Trapped spelunkers rescued from French cave

Seven Spanish spelunkers who were had been trapped in a pit cave in southern France since Tuesday night have been rescued, French authorities reported at noon on Wednesday.

The cavers were pulled out of a shaft known as Gouffre de Mile, located in the municipality of Herran, in the French Pyrenees.

“The seven speleologists have been pulled out of the pit cave,” said the prefecture of the Haute-Garonne department through its Twitter account.

If you’re in the river and get wet, and don’t have the strength to get out, then the most intelligent thing to do is wait to get rescued

Victor Ferrer, spelunker and photographer

All seven were reported to be “exhausted” but unhurt. They were found 300 meters underground, according to France TV Info.

The president of the French Caving Rescue Association, Bernard Tourte, said that rescuers contacted the trapped spelunkers at 8am, around four hours after eight fellow explorers managed to climb out of the pit and sound the alert.

The radio station RTL reported that the seven rescued individuals – six men and a woman – were caught by sudden rising waters inside the shaft following several days of adverse weather conditions.

“Conditions were made worse by the rains of recent days, but the place is well known to spelunkers and rescue teams,” explained Haute-Garonne authorities to the local news outlet France Bleu Toulouse. Herran is located in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrenees.

“Tremendously irresponsible”

The president of the Catalan Spelunking Federation, Hilari Moreno, said on Wednesday morning that he considered it “tremendously irresponsible to embark on a crossing of such dimensions in the knowledge that it’s been raining for three days in the area.”

Moreno added that the group of cave explorers come from various parts of Catalonia and were being tested by two instructors in a bid to obtain a Level 2 certificate, which would entitle them to train other cavers.

He said the instructors, whose identities he could not confirm, were negligent on several counts, including their decision to take out such a large group of people “who are very well prepared but still in a training period.”

Víctor Ferrer, a spelunker, photographer and book publisher who knows the area very well, said that the spot where the cavers got trapped is a cavity reaching down as far as 1,018 meters underground, with more than 100 galleries and subterranean rivers.

The specific spot where the Spaniards were found “is a dangerous place where, if you’re in the river and get wet, and don’t have the strength to get out, then the most intelligent thing to do is what they’ve done: wait to get rescued.”

English version by Susana Urra.