Laos miner emerges from cave where group has been trapped, organization says

At least one Laos gold miner has been brought out of a flooded cave where monsoon rains trapped a group for over a week, according to a Laotian rescue organization. 

Rescue Volunteer for People said on social media that a person, who was not named, was brought out safely at 8:37 p.m. local time on Friday. It was not immediately clear how the miner was rescued. The organization said their name would be announced later. 

Seven artisanal gold miners have been in the cave for nine days. Five of the seven miners were located, and two remain missing. 

Conditions inside the cave are dangerous and complex. Even before the flooding due to monsoon rains, it was nearly impossible to get in and out of the cave. 

The round trip to where the group is trapped takes a trained team of divers about five hours. Complicating efforts is Laos' monsoon season, which creates a "ticking clock," lead rescue diver Mikko Paasi told CBS News chief correspondent Matt Gutman. 

"The environment is so hostile that anything can happen," Paasi said.

The rescue team had hoped to be able to pump the water out of the cave, but five days of those efforts have not succeeded. Paasi said his team was considering teaching the trapped miners how to scuba dive.

The scuba idea was "the last option," Paasi said, because it would put both the miners and the rescue divers at "quite high risk." The waters inside the cave are murky and difficult to navigate, and the system is filled with dead ends and knife-sharp rocks. Panic or uncertainty inside that environment could be fatal.

The rescue team has asked the Laos government for immunity from charges in case someone dies during the rescue mission. 

"Finding them was difficult, but finding them, in a way, was the easy part," said Josh Morris, who helped lead the rescue of a youth soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. "You have to have a whole practiced, well-thought out plan to move people in conditions where the risks of serious problems is very high."