From the Maldives Cave System, where five divers entered with no proper permit or certification, of which none survived, to Norway's deepest cave passage, where friends launched an illegal recovery for two men sealed underground, to a flooded Laos gold mine where trapped miners waited 10 days to see the light. Today, we’re covering the disasters connected by the rescue teams determined to recover everyone.
TW: Drowning
Subscribe on Patreon to stay up to date on all things HSP with our newsletter, bonus content, and more. If you want to dive deeper into a community of fellow darkly curious listeners, upgrade for ad-free listening, monthly bonus episodes with topics voted on by members, merch perks, and Patreon-only group chats. High Council members also get Footnotes, our weekly after-show where Kaelyn dives deeper into the episode, recent true crime news, theories, and other scary stories from around the internet.
You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts .
Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror.
SOURCES
https://www.cnn.com/world/map-laos-cave-rescue-vis
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/28/asia/thai-cave-rescuer-dies-intl
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/28/asia/laos-cave-rescue-divers-trapped-hnk-intl-dst
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/29/world/live-news/laos-cave-rescue-intl-hnk
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/31/asia/laos-cave-rescue-survivor-hnk-intl
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trapped-miners-laos-cave-rescue/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/laos-gold-miners-cave-rescue-trapped/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/28/thailand-cave-rescuer-dies-after-year-long-blood-infection
https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/bodies-of-missing-italian-divers-located-in-maldives-cave
https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/thai-cave-rescue-veterans-flooded-laos-cave
https://www.deeperblue.com/all-four-missing-divers-located-in-the-maldives/
https://xray-mag.com/content/specialist-cave-divers-locate-victims
https://diventuresmag.com/maldives-italian-divers-cave-tragedy-vaavu-atoll-2026/
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b1rhvqh1fg
https://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/news-analysis/maldives-diving-accident-cave-tragedy/
https://www.thehumandiver.com/post/eight-questions-about-maldives-accident
https://diversofthedark.com/blog/sami-paakkarinen
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5ZseEk0u1HoCAPUINsKvs4
https://www.divepacific.co.nz/post/friendship-runs-deep
https://www.divepacific.co.nz/post/cave-rescue-documentary-diving-into-the-unknown
https://www.lifeinnorway.net/plura-cave-disaster/
https://www.dive-scuba.com/plura-cave-diving-incident/
https://twi-ny.com/tag/jari-huotarinen/
https://takaisinpintaan.fi/en/
https://www.trevisotoday.it/eventi/entomologo-stefano-vanin-barbazza-garden-giugno-2018.html
https://www.quotidiano.net/cronaca/maldive-sub-italia-autopsie-vanin-unige-oq9wftqy
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/05/23/sub-morti-maldive-vanin-missione-notizie/8396469/
https://www.primocanale.it/cronaca/67469-funerali-monica-montefalcone-giorgia-sommacal.html
https://tg24.sky.it/cronaca/2026/05/30/maldive-funerali-monica-giorgia-montefalcone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Thinwana_Kandu_cave_diving_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saman_Kunan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluragrotta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_into_the_Unknown
https://www.aol.com/news/eerie-video-captures-final-image-175020800.html
https://earthquakelist.org/laos/
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36097300
https://dan.org/education-events/e-learning/
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/05/20/sub-morti-maldive-grotta-brevetto-notizie/8393049/
TRANSCRIPT
Picture yourself swimming into an underwater cave, so deep below the surface that you can’t even see your hand in front of your face.
If that makes you squirm, you’re not alone, but some people are not bothered by this at all, and push boundaries each year trying to go deeper into underwater caves, explore further into uncharted territory, in pitch darkness
But the thing is, when you’re down there, disaster can strike at any moment
And thats exactly what happened in today stories. I want to tell you three stories of people who pushed deep into the unknown and what happened. Including the Maldives disaster that happened just a few months ago.
As always this is HSP, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore, and if you are interested in misadventures, miraculous stories of surviving, mysteries and mre, you’re in the right place, you’re just like me
It was mid-morning on May 14th, 2026, out in the Indian ocean. Six divers were gearing up on the deck of a boat, The Duke of York, getting ready for a diving expedition through the reefs down below.
They’re in the maldives, a small country south of India made up of over 1000 tiny coral islands
But as they finished preparing, one of the divers, a young woman, stopped. You guys go ahead without me, she said.
Now, this wasn’t supposed to be a hard dive, and it should only take an hour. But still, something stopped her.
She watched as they finished suiting up and got in the water. They dove below the surface and little bubbles came up from their oxygen tanks. This woman figured she’d see the group in an hour after they were done studying the reefs.
But an hour later, the group was nowhere to be seen. Another 30 minutes passed, then another, and the woman watched, waiting for her group’s heads to surface, but they never did.
She grabbed the boat’s phone to call for help, not knowing that below her was a cave system that was much deeper and more complicated than anyone in her group had anticipated. And time was running out.
<<>>
51-year-old Monica Montefalcone was one of the divers who had gone down that morning,and she was the reason the group was there. She was an associate professor of marine ecology at the University of Genoa, and had been leading Maldives coral-research projects for more than a decade — there’s over a hundred and thirty scientific publications to her name, and somewhere around five thousand dives logged over her career.
Diving beside her that morning was her daughter, Giorgia Sommacal who was in her early twenties , she was a biomedical-engineering student who regularly came along on her mother's fieldwork.
Then there was Muriel Oddenino, thirty-one, a PADI divemaster and research fellow. Federico Gualtieri, around thirty, a dive instructor and recent marine-biology graduate. And Gianluca Benedetti, forty-four — a man who'd walked away from a career in finance to spend his life diving. He'd lived in the Maldives for seven years. He knew these waters as well as anyone on the boat.
Now, that day the group was supposed to be exploring Devana Kandu, just over 50 meters below the surface of the water. It’s a system of coral-reef caves and tunnels carved into these big Coral Reef walls that look like underwater cliffs.
The entrance they were looking for opened into a large first chamber. It’s bright and easy to see, natural light filters down and illuminates it. But this cave gets dark, fast.
Just past the first chamber, there’s what looks like a long hallway, 3 meters wide and 30 meters long. By the end of it, there’s no more light. And the cave goes even deeper than that into a third chamber. The whole system reaches some two hundred meters through interconnected passages but a lot of it is not mapped, so it might keep going. It’s a site that draws experienced divers. And this group had the experience for it. Thousands of dives between them. A leader who'd spent more than a decade in these exact waters.
So why hadn’t they resurfaced?
The first divers to respond to the distress call came from another boat anchored nearby. They slowly descended down toward Devana Kandu, and immediately, their hearts dropped.
There, floating lifeless by the mouth of the cave was 44 year old Gianluca, the man who knew the area better than anyone in the group. The other four were nowhere to be found, likely further inside the cave system.
This was now a recovery operation. I think they assumed that since the most adept person was dead by the mouth of hte cave, that htey were probably trying to get help for everyone else and there was no chance they were alive. But this now fell to the Maldives National Defence Force — the Coast Guard.
The man who led it was Sergeant First Class Mohamed Mahudhee. He was forty-four years old, with more than twenty years of service — a trained rescue and salvage diver, an instructor, decorated with four medals and nine commendation ribbons over his career. He had two children. He was described by many who knew him as one of the best.
On May 16th, two days after the group vanished, Mahudhee led an eight-man team into the cave.
And they had to be really careful during this recovery. They were over 50 meters down, and at that depth, if you’re just breathing regular ole air in your tank, like what you and I are breathing right now, two horrible things can happen
You can get nitrogen narcosis. You wouldn’t feel this until it was too late. You’d be swimming around when all of a sudden, you’d start feeling disoriented, almost drunk. By that point, you might get all turned around and not be able to find your way out.
You can get oxygen toxicity. You also most likely wouldn’t feel this until it was too late and death was almost certain. Again, you’d be diving and all of a sudden you’d have a seizure and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
To combat this, divers will use Trimix specialized blend of oxygen, helium, and nitrogen that technical divers use to manage the effects of depth.
The only problem was, Mahudhee and his team were not using Trimix.
By the time the team surfaced, they didn’t even know Mahudee had lost consciousness far below. They had to dive back down and recover him.
He was rushed roughly ninety kilometers to the hyperbaric unit at ADK Hospital in the Maldives capital Male..
He died there, of decompression sickness.
So now, six people were dead from what was supposed to be a recreational dive. After this The MNDF suspended the operation. The bodies of four divers were still inside the cave. But they were about to call in the big guns.
The call went out to the Divers Alert Network, also known as DAN Europe , which provides emergency support and expertise to the global diving community. And on May 17th, three divers arrived in Malé.
Their names were Sami Paakkarinen, Patrik Grönqvist, and Jenni Westerlund. All three were Finnish. All three were closed-circuit rebreather divers — and what they brought was a different category of diving entirely. There are basically two types of systems used for breathing in scuba diving. The one that probably immediately comes to mind is the ‘normal’ open system where you inhale compressed gas from a tank through a regulator and exhale straight into the water in a big stream of bubbles. Rebreathers are a closed system. You inhale the compressed gas and exhale it into that same system. It runs through a chemical scrubber that removes the carbon dioxide and then adds back in a little oxygen, so it doesn’t waste nearly as much gas and it lets you stay at depth far longer than an open tank allows. They also brought underwater scooters to cover ground fast. Fully redundant life-support systems, so that if one thing fails, another takes over. They arranged for an ambulance boat and a hyperbaric doctor to stand by on the surface. This was what a dive into Devana Kandu was supposed to look like.
On May 18th, they went in.
Through the bright first chamber with its sandy floor, the last place natural light reaches. Into the tunnel that runs deeper into the reef. Past a sandbank, and into the second chamber — round, and completely dark. Then deeper still, toward the third and lowest chamber, around sixty meters down. And that is where they found them. All four, close together, in the deepest part of the cave.
The team sent word to the surface in the simplest way they could. They tore a page from a logbook and let it float up through the water until it broke the surface, where the crew was waiting. Written on it, four words: WE FOUND ALL FOUR.
And as they worked, the Finnish divers began to understand what had happened down there.
The four hadn't been found in the main chamber. They'd been found in a side tunnel — one that didn't appear on any map of the cave, branching off near the sandbank, running only a few dozen meters before dead-ending in solid rock. The team followed marks in the sand to reach them. And the leading theory for how five experienced divers ended up dying in a dead-end tunnel most likely came down to that sandbank.
Going in, the sandbank was easy — you cross over it and drop into the second chamber. But on the way back out, visibility is worse. You’ve just been kicking your flippers near the sandbank, kicking up all of that silt, and now, that same sandbank may have looked like a wall. Just think of what your car’s headlights look like in a thick fog. I’ve watched videos of divers in similar circumstances and they literally can’t see their hands in front of their face. It’s dark, it’s easy to panic–I panic watching it on youtube. So, if that’s what these divers were facing it makes sense they’d spot the opening of the unmapped tunnel and think it was the way out
And only now that none of them survived are we learning MORE about how dangerous of a dive this was…. Sure, this group was made up of experienced, accomplished divers. But they were not cave divers. None of them had cave-diving training —That’s a separate discipline with its own certifications, its own equipment, its own hard rules for exactly this kind of enclosed environment.
They also didn't have the deep-exploration permit that is, legally, the only way into Devana Kandu — a permit only a small number of Maldivian technical divers hold. And They'd gone in on what were known as "tourist tanks" — standard recreational compressed-air cylinders that, at sixty meters, last like 20 minutes. For this kind of dive they would have needed a different type of tank
And I could go on, Two of them wore nothing but thin neoprene over swimwear. Also The Maldives caps recreational diving at thirty meters. The entrance to that cave sits at closer to fifty.
This group made a ton of careless mistakes that eventually cost them their lives.
And at the end of the voyage, it was the Finnish divers who had to go in and bring them out one by one, a traumatic experience for them all.
But this was not the first time that the Finnish divers had done a traumatic recovery like this,
In fact, the three of them had been involved in one of the most harrowing cave accidents in all of history.
12 years prior, On February 6th, 2014,five Finnish cave divers stood on the surface of a pond in northern Norway. The plan, which to a lay person like myself sounds horrible, was to cut through a half meter of ice and dive down to the caves below.
The group consisted of Patrik Grönqvist, who at the time was forty-two. He was actually a firefighter by trade.
There was also Jari (Yari) Huotarinen, who was forty. Jari Uusimäki (Yari OOsmockie) was thirty-four — the two Jaris. Vesa Rantanen was thirty-three. And Kai Känkänen was forty-six. These men were best friends, brought together by their obsession with the hardest, coldest, deepest underwater places in the world
What the five of them were attempting that day was a traverse. If you were to drop into the still, dark pond called Plura, and swim underground for a little under half a mile, you’d surface inside a long, colorful cave.
That part was easy. A weekend hobbyist could make it that far, climb out, admire the grotto, and swim back. But the five weren't stopping there. From that cave, the route plunges much deeper and much narrower, into pitch-black, near-freezing water, water that’s only 2 degrees celsius — down through a section that is the deepest cave passage ever dived through anywhere in the world. Push all the way through that, until you’re nearly 2,000 meters into the journey, the deepest part being 130 meters below the surface of the earth., and you eventually ascend into a second cave on the far side, called Steinugleflåget, where the rock rises toward a crack of daylight and then the exit appears.
So, in through Plura, out through Steinugleflåget. That was the traverse.
A recreational diver might spend thirty minutes to an hour in the water on a normal dive. This one was planned to take five hours, and they'd use underwater scooters to cover the distance.
Now, unlike the first story, this group really REALLY paid attention to detail. Grönqvist, and Känkänen, had done this exact traverse the year before. They knew the route. They had the training and the gear that the divers in our first story did not.
And so, they cut the ice and went in, in two staggered groups to give each other more than enough space. Grönqvist and Huotarinen led. Rantanen, Uusimäki, and Känkänen were to follow about two hours later
But about an hour into Grönqvist and Huotarinen’s journey, something went wrong.
The two were deep into the traverse, past the deepest section, roughly a hundred and ten meters below the surface — over three hundred and sixty feet. Far deeper than most divers will ever go. Grönqvist knew that the tunnel narrows to what divers call a restriction: a passage tight enough that he’d have to adjust his body and his gear to fit through. And what that meant was, he couldn’t turn around. No matter what happened he was going to have to keep moving forward.
So, he steadied his breathing and started through, one bit at a time, only seeing what his headlap illuminated. When finally, he cleared the restriction. He turned around to make sure Huotarinen was doing ok.
But what he saw, was his partners light bouncing back and forth. Not like it was searching the cave, but like it was signaling distress.
Grönqvist could see that Huotarinen was stuck in the restriction — wedged in the narrow gap, with the leash from his underwater scooter tangled around him. And from the way Huotarinen was moving, it was clear that he was starting to panic.
At a hundred and ten meters, panic is a death sentence, and here's why. When your breathing rate spikes — which is what panic does — you produce carbon dioxide faster than your equipment can handle. These divers were using rebreathers, devices that, like we mentioned in our first story, chemically scrub the CO₂ from your exhaled breath so you can re-breathe the same gas. A rebreather works well when you're breathing steadily. But if you start gulping air the scrubber can't keep up. Carbon dioxide floods your bloodstream. At depth, that process is accelerated. It clouds your thinking. It can knock you unconscious. And if you're already trapped in a narrow space, tangled in your own equipment, it doesn't take long.
But Grönqvist was trained for situations like this, so he tried to stay calm and do what he had been taught. He gave Huotarinen a separate cylinder of gas — a clean supply to buy him time to steady himself. To use it, Huotarinen had to switch mouthpieces: take out the rebreather loop, put in the open-circuit regulator.
But as he started switching the cylinders, water flooded into his open mouth.
Grönqvist watched in horror as his friend tried to get the mouthpiece in, but before he could, he stopped moving. He was dead.
And all he wanted to do was panic, but he couldnt do anything. He could not thrash. He could not scream. If his own breathing spiked now, the same CO₂ cascade that had just killed his friend would kill him.
But there was an even bigger problem now. He could not just swim straight up to the surface, he had to slowly decompress. At this depth, his body was saturated with dissolved gas. Coming up fast would cause that gas to form bubbles in his blood, his joints, his spinal cord — decompression sickness, which can paralyze or kill. The only safe way up is slowly, in stages, over hours. And the only way forward was forward — deeper into the traverse, alone, toward the far exit at Steinugleflåget.
He tried briefly to free his friend's body from the restriction. He couldn't. There was no way back. And no way to warn his friends who would soon be coming along this same path. And so Grönqvist made himself calm. He made himself breathe slowly. And he kept going, the only way he could, leaving Huotarinen behind him in the passage.
The time he'd lost — the attempt to help, the shock, the slow forced steadying of himself — had stretched his decompression obligation from roughly two hours to roughly six and a half. Six and a half hours of staged stops on the way up, alone, in near-freezing water, with the knowledge of what was behind him and what the second group was about to find.
About two hours later, the trailing group of three reached that same narrow gap. Vesa Rantanen was in front. And what he found was his friend's body, blocking the passage.
Rantanen had two options — the same two options every diver behind him would face. He could try to squeeze past the body and continue forward through the traverse to the far exit. Or he could turn around and swim all the way back — back through the deepest section, back through the sump, back through the mile-plus of cave he'd already come through — and try to reach Plura.
He chose forward. "I got to that narrow place, where that first diver got stuck, and I had to decide what to do," he said later. "My options were to try to pass that dead diver, or to turn around and try to do a very long dive back, go back to the deepest section and try to survive to the surface. I decided to go forward, and that was a very good decision for me. But it took me at least fifteen minutes to get past that dead diver."
Fifteen minutes of working his body past his friend's, in a space barely wide enough for one person. That time added hours to his own decompression obligation and burned through his gas. When he finally made it to the surface, he was eighty minutes short of a full decompression — eighty minutes his body needed to safely release the gas dissolved in his tissues. The pain started in his knees and elbows. It got worse. The decompression sickness left him with permanent spinal-cord damage.
Behind Rantanen came the second Jari — Uusimäki. He reached the body too. Norwegian police believe he panicked at the scene and drowned there. Two friends now dead in the same stretch of tunnel.
And behind Uusimäki was the last man. Kai Känkänen. He tried to help Uusimäki but it was too late. So there he was, deep, deep underground, hours into this journey with limited oxygen left, and he sees his friend blocking the tunnel. And he can tell that there’s another body in front of Usimaki as well, and so he thinks to himself, are all of my friends dead, did everyone die in this tunnel? And so he chooses to not go forward, he turns around and starts the long journey back.
He swam the entire traverse in reverse. Alone. Back down through the deepest part of the system, back through the narrow tunnels, back the full mile-plus to Plura. This dive was supposed to take 5 hours, but soon 6 hours had passed, then 7 then 8. He’s going slowly to make sure that he doesn’t surface too fast and risk decompression sickness, but he has to go fast enough to not run out of air.
Finally, he gets back to the entrance and he sees that the hole they entered through is now frozen over. He has to break through it in order to climb out.
And even though he’s alive, he’s looking back at the lake wondering if he was the only survivor.
And luckily, he wasn’t alone. Back on the other end of the diveGrönqvist. And Rantanen were exiting.
All three were hospitalized in Tromsø. But the two Jaris — Huotarinen and Uusimäki — were still down there. A hundred and ten meters below northern Norway, in the dark.
When their families heard the news, all they could focus on was getting those men back to the surface for proper burials. But there was a problem with that. recovering two bodies from the middle of the deepest cave passage on earth, is one of the most dangerous things a diver can attempt. Just Doing the dive was risky enough to claim two lives, rescuing was a whole other game.
Norwegian police brought in the people you call for exactly this — a team of elite British cave divers, among them a man named Rick Stanton, who is arguably the most accomplished cave-recovery diver alive, and who had actually done a recovery at this same site years earlier, in 2006.
Stanton's team went in to assess it. And what they found was that Huotarinen's body was wedged into the restriction in a way that couldn't be quickly undone — and worse, that his body was blocking the route to Uusimäki's. To reach the second man, they'd have to get through the first, in a space that had already killed one experienced diver.
They decided it was just too risky. And The Norwegian authorities agreed. The cave was officially closed with the men inside. A diving ban came down. Officially, that was the end of it. The two Jaris would stay where they were.
Stanton would say later that recovery divers live with a hard truth — that some bodies simply cannot be brought back.
Meanwhile, across the world in Mexico, Sami Paakkarinen woke up to his phone lighting up
He had Ten missed calls. Ten messages. And he immediately knew something was wrong. Remember Paakkarinen had been one of the trio who first ran this traverse in 2013. He had trained both of the Jaris. they were his friends and his students.
He got the three survivors on the phone from their hospital beds and they walked him through what was happening and how the cave was closed for good. Then he spent the day walking in circles around the courtyard of his hotel, planning.
Because a plan was already formulating among the survivors, quietly, without anyone quite saying it out loud. Grönqvist — the man who had watched Huotarinen die — had made a promise to Huotarinen's widow. They were not going to be left down there. And when the survivors began, tentatively, to talk to each other, they discovered they had all landed in the same place independently. They were going to go get their friends.
Around the 22nd of March, 2014 — about six weeks after the accident — twenty-seven people converged on the Plurdalen valley. Seventeen Finns and ten Norwegians. They came in by truck and by car, by sled and by snowmobile, hauling more than a ton of equipment and over fifty cylinders of breathing gas across the snow. The plan was built to leave nothing to chance, because chance was what had killed their friends. Support divers would stage at shallower depths at both mouths of the traverse. And the deep team — the three who would go all the way down to the bodies — would be Grönqvist, Paakkarinen, and Känkänen.
There's a Finnish concept — sisu — that doesn't translate cleanly into English. The closest you can get is something like a quiet, stubborn endurance. The will to keep going when going on doesn't make any rational sense. And there's a phrase that Finnish soldiers used in the Winter War of 1939, when they went back under fire to carry their dead home: kaveria ei jätetä. You don't leave a friend behind. And this is what that phrase represents.
The setup alone took days. They winched more than a ton of gear up the mountain to the Steinugleflåget entrance, piece by piece. They spent a full day staging fifty cylinders of gas along the route. On the Plura side, they built an underwater habitat — a pocket of trapped breathable air, down in the cave, where a diver could surface during the long decompression stops, get their head out of the near-freezing water, take off their mask, even eat. In water that cold, over a decompression that runs for hours, that habitat was itself a piece of survival equipment. If something went wrong and the team had to retreat all the way back to Plura, it might be the thing that kept them alive.
The team spent the weeks beforehand deliberately working through their grief — getting it out, processing it on the surface — so that when they finally went into the water, they could be technicians and not mourners. Down there, grief would get them killed.
On March 24th, the deep team slipped under the ice at Plura and started the traverse, with camera operators filming alongside them. That footage would later become a documentary called Diving Into the Unknown, and it is the reason we know what the recovery actually looked like.
They reached Uusimäki first, his body suspended in the water. Then, about sixty-five feet further on, they came to Huotarinen — still wedged exactly where Grönqvist had been forced to leave him, seven weeks before. They cut away the tangled equipment. They worked the body free of the restriction that had trapped it. And then Grönqvist took hold of a scooter and began the long haul up and out, towing his friend toward the surface, with Paakkarinen following behind to help guide the body through the tightest passages.
The next day, they went back down and recovered Uusimäki, with another diver, Jani Santala, joining for the second dive.
Both men were finally brought up into Steinugleflåget — the dry cave at the far end, where the rock climbs toward that thin crack of daylight. Grönqvist had brought body bags from his fire station. They placed the two Jaris inside them. All told, the operation had taken a hundred and one hours of dive time.
And then, in the cave, the team stood together and held a moment of silence.
They notified the police afterward. There were, in the end, no serious legal consequences. The two men were home.
On May 30th, Monica Montefalcone and her daughter Giorgia were laid to rest together, in a church in Genoa. And afterward, some of Montefalcone's own students from the University of Genoa reportedly gathered to hold a kind of memorial in the water — a collective underwater prayer at the Christ of the Abyss, the bronze statue that stands submerged in the bay near Portofino, on the Italian coast where she taught.
As of this recording, the story of Devana Kandu is not over. Two separate criminal investigations remain open — one in Rome, one in the Maldives. Toxicology results and a full expert report have been ordered by the court, with a deadline running to roughly late August 2026, so right around now. The GoPro cameras and dive computers recovered from inside the cave — the evidence most likely to show what actually happened in those final minutes — are still being held.. Rome prosecutors have filed an international request to get them. The unnamed student who stayed on the boat that morning has given her testimony. We still don't know her name. We still don't know why she didn't dive.
It’s a tragic story, but I did want to bring up something that I found while I was researching this episode, and that brings me to a segment I haven’t done in a while called One Curious Thing:
In today’s one Curious thing, I want to tell you about the other caving disaster that happened right around the same time as the maldives disaster, except this one wasn’t covered really at all.
But this story features a bunch of gold miners in a cave in Laos:
So In May 2026, the same month as the Maldives, a group of gold miners walked into an unmapped cave in central Laos. They were artisanal prospectors, part of a surge in small-scale mining driven by record gold prices. The cave was in Xaisomboun province, hours from the nearest city on muddy monsoon-season roads. It was unreinforced and unmapped, just a horrible combination for a cave. And then it rained.
A flash flood sealed the entrance. One man managed to escape and raise the alarm. The rest were trapped more than eight hundred feet inside, down a forty-five-degree slope, in water so dark and gritty rescuers described it as like diving in coffee.
An international team converged. And among them were two names that anyone who followed the Thai cave rescue in 2018 would recognize. Mikko Paasi, a Finnish cave diver, and Kengkard Bongkawong, a Thai rescue commander. Both had been part of the operation that pulled twelve boys and their soccer coach out of Tham Luang cave alive. Eight years later, another flooded cave, another phone call.
On May 27th, Paasi and another diver named Norrased Palasing found five of the miners alive, huddled on a rock ledge more than two hundred and fifty meters inside the cave. Their headlamps were still on. They hadn't eaten in days. Palasing said they grabbed his hands and cried.
Paasi told them: "There are people here to help now. The important thing is that you're alive. Don't cry."
Getting them out was another problem. The team tried pumping the water down, but conditions were deteriorating. On May 29th, Paasi went to what he called the last option: a trust-me dive. The term means what it sounds like: you take a person who has never dived in their life and you bring them through flooded passages that would challenge an expert, tethered between two divers, with no time to teach them anything. The first miner came out alive. The next day, the water dropped enough that the remaining four crawled out on their own.
All 5 of the men that were found were rescued
But two more miners were still unaccounted for, deeper inside the system. The search was suspended in early June after an earthquake triggered a rockfall that blocked the entrance. The cave became too unstable to enter. Paasi told reporters the two were no longer believed to be alive.
This episode shows me that even if you’re an expert diver, or even if you’ve worked in the same mine your whole career, you never know when disaster can strike. And sometimes it happens with no warning. I guess the best thing you can do is just be prepared. Which reminds me, as I was doing this episode, I thought it might be interesting to do another cave diving episode but have some diving experts on to help us all understand the mechanics of these disasters. Let me know wherever you listen if that’s something you’d be interested in.
And I’ll meet you here next week with our last installment in this seasons dark summer. It’s with a really fun guest I’m so excited to share that with you. I’ll see you then and until next time, stay curious.