189. Cave Diving Horror: 3 Deadly Underwater Cave Exploration Disasters

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 https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. 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 https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en and⁠ Instagram⁠ https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore. Now, when I announced that I was going to be doing Dark Summer this year, I got a lot of requests from you guys for episodes that you wanted to hear about. Some of the heavy hitters, like camping horror, spooky campfire tales, all that good stuff. But a lot of you also reached out to me asking for something that I hadn't necessarily heard you ask for before, and that was scary cave diving stories. And what clicked for me is there was a terrifying cave diving... And what clicked for me was there was a terrifying cave diving accident that actually happened earlier this year, one that I followed very closely as it was happening, one that honestly should have never happened in the first place.

• 0:43Kaelyn Moore?

  And that's the accident that took place in the Maldives, and that is what I want to cover for you today. And I also want to talk about some of the other scary cave diving stories that tie into that one, because there's people involved in this story that were also involved in other terrifying cave diving accidents that I felt needed to be included in this episode. We're going to get into all of that today, so thank you to everyone who reached out and sent that as a suggestion. But first, I want to say thank you to everyone who participated in our back-to-school campaign. I had been hearing from a lot of teachers in our community saying things that did not make any sense to me, like, "Kaelyn, my school district won't help me pay for school supplies," necessary

• 1:24Kaelyn Moore?

  things like erasers, markers, pencils. I couldn't believe it, and I knew just from hearing from you guys that I needed to help as much as I could. We have gotten a lot of submissions from you guys. I honestly wish that I could reach out to everyone, but at this point, we've supported over 40 classrooms, and there's more that we're getting to. This will be the final week. I actually have more support that's going to go out today, and we're going to finish up on next Friday, the 21st. For more information, you should sign up for our free newsletter. We've been doing it on Patreon. You just have to sign up for Patreon. You don't have to pay. That's where we've been doing a newsletter that puts together information on ways that we're supporting the community, and it also just is where I keep all of the community projects that I'm working on and other updates

• 2:08Kaelyn Moore?

  in the Heart Starts Pounding community. I keep it all in one place on this newsletter, so it's a great thing to sign up for. You get a little bit of behind-the-scenes on the episodes, all that good stuff. Again, that's over on Patreon, and it's free for everyone. Okay, and with that, let's dive into this week's episode.

• 2:25Kaelyn Moore?

  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 were in the Maldives, a small country south of India made up of over 1,000 tiny coral islands. But as this group finished preparing, one of the divers, this young woman, stopped. "You guys go ahead without me," she said. Now, this was not supposed to be a hard dive, and it should only take an hour, but still, something stopped her. She watched as the group finished suiting up, slowly got in the water. They dove below the surface, and little bubbles came up from their oxygen tanks. And this woman figured

• 3:07Kaelyn Moore?

  she would see the group in an hour after they were done studying the reefs. But an hour passed, and the group was nowhere to be seen. Another 30 minutes went by, and then another. And the woman watched, waiting for the group's heads to surface, but they never did. So she grabbed the boat's phone to call for help, not knowing that below her was a cave system that was much deeper and much more complicated than anyone in her group had anticipated, and time was running out. 51-year-old Monica Monofalcone was one of the divers who had gone down that morning, and she was the reason that that group was there that day. She was an associate professor of marine ecology at the University

• 3:51Kaelyn Moore?

  of Genoa, and she had been leading Maldives coral research projects for more than a decade. There's over 130 scientific publications to her name, and somewhere around 5,000 dives logged over her career. Diving beside her that morning was her daughter, Georgia Somacal, who was in her early 20s. She was a biomedical engineering student who regularly came along on her mother's fieldwork. Then there was Muriel Odenino, who was 31, a paddy dive master and research fellow, Federico Gualtieri, around 30 years old. He was a dive instructor and a recent marine biology graduate, and Gianluca Benedetti, 44, a man who had walked away from a career in finance to spend his life diving. He'd lived in the Maldives for

• 4:33Kaelyn Moore?

  seven years, and he knew these waters better than anyone on the boat. Now, that day, the group was supposed to be exploring Devana Kundu, just over 50 meters below the surface of the water. It's a system of coral reef caves and tunnels that are carved into these big walls in the coral reefs. It kind of looks like underwater cliffs. The entrance that they were looking for opened into a large first chamber. It's bright, and it's easy to see. Natural light filters down and illuminates this big chamber. But the cave gets really dark really fast. Just past this first chamber, there's what looks like a long hallway. It's three meters wide, and it's 30 meters long. By the end of it,

• 5:15Kaelyn Moore?

  there's no more light. Nothing is spilling in. And the cave goes even deeper than that, into a third chamber. The whole system reaches some 200 meters through interconnected passages, but a lot of this cave is not mapped. And you have to be careful when you look up pictures of it online, because, like I said, it's not mapped, and so there's a lot of misinformation out there on what it looks like. We don't know how deep this cave is, is what I'm trying to say. This is one of those sites that draws really experienced divers, and this group did have the experience for it. They had thousands of dives between them, a leader who had spent more than a decade in these exact waters. So that leads me to the question: Why, after an hour on an easy dive, had they not resurfaced?

• 6:00Kaelyn Moore?

  So the first divers to respond to that distress call came from another boat that was anchored nearby. They slowly descended down towards Devana Kundu, and immediately, their hearts dropped. Because there, floating lifeless somewhere inside of that first chamber, 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 of that cave system. This was now considered a recovery operation. I think they probably assumed that since Gianluca was found dead by the mouth of the cave, that he was probably trying to get help for everyone else who was even further inside of there, and there was now

• 6:41Kaelyn Moore?

  no chance that they were alive. And now, this recovery mission fell to the Maldives National Defense Force, basically their coast guard. The man who led the recovery operation was Sergeant 1st Class Mohammed Mahudi. He was 44 years old with more than 20 years of service. He was a trained rescuer and salvage diver. He was also an instructor. He had two children back home and was described by many people who knew him as being one of the best. On May 16th, that's two days after the group vanished, Mahudi led an eight-man team into that 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 air in your tank like

• 7:26Kaelyn Moore?

  what you and I are breathing right now, two really horrible things can happen. One, you can get nitrogen narcosis, and this is something you won't feel until it's too late. You could just be swimming around when all of a sudden, you'd start feeling disoriented, kind of like you were drunk. And by that point, you would probably get all turned around and not be able to find your way out. And you can also get something called oxygen toxicity. This is also something you might not feel until it was too late, and death was almost certain. Again, you'd be diving, and all of a sudden, you would have a seizure and just sink to the bottom of the ocean. To combat this, divers will use something called Trimix. It's a special blend of oxygen, helium, and nitrogen that technical divers

• 8:08Kaelyn Moore?

  use to manage the effects of the depth and to prevent those two things I just told you about. But there was a problem with this, because Mahudi and his team were not using Trimix. By the time that his team surfaced, they didn't even know that Mahudi had lost consciousness far below. They dove back down and found him just floating there, unconscious. He was rushed roughly 90 kilometers to the hyperbaric unit at 80K Hospital in the Maldives, capital of Malay, and he died there of decompression sickness.

• 8:39Kaelyn Moore?

  So now six people were dead during what was supposed to be a recreational dive. After this, the MNDF suspended the operation entirely. The bodies of the four divers were still inside the caves. But now they were going to call the big guns, basically the best divers that exist in our world. And that 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 Male. Their names were Sami Pakarinen, Patrick Gronkvis and Yanni Westerlund. All three of them were closed-circuit rebreather divers, which allows you to dive for extended periods of time.

• 9:22Kaelyn Moore?

  And the equipment that they brought with them was a different category of diving entirely. There's basically two systems that are used for breathing and scuba diving. The one that maybe immediately comes to mind to you is the normal open system, where you inhale compressed gas from a tank through a regulator, and then exhale straight into the water in a big stream of bubbles. Rebreathers are different. They're a closed system. You inhale the compressed gas and you exhale into the same system. And then that runs through a chemical scrubber that removes the carbon dioxide and then adds a little bit of oxygen back in. So it doesn't waste nearly as much gas, and it lets you stay at depth for far longer than an open tank allows. With them, they also brought underwater scooters so that they could cover ground even faster.

• 10:07Kaelyn Moore?

  They also arranged for an ambulance boat and a hyperbaric doctor just to stand by on the surface in case anything should happen. And this is what a dive into Davana Khandu was supposed to look like. On May 18th, they went in. First, through that bright first chamber with the sandy floor, the last place that natural light reaches. Then they went into the tunnel that runs even deeper into the reef. They went past a sandbank that led into the second chamber, which was round and completely dark. And then deeper still, they went towards the third chamber, which was the lowest chamber. It's about 60 meters down. And that is where they found the group, all four of them, close together in the deepest part of the cave.

• 10:50Kaelyn Moore?

  The team sent word to the surface by tearing out a page from a logbook and letting it float up through the water until it broke the surface, where the crew was waiting for them. And they had written on it just four words that said, "We found all four." As they worked, the Finnish divers began to understand what probably 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. It branched off near the sandbank, running only a few dozen meters before dead-ending into solid rock. The team had to follow marks in the sand to reach them, to even find them. And so the leading theory for how five experienced divers ended up dying

• 11:32Kaelyn Moore?

  in a dead-end tunnel most likely came down to that sandbank. So going in the sandbank is actually pretty easy. You cross over it and you drop into that second chamber. But on your way out, visibility is a lot worse, because you've been down there kicking your flippers near the sandbank, and that has probably kicked up all of the silt. And that sandbank might just look like a wall, instead of what's going to lead you on the way out. I ended up watching a lot of videos on YouTube of divers in similar circumstances to this, and they literally cannot see their hands in front of their face. It's just so dark and there's silt everywhere. It's really murky down there. And so when you're in that situation, it's really easy to panic. I mean, I just panicked even watching it on YouTube. So if that's what these divers are facing,

• 12:15Kaelyn Moore?

  the theory is that they actually spotted the opening to the unmapped part of the cave, that tunnel, and they thought it was the way out. And so they ended up trapped in there. And now that none of them survived, we're learning even more about how dangerous of a dive this truly was. Sure, the 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 and its own equipment. It has its own rules for exactly this type of enclosed environment. This group also didn't have the deep exploration permit that is legally the only way into Davana Khandu. It's actually a permit that only a small number of Maldivian technical divers hold.

• 13:00Kaelyn Moore?

  And on top of it, probably worst of all, this group had gone in on what was known as tourist tanks, standard recreational compressed air cylinders that at 60 meters are likely to last no more than 20 minutes. That means when they got into that third chamber, they only had 20 minutes of air. For this kind of dive, they would have needed a different type of tank entirely, something like those rebreathers or the Trimix, et cetera. And I could go on as to the mistakes that the group made. Two of them were wearing nothing but thin neoprene over swimwear. Also, the Maldives caps recreational diving at 30 meters. I mean, they entered the cave at 50 meters and they just went down from there. So there was not really much reason for them to be doing this dive.

• 13:42Kaelyn Moore?

  The group made a lot of careless mistakes, and that eventually cost them their lives. But at the end of this voyage, it was the Finnish divers who had to go in and bring them out one by one, a very traumatic experience for those people involved. But that was not the first time that the Finnish divers had to do a traumatic recovery like this. In fact, when I was looking into their stories, I found that those three divers had been involved in one of the most harrowing cave accidents in all of history. So 12 years prior to the Maldives disaster, on February 6, 2014, five Finnish cave divers stood on the surface of a pond in northern Norway.

• 14:23Kaelyn Moore?

  The plan, which to a layperson like myself sounds absolutely horrible, was to cut through a half meter of ice and dive down into the caves below. That group consisted of Patrick Gronkvis, who I talked about before, at the time he was just 42, and he was a firefighter by trade, but his passion was diving. There was also Yari Huatrinen, who was 40, Yari Uzumaki, who was 34. They were the two Yaris. There was Vezza Rantinen, who was 33, and Kai Konkinen, who was 46. These men were best friends. They were very close. They were brought together by their obsession with the hardest, coldest, deepest underwater places in the world. And what the five of them wanted to do that day was a traverse.

• 15:09Kaelyn Moore?

  And it looked like this. They were going to drop into this still dark pond called Plura. They were going to swim underground for a little under a half mile and then surface inside of this long, colorful cave. That part was considered easy. Not easy enough for you or I to do it, but like easy in the diving community. But the five men weren't going to stop there. From that cave, the underground cave, the route plunges much deeper and much narrower into pitch-black, near-freezing water, water that is only 2 degrees Celsius, down through this section that is the deepest cave passage that's ever been dived anywhere in the world. They were going to push all the way through that, which would lead them about 2,000 meters into their journey.

• 15:51Kaelyn Moore?

  And the deepest part of that journey was going to be 130 meters below the surface of the earth. Then they were going to ascend into a second cave on the far side, called Steinuglifluget, where the rock rises towards a crack of daylight and then the exit appears. So in layman's terms, in through the ice in Plura, dive, dive, dive, dive, dive, out through Steinuglifluget. That was going to be the traverse. This whole trip was planned to take five hours, and they were going to use underwater scooters to cover some of the distance. Now, unlike in the first story, this group really, really, really paid attention to detail. Gronkvis and Konkinen had done this exact traverse the year before. They knew this route really well.

• 16:34Kaelyn Moore?

  They had the training gear that the divers in the first story did not. And so they cut a hole in the ice and the group went in. They did two staggered groups to give each other more than enough space. Gronkvis and Huatrinen went in first, and then Rantinen, Uzumaki and Konkinen were to follow about two hours later. But about an hour into Gronkvis and Huatrinen's journey, something went wrong.

• 17:05Kaelyn Moore?

  So the two were deep into the traverse, past the deepest section roughly 110 meters below the surface, over 360 feet at that point. It was far deeper than most divers ever go in their diving careers. Gronkvis knew that the tunnel narrows to what divers call a restriction. It's a passage that's tight enough where he would have to adjust his body and his gears just a bit through. And what that meant was, basically, under no circumstances could he turn around there. No matter what happened, he was going to have to keep moving forward. So he studied his breathing, and he started through, just one bit at a time, seeing what his headlamp illuminated. When finally, he cleared that restriction,

• 17:48Kaelyn Moore?

  and he turned around to make sure that Huatrinen was doing okay. What he saw was his partner's light bouncing back and forth. And not like he was searching the cave, but like he was trying to signal to his friend that he was in distress. Gronkvis could see that Huatrinen was stuck in that restriction, wedged somehow in the narrow gap, with the leash from his underwater scooter tangled around him. And from the way that Huatrinen was moving, it was clear that he was starting to panic about being stuck. At 110 meters below the surface, panic can be a death sentence, and here's why. When your breathing rate spikes, which is what panicking does to you, you produce carbon dioxide faster than your equipment can handle.

• 18:32Kaelyn Moore?

  And these divers were using rebreathers, devices that, you know, like we mentioned earlier, chemically scrub the CO2 from your exhaled breath so that you can rebreathe the same gas. A rebreather works really well when you're breathing steadily. But if you start gulping air, the scrubber can't keep up, and carbon dioxide floods your bloodstream. At that depth, the process is accelerated beyond what it would be at the surface. And breathing in all that CO2 can cloud your thinking. It can, in the worst-case scenario, knock you unconscious. And if you're already trapped in a narrow space and tangled in your own equipment, it does not take long for that to happen. But Gronkvis was trained for situations like this.

• 19:15Kaelyn Moore?

  So he tried to stay calm and do what he had been taught. He gave Huatrinen a separate cylinder of gas, a clean supply to buy him time to steady himself. And to use it, Huatrinen just had to switch mouthpieces, take out the rebreather, and put in the open-circuit regulator. But as he started switching cylinders, water rushed into his open mouth. And Gronkvis watched in horror as his friend tried to get the mouthpiece in. But before he could, he stopped moving, and he was dead. All Gronkfest wanted to do was panic, but that was the thing that just killed his friend. He couldn't do anything. He couldn't thrash, he couldn't scream. If his own breathing spiked now,

• 19:58Kaelyn Moore?

  the same CO2 cascade was going to kill him. But there was another problem at this point. He couldn't just swim straight up to the surface. He had to slowly decompress. At this step, his body was saturated with dissolved gas. And if he came up too fast, that gas would form bubbles in his blood, his joints and his spinal cord, and it would cause decompression sickness, or the bends, as maybe you've heard it called. And that can paralyze you. It can also kill you. The only safe way up is slowly, in stages, over hours. And the only way out was deeper into that traverse, alone, towards the exit at Steinuglafloget. He tried briefly to free his friend's body from that restriction.

• 20:43Kaelyn Moore?

  One, because he didn't want to leave without him. But two, he had three more friends coming through the traverse. They were going to get stuck if his friend's body was there, but he couldn't do it. His friend was wedged too far in, and there was no way to warn his friends that would soon be coming along the same path. So Gronkfest did the only thing he could do. He made himself calm. He made himself breathe as slowly as he could, and he kept going, the only way that he could, leaving Huatranen behind in the passage. The time that he had lost by attempting to help had stretched his decompression obligation from two hours to roughly six and a half. So that is six and a half hours that he had to keep stopping on the way up, alone in near freezing water,

• 21:29Kaelyn Moore?

  also panicking and in grief, knowing what was behind him and what the second group was about to find. And then it happened. About two hours later, the trailing group of three reached that same narrow gap. Vesa Rontanen was in front, and what he found was his dear friend's body blocking the passage. And Rontanen had two options, the same two options that every diver behind him would face. He could try to squeeze past his friend's 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 of the traverse, back through the mile-plus of cave that he'd already come through, and try to go back out the way he came in.

• 22:13Kaelyn Moore?

  And he chose to go forward. And it took him 15 minutes of working his body past his friends to get through in a space that was barely wide enough to fit one person. And that time added hours to his own decompression obligation, and it also burns through a lot of his gas. So when he finally made it to the surface, he was 80 minutes short of a full decompression, which means there were 80 minutes that his body needed to safely release the gas that was dissolved in his tissues that it didn't. And the decompression sickness he faced left him with permanent spinal cord damage. Now, behind Rontanen came Yari Uzumaki. He reached his friend's body, and we don't know exactly what happened.

• 22:56Kaelyn Moore?

  Norwegian police believed that he maybe panicked at the scene, but we do know that he did drown there as well. Two friends now dead in the same stretch of tunnel. And behind Uzumaki was the last man, Kai Konkunen. And he tried to help Uzumaki, but it was just too late. So there he was, deep underground, hours into this journey with limited oxygen left, and he sees his friend blocking the tunnel. And on top of that, he can tell that beyond this friend is the body of another one of his dear friends. And he thinks to himself, are all of my friends dead? Did everyone in my group die in this tunnel? And so he makes the choice to not go forward,

• 23:38Kaelyn Moore?

  and he turns around and he starts the entire journey back. He swam that 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. Now, this dive was supposed to take five hours, but soon, six hours had passed, and then seven, and then eight. He has to go really slow to make sure that he doesn't surface too fast and risk decompression sickness, but he has to go fast enough that he doesn't run out of oxygen. Finally, he makes it back to the entrance, and he sees that the hole he entered through in the lake is now frozen over. So he has to break through the ice to climb out, but he's alive. And he's looking back at that lake,

• 24:21Kaelyn Moore?

  wondering if he's the only survivor. In total, the journey took him 11 hours. But luckily, he wasn't alone. Back on the other end of the traverse, Gronkfest and Rontanen were also exiting. All three of them were hospitalized, but the two Yaris, Huatranen and Uzumaki, were still down there, 110 meters below the surface, in the dark. When the two Yaris' 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.

• 25:03Kaelyn Moore?

  Just doing the dive was risky enough to claim two lives. Rescuing those men was going to be a whole other game. Norwegian police brought in the people that you call for exactly this kind of emergency. It was a team of elite British cave divers. Among them was a man named Rick Stanton. He's probably the most accomplished cave recovery diver alive, and he had done a recovery at the same site years earlier in 2006. Stanton's team went down and they assessed the situation. And what they found was that Huatranen's body was wedged into the restriction in a way that could not be quickly undone. And even worse, his body was blocking the route to Uzumaki's. And they decided that this dive was just too risky. And the Norwegian authorities agreed.

• 25:48Kaelyn Moore?

  The cave was officially closed with the men inside. They set a diving ban on it, so no one else could enter. Officially, that was the end of this story. The two Yaris were set to stay where they were. And Stanton would later say that the recovery divers live, unfortunately, with a hard truth, that some bodies simply cannot be brought back. Meanwhile, across the world in Mexico, Sami Pakarinen, from our first story, woke to his phone lighting up. He had 10 missed calls and 10 messages. And he said he immediately knew that something was wrong. Pakarinen had actually done this traverse before. He was one of the first to traverse it in 2013. And he had trained with both of the Yaris. They were his friends. They were also his students.

• 26:32Kaelyn Moore?

  So what he did was he got the three survivors on the phone from their hospital beds. And they walked in through everything that happened and what was happening now with the government and how the cave was closed. And then he spent the day walking in circles around the courtyard of his hotel, coming up with a plan. Because Gronkfest told him that he had made a promise to Huatranen's widow, a promise that he would recover her husband's body. And when the survivors began talking to each other about how much they wanted to recover their friends' bodies, they realized that they had all landed on the same plan independently, that they were going to go get their friends.

• 27:13Kaelyn Moore?

  Around the 22nd of March, 2014, about six weeks after the accident, 27 people converged on the Plurdelein Valley. 17 Finns, 10 Norwegians. They came by truck, by car, by sled and by snowmobile. And they were hauling more than a ton of equipment and 50 cylinders of breathing gas across the snow. The plan they had come up with was built to leave nothing to chance, because chance was ultimately what had killed their friends. And here's what they were going to do. They were going to have support divers staged near the mouths of the traverse. And then there was going to be a deep dive team, which were going to be the ones ultimately going down to recover the bodies. And that was going to be Gronkfest, Pakarinen and Konkunen. Now, there's this Finnish concept that I came across, sisu.

• 27:58Kaelyn Moore?

  It doesn't translate cleanly into English. The closest you can get is to something like this quiet, stubborn endurance, the will to keep going when going doesn't really make any rational sense. And that, I think, is the perfect way to describe this plan. The setup alone took days for this recovery. They had to get more than a ton of gear up the mountain to the Steinuglafloget entrance. Piece by piece, they spent a full day staging 50 cylinders of gas along the route down there. On the Plura side, they built an underwater habitat. It was a pocket of trapped breathable air down in the cave, where a diver could surface during the long decompression stops, and they could get their head out of the freezing water,

• 28:42Kaelyn Moore?

  even take their mask off and eat if they needed to. And that habitat was a piece of survival equipment. If something went wrong and the team had to retreat all the way back up to Plura, it could be the thing that kept them alive. And here's one thing about the story that I actually found really beautiful, and...

• 29:01Kaelyn Moore?

  Made me emotional, but the team spent the weeks before they did this recovery deliberately working through their grief. They wanted to get it out and process as much of it as they could because they wanted to know that when they finally went into the water, they were going to be technicians and not still mourning their friends because they felt like down there grief could get them killed. On March 24th, the deep team slipped under the ice at Plura and started their traverse with camera operators filming alongside them. That footage would later become a documentary called Diving Into the Unknown. I highly recommend it if you can watch it. I think I watched it on Tubi. It's the reason that we actually

• 29:42Kaelyn Moore?

  know a lot about how this recovery went. They reached Uzumaki's body first and they found that his body was still suspended down there in the water. And then about 65 feet further on, they came upon Huatranen, still wedged exactly where Gronkfest had been forced to leave him seven weeks before. They cut away his tangled equipment and worked his body free from the restriction that had trapped it. And then Gronkfest took hold of a scooter and began the long haul trip up and out towing his friend towards the surface. Pakarinen followed behind to help guide the body through the tightest passages. And the next day, they went back down and they recovered Uzumaki with another

• 30:22Kaelyn Moore?

  diver, Yanni Santala, joining for that second dive. Both men were finally brought up through Steinugelflogget. Gronkfest had brought body bags from his fire station and they placed the two Yaris inside of them. All told, the operation had taken 101 hours of dive time. And then when they were in the cave, the team stood together and they held a moment of silence. Ultimately, they did have to notify the police, even though what they had done was technically illegal. They had done the recovery and they wanted the police to be aware. But in the end, there were no serious legal consequences for this group and the two men did make it home. It's kind of a bittersweet ending to that story. And

• 31:06Kaelyn Moore?

  honestly, the Maldives story has a bittersweet ending as well. On May 30th, Monica Maltifakone and her daughter Georgia were laid to rest together in a church in Genoa. And afterwards, some of Monica's students from the University of Genoa reportedly gathered to hold a kind of memorial in the water. A collective underwater prayer that they held at the Christ of the Abyss, which is a bronze statue that stands submerged in the bay near Portofino, the Italian coast where she taught. And as of this recording, the story of Divana Khandu is not over. Two separate criminal investigations remain open, one in Rome and one in the Maldives. Toxicology results and a full expert report have been ordered by the court with a deadline

• 31:48Kaelyn Moore?

  running to roughly late August 2026. So right around now. The GoPro cameras and the dive computers recovered from inside the cave, the evidence that was most likely to show what really happened in those final minutes is still being reviewed. Rome prosecutors have filed an international request to get them. The unnamed student who stood on the boat that morning and gave her testimony, we still don't know who she is and we don't know exactly why she didn't dive that day. It is a tragic story. It's very sad. But I actually did want to bring up before we go, something that I found while I was researching this episode. And that kind of brings me to a segment that I haven't really done in a while. It's called One Curious Thing. So in today's One Curious Thing, I want to tell

• 32:32Kaelyn Moore?

  you about the other cave disaster that happened right around the same time as the Maldives disaster, except this one was really not covered at all. But this story features a bunch of gold miners in a cave in Laos. So in May of 2026, the same month that the Maldives disaster happened, a group of gold miners walked into an unmapped cave in central Laos. They were artisanal prospectors and part of this surge that's been happening in small scale mining driven by record gold prices. Now, the cave that they were in was hours from the nearest city on muddy monsoon season roads. It was unreinforced and it was unmapped, which is a horrible combination for a cave. And then, when the gold miners

• 33:14Kaelyn Moore?

  went in, it rained. A flash flood ended up sealing the entrance of the cave. One man did manage to escape and raise the alarm that the rest were trapped more than 800 feet inside of this cave, down a 45 degree slope and water that was so dark and gritty that 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 Posse, who is a Finnish cave diver. What is it with the Finnish and diving? They're so good at it. And also Kenkard Bonkawang, who is a Thai rescue commander. Both had been part of the operation that pulled those 12 boys and their soccer coach

• 33:54Kaelyn Moore?

  out of the Tom Lung Cave alive. On May 27th, Posse and another diver found five of the miners still alive, huddled on a rock ledge more than 250 meters inside of the cave. Their headlamps were still on, but they hadn't eaten in days. The rescuers said that they grabbed their hands and started crying when they saw them. And Posse told them, there are people here to help you now. The important thing is that you're alive. Don't cry. But getting them out was going to be a whole other problem. The team tried pumping the water out of the cave, but the conditions inside were just deteriorating. And on May 29th, Posse did what he called his last option, and that is a trust me dive. The term means

• 34:36Kaelyn Moore?

  exactly what it sounds like. You take a person who has never dived before in their entire 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 made it out alive and the next day, the water actually dropped enough that the remaining four crawled out on their own. All five of the men that were found inside of that cave were rescued. However, the group did tell rescuers that there were two more miners unaccounted for, somewhere deeper inside of that cave system. The search was suspended in early June after an earthquake triggered a rock fall that blocked the entrance for good and the cave became too unstable to enter. Posse told reporters that he believed the two were still inside the cave, but most

• 35:21Kaelyn Moore?

  likely not alive. And, you know, this episode really showed me that even if you're an expert diver, or even if you've worked in the same mine your entire career, you never know when disaster can strike. And sometimes it happens with no warning. So I guess the best thing you can do in these situations, if you do feel so called as to go cave diving or cave exploring, is to just be as prepared as humanly possible. But obviously, you know, disaster can still strike and no matter how prepared you are, you might still be at risk. And that actually reminds me that as I was doing this episode, I thought it might be interesting to one day do another cave diving episode, but have some diving experts on so that we can all understand a little better the mechanics of these kinds of disasters. Let me know if

• 36:05Kaelyn Moore?

  that is something you'd be interested. Wherever you listen, I'm always reading your comments. And I will meet you here next week with our last installment of Dark Summer. It's going to be a really fun collab episode that I'm very excited to share with you. I will see you all here then. And until next time, stay curious.

• 36:28Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Red Rome Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jordanigan, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out heartsstartspounding.com.