An American caver has been rescued by emergency workers near Anamur, in southern Turkey, after he became stranded hundreds of meters underground earlier this month.
Mark Dickey is “out in the hands of a rescue worker. He seems fine at first look. He will take a chopper to Mersin hospital,” Recep Salci of Turkey’s disaster and emergency management authority (AFAD) said on Tuesday as footage emerged of him being stretchered out of the cave with a grin on his face.
Speaking near the cave at a medical tent, Dickey said it was “amazing to be above ground again.”
I wonder if any of the rescuers here could have been in Morocco in the first 72 hours if they weren’t rescuing him?
This wasn’t some idiot who got himself stuck as is normally the case, he was a geologist that was mapping the cave and had a medical emergency and had to be extracted.
Cave rescue is a different discipline to urban search and rescue (USAR). It’s unlikely that if you’re good enough at cave rescue to travel internationally to do it, that you’re also going to be good enough at USAR to go on an international deployment.