9.24.2017

"Rigorous protocol" miscounts spelunkers - Indiana University student left behind for 2½ days

After photo
Before



IU freshman rescued after surviving three days in cave

Excerpt:

For three days, the IU freshman was trapped in the cave, wondering why the other students had left him behind in the darkness. He licked the moisture off the walls that surrounded him. He licked the wrappers of Clif bars and debated eating crickets. In the dim light of his iPhone, he tapped out goodbye letters to his family. After the battery died, he carried on imaginary conversations with the friends he thought he’d never see again. “I was very confused and pretty scared,” Lukas Cavar told the Indiana Daily Student. “It took me a little while to wrangle my emotions and sort of approach things analytically, sensibly, to come up with a game plan to survive.” Cavar, a 19-year-old physics major, was rescued late Tuesday night after the president of the Caving Club realized that the group had forgotten the freshman at the end of Sunday’s trip to Sullivan Cave in Southern Indiana. The club’s leaders raced to the cave and unlocked the entrance gate — the same gate one of them had locked on their way out, trapping Cavar.
Indiana man 'glad to be alive' after being forgotten and locked in cave for 60 hours

Excerpt:

A message posted by the Caving Club's president on a website for Indiana University student organizations says the club's "rigorous protocols" for accounting for members during cave excursions had failed. "We had a failure in our leadership to closely follow all these safety procedures," the message states.
Comment: Source of Lukas Cavar "before" photo. Source of cave entrance photo. Info on Sullivan Cave




1 comment:

  1. I'm glad he came out of the ordeal better than did Injun Joe in "Tom Sawyer." And come to think of it, except for the obvious political incorrectness of it, that would be a great nickname to memorialize this mess-up, no?

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