“When does a cave rescue become a recovery?’ That was the question a friend of mine asked me online about a week ago. This was before the boys and their coach had been found in the Thai cave.

Before I continue, let me add a huge caveat: this is an ongoing dynamic situation and many of the details I mention here may already be based on inaccurate or outdated information. But that’s also part of the point I ultimately hope to make: plans have to evolve as more data is gathered.

My somewhat flippant answer was “when they’re dead.” This is a bit of dark humor answer but there was actually some reasoning behind it. Before I go on, let me say that at that point I actually still had a lot of hope and reason to believe they were still alive. I’m very glad to find that they were in fact found alive and relatively safe.

There’s a truth about cave rescue: caves are literally a black-hole of information. Until you find the people you’re searching for, you have very little information.  Sometimes it may be as little as, “They went into this cave and haven’t come out yet.” (Actually sometimes it can be even less than that, “We think they went into one of these caves but we’re not even sure about that.”)

So when it comes to rescue, two of the items we try to teach students when teaching cave rescue is to look for clues, and to try to establish communications. A clue might be a footprint or a food wrapper. It might be the smell of a sweaty caver wafting in a certain direction. A clue might be the sound of someone calling for help. And the ultimate clue of course is the caver themselves. But there are other clues we might look for: what equipment do we think they have? What experience do they have? What is the characteristics of the cave? These can all drive how we search and what decisions we make.

Going back to the Thai cave situation, based on the media reports (which should always be taken with a huge grain of salt) it appeared that the coach and boys probably knew enough to get above the flood level and that the cave temps were in the 80s (Fahrenheit).  These are two reasons I was hopeful. Honestly, had they not gotten above the flood zone, almost certainly we’d be talking about a tragedy instead. Had the cave been a typical northeast cave where the temps are in the 40s (F) I would have had a lot less hope.

Given the above details then, it was reasonable to believe the boys were still alive and to continue to treat the situation as a search and eventually rescue situation.  And fortunately, that’s the way it has turned out. What happens next is still open for speculation, but I’ll say don’t be surprised if they bring in gear and people and bivouac in place for weeks or even months until the water levels come down.

During the search process, apparently a lot of phone lines were laid into parts of the cave so that easier communications could be made with the surface. Now that they have found the cavers, I’d be shocked if some sort of realtime communications is not setup in short order. This will allow he incident commander to make better informed decisions and to be able to get the most accurate and up to date data.

So, let me relate this to IT and disasters. Typically a disaster will start with, “the server has crashed” or something similar. We have an idea of the problem, but again, we’re really in a black-hole of information at that moment. Did the server crash because a hard drive failed, or because someone kicked the power cord or something else?

The first thing we need to do is to get more information. And we may need to establish communications. We often take that for granted, but the truth is, often when a major disaster occurs, the first thing to go is good communications. Imagine that the crashed server is in a datacenter across the country. How can you find out what’s going on? Perhaps you call for hands on support. But what if the reason the server has crashed is because the datacenter is on fire? You may not be able to reach anyone!  You might need to call a friend in the same city and have them go over there.  Or you might even turn on the news to see if there’s anything on worth noting.

But the point is, you can’t react until you have more information. Once you start to have information, you can start to develop a reaction plan. But let’s take the above situation and imagine that you find your datacenter has in fact burned down. You might start to panic and think you need to order a new server.  You start to call up your CFO to ask her to let you buy some new hardware when suddenly you get a call from your tech in the remote. They tell you, “Yeah, the building burned down, but we got real lucky and our server was in an area that was undamaged and I’ve got it in the trunk of my car, what do you want me to do with it?”

Now your previous data has been invalidated and you have new information and have to develop a new plan.

This is the situation in Thailand right now. They’re continually getting new information and updating their plans as they go. And this is the way you need to handle you disasters, establish communications, gather data and create a plan and update your plan as the data changes. And don’t give up hope until you absolutely have to.