Rescue of explorer Mark Dickey trapped 3,400 feet inside Turkey cave set to begin

Members of Italy’s National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Team joined rescue teams from Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Turkey late on Thursday. A Turkish helicopter was on standby near the entrance of the cave. The Italian organisation said six of their rescuers, including a doctor and nurse, reached Mr Dickey during the night. The team planned to work to keep him stable for 15 to 20 hours before being replaced by another team. Small camps set up at different levels inside the cave gave doctors, nurses and technicians a place to rest, the group said.

Recep Salci, a Turkeish rescue official, told HaberTurk TV that doctors gave Mr Dickey IV fluids and 4 litres of blood inside the cave.

More than 30 rescuers were inside the cave on Friday afternoon, and teams comprised of a doctor and three or four others take turns staying with the American at all times, Mr Salci said.

“Our aim is to bring him out and to have him hospitalized as soon as possible,” he said.More than 170 people, including doctors, paramedics and experienced cavers, are involved in the rescue operation.

A Turkish official has rescuers were waiting for doctors to give the go-ahead for the difficult operation to begin.

Recep Salci, the head of AFAD’s search and rescue department, told HaberTurk TV that the plan was to lift Dickey on a stretcher but to use a “security belt” system to lift him through the cave’s narrow openings.

“We are trying to expand the narrow areas by making small explosions, by breaking some areas,” Mr Salci said.

His resume of cave explorations and expert status is endless: secretary of the ECRA medical committee, lead instructor for Caving Academy, a US-based organisation that prepares other cavers for exploration and a national instructor for the National Cave Rescue Commission.

He also volunteers with the New Jersey Initial Response Team, a nonprofit search-and-rescue team.

Having participated in many cave explorations in karst areas around the world for many years, Mr Dickey is knowledgeable and skilled – the kind of person you’d want on complicated cave exploration like the Morca mission.

Mr Dickey was on an expedition to map the 4,186-foot-deep cave system in southern Turkey for the Anatolian Speleology Group Association.

Photos from a Facebook page that seemingly belongs to Mr Dickey show him happily preparing for the mission by inspecting all the necessary gear before embarking.

Carl Heitmeyer, the public information officer for the New Jersey Initial Response Team described the complexity of the cave system that Mark Dickey is in to New Jersey Patch.

“I compare it to Everest,” Mr Heitmeyer said.

“There’s twists and turns and squeezes,” he said. “There’s climbs both up and down. And then there’s the rope work, where you’re hanging on, climbing up. And then there’s water coming in…some of the times when you’re on rope, doing all that very technical stuff, you’re blinking because of the rain.”

Gretchen Baker, a representative of the National Cave Rescue Commission in Huntsville, Alabama has spoken about how the route is being prepared for Mark Dickey to exit the cave. “The cave has been divided into seven sections, with different cave rescue teams working to prepare each section for Mark’s passage,” Ms Baker said. “This includes adapting the current rigging to rescue rigging, which can hold more weight and is in good places to put in haul systems. It also means enlarging the passages so that a litter can fit through.”

Mr Dickey will assist in his rescue, but to keep his condition stable, he will be put on a litter, a type of stretcher, “for at least part of the time,” Ms Baker told The Washington Post. “Using the litter protects him, but also means that it will take longer to get out of the cave, as there are many narrow, tight sections on the route out, and the litter is harder to fit through than a human body,” she added.

Andrew and Deborah Ann Dickey, the scientist Mark Dickey’s parents, released a statement thanking rescuers for their life-saving efforts.

“Mark is strong, but he needed his fellow cavers, including, of course, the doctors, to allow a devastatingly scary situation to turn positive,” Dickey’s parents said.

“Our prayers are being answered and we cannot express how much that means, and will always mean, to us.”

For five days, expert cave explorer Mark Dickey has been stuck 3,400 feet below the surface in a cave in the Taurus Moutain region of Turkey.

Mr Dickey, 40, is an experienced caver who embarked on an expedition mission to map one of the deepest caves in the world – the Morca cave system in southern Turkey.

But the expedition was suddenly cut short after Mr Dickey fell ill with gastrointestinal bleeding.

Now, a rescue team of over 150 personnel from several international organisations have combined their efforts to try to retrieve Mr Dickey, who cannot leave the cave due to the emergency medical situation.

As of Thursday, officials in the Speleological Federation of Turkey said that Mr Dickey’s situation had improved but that he would require a stretcher, making the rescue mission even more complicated.

In a video message from inside the cave and made available Thursday by Turkey’s communications directorate, Mark Dickey thanked the caving community and the Turkish government for their efforts.

“Hi. Mark Dickey from nearly a thousand metres,” Mr Dickey said. “The caving world is a really tight-knit group and it’s amazing to see how many people have responded on the surface.

“We’re still waiting for communications actually to reach down here. So right now it’s a day or two days of travel for information to get back and forth. I don’t quite know what’s happened, but I do know that the quick response of the Turkish government to get the medical supplies that I need, in my opinion, saved my life. I was very close to the edge.”

Mr Dickey, who had been bleeding and losing fluid from his stomach, has stopped vomiting and has eaten for the first time in days, according to a New Jersey-based cave rescue group he is affiliated with. It is unclear what caused his medical issue.