Sadly that’s the point of a tl;dr, it misses the nuance for people who can’t be arsed to read a whole paragraph.
I will also add that he died because of positional asphyxia. It’s not just that his heart couldn’t handle it. The way we breathe really only works if we’re right side up or laying down. If you’re upside down for a long period of time, your lungs are pushing against your guts and other organs that are pressing down on your lungs. It’s trivial to do for an hour or two, but beyond that, you’re breathing against physics and it just gets harder and harder. He also didn’t have much energy since he worked so hard to get in there. Even if they were able to pipe him sustenance, he couldn’t beat the physics and it was just a matter of time.
They also tried a few things to get him out, but because of the angle he was at, I think they broke one of his legs trying to pull him back out and he told them to stop trying. They were able to lower a phone to him and he was able to speak to his wife and children and tell them he wasn’t coming home, so that had to weigh on him as well.
It’s tempting to think about digging him out. He was underground, so you think “okay so dig.” But it’s rocks, so you can only use demolition (explosive). Explosives push things away, so if you used demolitions to get at him, you’d be crushing him. There’s no magical black hole bomb that just vaporises the rock. You break rocks with explosives by blowing them apart (pushing them away from you). The only way you could use demolition to get where he was would be to drop the explosives in with him, to make a bigger hole. Unfortunately he would be killed in the process and his body destroyed.
Yeah, I know…
Sadly that’s the point of a tl;dr, it misses the nuance for people who can’t be arsed to read a whole paragraph.
I will also add that he died because of positional asphyxia. It’s not just that his heart couldn’t handle it. The way we breathe really only works if we’re right side up or laying down. If you’re upside down for a long period of time, your lungs are pushing against your guts and other organs that are pressing down on your lungs. It’s trivial to do for an hour or two, but beyond that, you’re breathing against physics and it just gets harder and harder. He also didn’t have much energy since he worked so hard to get in there. Even if they were able to pipe him sustenance, he couldn’t beat the physics and it was just a matter of time.
They also tried a few things to get him out, but because of the angle he was at, I think they broke one of his legs trying to pull him back out and he told them to stop trying. They were able to lower a phone to him and he was able to speak to his wife and children and tell them he wasn’t coming home, so that had to weigh on him as well.
It’s tempting to think about digging him out. He was underground, so you think “okay so dig.” But it’s rocks, so you can only use demolition (explosive). Explosives push things away, so if you used demolitions to get at him, you’d be crushing him. There’s no magical black hole bomb that just vaporises the rock. You break rocks with explosives by blowing them apart (pushing them away from you). The only way you could use demolition to get where he was would be to drop the explosives in with him, to make a bigger hole. Unfortunately he would be killed in the process and his body destroyed.
So yeah, fuck caves.