionally and teaches underwater crime scene classes at the Galveston Police Academy. Both were founding members of the Galveston Police Department’s public safety diving team, and their experience is evident as they walk through different scenarios that the Thai rescue team may be going through.
Contenta was quick to qualify his professional advice, not wanting to play “armchair quarterback” to the team of divers, but nonetheless offered that the divers could use the small chamber where the boys are staying as a training ground of sorts. The New York Times reported none of the boys has ever dived before — some don’t know how to swim at all —and are undergoing basic diving training.
“My suggestion was: They’ve got a pool, an area they call a beach where the children are at — that would be a good training ground to start acclimating them in some kind of a scuba apparatus, so they could get used to it, acclimate them to it and maybe get them out that way,” Contenta said.
Phillips recommended they use full-face diving masks as opposed to a regulator mask piece that many recreational divers use, particularly for the children who have never dived before.
“You don’t have to bite a regulator like you do in regular scuba, so once it’s secured to your face, you’ve got air,” Phillips said. “Even if you pass out, you’ve got air. You can’t spit the regulator out.”
‘Mostly zero visibility’
As public safety divers, Contenta and Phillips were never tasked with a rescue mission like the one in Thailand, but both have dived in waters where visibility is extremely limited. They were involved in a recovery mission in 1996 when the tugboat Laura Haden collided with a chemical tanker and sank in the Houston Ship Channel, killing the three-member crew.
“Public safety diving is mostly zero visibility, and it sucks, it really does,” Contenta said. “We call it ‘mud diving’ or ‘shadow diving’ — your eyes play tricks on you and you think you’ll see shadows in zero (visibility) and you’ll try to swim to it and you realize there’s nothing there.”
News reports indicate the rescue divers in Thailand have set up a guide rope to help them navigate the underwater cave route, and two or three divers are leading each boy to safety. George Veni, the cave researcher, said having some sort of signal system between the boy and divers is paramount in low-visibility waters.
“The problem is, if visibility is in fact very low and one of the boys has a problem, the rescue diver may not see it, and the boy may not be able to see what the problem is,” Veni said. “They’ll train (the boys) about giving basic signals if you’re having difficulty, but it is more complicated.”
Where the rescue could get complicated, Contenta said, is where the passageways in the Thai cave dramatically narrow.
“Trying to get a child through a passageway that cannot accommodate two people, the only thing you can do, I would think, is to tether to the child, the big experienced diver goes through the narrow thing and kind of gently pulls the child through,” he said. “That’s where the biggest roadblock would be, if the child happens to panic in that situation.”
Phillips, drawing on his experience as part of the dive team that recovered debris from the space shuttle Columbia in Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Sabine River, said it’s important in complicated missions to put all options and ideas on the table — a lesson he learned from Capt. Jim Wilkins, the supervisor of salvage and diving for that mission.
“When you get some large operation like that that’s affecting the world — the whole world is paying attention to this — you have folks with technology and ideas and everything, ‘I’ve got this left-handed monkey wrench that’ll help.’ It may not be what you need, but those folks really come out and offer their services or equipment, and you just never know what combination is gonna hit and work.” nick.powell@chron.com twitter.com/nickpowellchron