For seven days, more than 200 people have battled round the clock to save a seriously injured caver trapped 1000m below the ground, in what is set to become the most expensive rescue operation in German history.
The long, dangerous journey to bring the injured 52-year-old back to the surface was finally under way yesterday, but rescuers are warning it will take another full week to transport him up through a dizzying series of tunnels and shafts, before he sees the daylight again.
Johann Westhauser has lain in the icy dark beneath the Bavarian Alps while doctors struggled to reach him and assess his condition. Now a team of 14 rescuers accompanied by a doctor must carry him on a stretcher more than 5km underground. They must cross underground lakes by dinghy, climb 300m vertical shafts by rope, fight their way past underground waterfalls and squeeze through tiny bottlenecks.
At one point they will somehow have to negotiate Westhauser's stretcher through a passage so narrow an average-sized man has to double over and exhale in order to squeeze past. Along the way, they will face near freezing temperatures and cave winds, and a constant danger of flooding.
The journey would take a professional caver more than 10 hours under ideal conditions - and they must do all this while carrying a man with a serious brain injury, who needs to be kept lying flat as much as possible.
