Thai cave rescue: what really happened?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2019

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s almost a year since a Thai football team of 12 boys and their coach found themselves trapped for more than two weeks in the Tham Luang caves in northern Thailand. In a story that gripped the entire world, the rescue became a race against time to save the Wild Boars before heavy monsoon rains flooded the caves. The task was so complex and dangerous that it led to the death of one of the rescuers - Saman Gunan. British caver Vernon Unsworth knows the Tham Luang caves better than anyone and played a crucial role in the rescue. In an exclusive interview he tells Beyond Today how difficult it was to get the operation off the ground, and the BBC’s South East Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head, remembers how it all happened. Producers: Seren Jones, Harriet Noble and Jaja Muhammad Mixed by Nicolas Raufast Editor: John Shields

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.4	Hello, welcome to Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4,
0:09.7	a space to ask one big question about one big story every weekday. I'm Matthew Price.
0:17.0	Today what really happened in the Thai Cave Rescue?
0:27.0	A year ago, the Wild Boers football team, a group of boys aged 11 to 16, living in a rural
0:38.8	part of Northern Thailand, went with their coach into the Tam-Lawang cave system for a day trip.
0:46.0	You can walk for hours and hours in the caves through vast chambers and tighter passages,
0:51.0	and that's exactly what they did. And then the rains came and they were
0:55.4	trapped by flood water. It looked like they would never make it out alive.
1:00.0	But more than two weeks later they did, all of them. Just one person died in a huge
1:08.2	international operation to save them. Saman Gunan, a Thai Navy seal diver who ran out of oxygen. There's now a statue
1:16.6	honoring him outside the caves. We asked two people to tell us the whole story.
1:23.0	How are you?
1:25.0	Older than last time I saw you.
1:28.0	The BBC's Jonathan Head, who lives in Thailand,
1:31.0	but who's back here on holiday at the moment, he spent weeks outside the cave
1:35.3	entrance covering the news.
1:37.6	But we're going to start with our main character, one of the team of rescuers, Vernon Unsworth. He's a gentle, calm man, he's in his mid-60s, his hobby is caving.
1:48.0	He was in London to meet the Queen, he got an MBE for his heroics in the cave rescue. He came in with his partner Tick to tell us his story.
1:57.0	I started climbing at 13. Where I lived in Lancaster, which is Northern England, it's on the cusp of the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.
2:08.0	That area is the UK mecca for caving, but the Lake District gives you access to climbing and then got
2:16.8	introduced to caving when I was 16.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.