It took 240 people 54 hours to rescue a man trapped in a Welsh cave

Story Transcript

Allan Berry says rescuers felt "relief and joy" when he and his colleagues finally emerged from one of Britain's deepest caves after a gruelling and complicated 54-hour rescue operation.

Berry was just one of more than 240 rescuers who joined forces, forming a human chain to extricate a cave explorer who lost his footing and stumbled in the Ogof Ffynnon Ddu cave, also known as the Cave of the Black Spring, in south Wales.

"There was a feeling of euphoria, really, and relief … namely that it was successful and that he got out with his life," Berry, chair of the Derbyshire Cave Rescue Organisation, told As It Happens host Carol Off. 

The victim, a 40-year-old man, suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries, including a broken jaw and leg, as well as spinal injuries. He's now recovering in hospital. 

The cave system is 300 metres deep, making it among the deepest in the U.K. It's also among the U.K.'s longest, stretching for about 70 kilometres, Berry said.

The rescuers had to make their way through about three kilometres of cramped and winding underground tunnels — sometimes climbing peaks, navigating sharp bends or wading through freezing cold streams and waterfalls — all while carrying the injured man on a stretcher.

Berry said it was like navigating a "3D vertical maze."

Exactly what they trained for

Berry got the call that his team was needed on Sunday at 7 a.m local time. By then, the man had already been in the cave for 18 hours.

"They were asking for extra manpower because they knew it was going to be a long and protracted rescue," Berry said.

It was just the type of thing he and his team had trained for, he said. 

"We're all cavers ourselves. Traversing that type of cave would take us about two hours to get to where the stretcher was," he said. "But with a stretcher … it's a lot more difficult."

It normally takes six to eight people working together to properly support someone on a stretcher, Berry said. But that simply wasn't an option in the cave's tight spaces.

"Sometimes you'll get two [people holding the stretcher] if you're lucky," Berry said.

"So you're into techniques like sliding the stretcher over the top of people. You … sometimes have to drag the stretcher through tight squeezes. When you're in water, you might have team members lying in the water to keep the stretcher from going under the water."

Injured caver doing 'remarkably well'

Berry was in the cave for about 11 hours in total. But the whole rescue operation took 54 hours on from Saturday into early Monday morning.

"I got about seven hours last night, and that was the first sleep I've had since Saturday night," Berry said.

Emergency services liaison officer Gary Evans said the injured man was doing "remarkably well" on Tuesday. 

And he wasn't to blame for what happened to him, said Peter Francis, the spokesperson for the South and Mid Wales Cave Rescue Team.

"The caver was very unlucky here. He's an experienced caver, a fit caver. And it was a matter of putting his foot in the wrong place," Francis told The Associated Press.

"He wasn't in a dangerous part of the cave, it's just something moved from under him."

Berry, meanwhile, remains in awe of what he and his colleagues managed to accomplish by working together. 

"This was a very unusual rescue in the U.K. in terms of the number of different teams involved that don't normally work together. And you wouldn't have even realized that when you were in the rescue," he said.

"There [were] people from all five or six different teams, and you would think they'd worked together all their lives. It was so well organized and well executed."

Written by Sheena Goodyear with files from The Associated Press. Interview produced by Katie Geleff.