Virginia Cave Rescue
BY Herschel Smith
5 years, 6 months ago
CNN:
Five men exploring a cave in southwest Virginia were trapped inside, and authorities are working to get them out safely, according to Billy Chrimes, search and rescue coordinator for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.
Six men entered the cave in Cleveland, Virginia, on Friday around 7 p.m. and planned to spend an extended amount of time exploring it, he said.
One of those men emerged from the cave, known as Cyclops Cave, on Sunday morning around 2 a.m. and told authorities the others were having difficulty getting out, Chrimes said Sunday.
That man, who is 22, said the other men were exhausted and were starting to have problems with hypothermia, according to Chrimes. The men are not lost and aren’t too far into the cave.
The five trapped men are between the ages of 34 and 59, according to Emergency Management Coordinator for Russell County Jess Powers. Powers said the group was planning to camp in the cave until Sunday, but a heavy downpour Saturday night made conditions muddy and wet and likely contributed to their difficulties.
One of the men was rescued on Sunday afternoon and is being assessed by a local volunteer rescue squad, Powers said. The rescue took much longer than anticipated, Powers said, and the rescue teams have gone back inside to help the other four men.
The cave explorers did not have a lot of extra food or water, and Chrimes said the temperature underground is in the 50s. While that is comfortable under normal circumstances, it can cause problems with hypothermia when you’re not active and moving.
That has nothing to do with it. Caves are confined spaces, and as I’ve explained before, I don’t go spelunking.
But here is the mistake they made. There are four different kinds of heat transfer: convective, conductive, radiant and evaporative.
The cave walls were rock, and were a heat sink. Their bodies were radiating heat to the walls of the cave totally apart from convective, conductive or evaporative heat transfer. They suffered hypothermia NOT because of the 50 degree F air temperature, but because of the temperature of the cave walls (even if they were suspended in mid-air and with no air movement whatsoever, their bodies would still have been radiating heat to the cave walls).
They should have prepared for this.
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