Turkey Cave Rescue: Live Updates On Mission To Save American Explorer

Dickey's rescue team has brought him to the -500m camp, the European Cave Rescue Association said Sunday evening local time. His status is stable, and the rescue team members are in good physical condition.

The group shared some photos of the site here.

Dickey is trapped about 3,400 feet from the entrance to the cave, deep below ground. Any recovery effort will be enormously complex, as the passage is too narrow at points for a stretcher to pass through, The Associated Press notes.

Yusuf Ogrenecek, an expert with the Speleological Federation of Turkey, told the wire service cave rescues are labor intensive, requiring people to work in mud, water and at low temperatures for long periods of time.

Plans are underway for rescue crews to extract Dickey this weekend. Marton Kovacs of the Hungarian Cave Rescue Service, which was the first to arrive at Dickey’s location, told The Associated Press that teams are working to widen some passages enough for a stretcher to pass and address the risk of falling rocks.

Rescue crews are hoping to begin Dickey’s extraction Saturday or Sunday and expect it to take several days, possibly weeks.

"If he has to be carried in a stretcher. It will most likely take 10-15 days, maybe more,” Dr. Yaman Ozakin, a spokesman for the Turkish Caving Federation, told The BBC.

Rescue teams from different countries are responsible for seven different sections of the cave, Cave Rescue Bulgaria explained in a Facebook update, adding that they may be able to forgo a stretcher in the tightest spots given that Dickey’s condition has improved.

An Italian rescuer who oversaw a 2014 cave rescue in Germany has been put in charge of the overall plan, the Bulgarian team said.

As rescue efforts to save Mark Dickey continue, there are reasons to remain optimistic, including that in recent years there have been several successful cave rescues.

In a similar situation to Dickey's, an injured explorer was trapped in Germany’s deepest cave system in 2014. Johann Westhauser, 52, injured his head in a rock fall and was unable to leave the cave on his own. Hundreds of rescue workers were on hand to help in the rescue operation, and after 12 days Westhauser was safely returned to the surface.

In perhaps the most well-known cave rescue in recent years, a junior soccer team was trapped in a cave in Thailand for two weeks in 2018. The 12 boys and their coach were stuck in the Tham Luang Cave after heavy rains trapped them. The rescue effort took several days, and officials said the team’s coach was among “the weakest in the group” because he gave up his share of food and water to the boys.

In 2004, six British soldiers were trapped in the Alpazat caverns in Puebla, Mexico, after heavy rain flooded the cave system. Their rescue eight days later set off rumors about whether the soldiers had gone into the cave in search of uranium deposits.

And in 1991, more than 200 people mobilized to rescue Emily Mobley, who got trapped in New Mexico’s Lechuguilla Cave after she broke her leg. Thankfully, Mobley had been part of a five-person team surveying the cave and was successfully rescued the following day.

Dickey, a 40-year-old cave researcher and explorer from New Jersey, is an instructor with the U.S.-based National Cave Rescue Commission who also serves as the organization’s international exchange program coordinator. The volunteer-based group was “developed primarily to train and track cave rescue resources throughout the United States.”

The European Cave Rescue Association describes Dickey as a member of its medical committee and “a highly trained caver and a cave rescuer himself” who is well known in the speleological community across the globe.

He’s engaged to Jessica Van Ord, who was also part of the expedition into the Morca cave. She stayed with him while he first began experiencing gastrointestinal issues and bleeding while inside the cave, but she began climbing out when his condition improved. She’s expected to resurface at some point Thursday.

Located in southern Turkey's Taurus Mountains (pictured above), Morca sinkhole is the third-deepest cave in the country with a depth of more than 4,100 feet, according to the Turkish Caving Federation. The cave is very narrow, which will make removing Dickey on a stretcher a complicated task.

"The cave is mostly vertical, but it doesn’t go straight down,” Dickey’s friend and fellow caver Carl Heitmeyer told NBC News.

"There’s water in-feeding from two points near the top of the cave and some of the passages are filled with water, and there are tight squeezes and corkscrews where you have to turn your body in [a] certain way," he continued.

The cave is frequently visited by scientists studying calcite formations in the caves, collecting biological samples from its water pools and doing other research.