Rescuers will take a week to bring brain-injured caver to surface

Rescue workers are camping near the entrance to the Riesending cave in Germany where Johann Westhauser is trapped. Photo / AP

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.

Westhauser suffered the traumatic head injury in a rock fall last weekend while exploring the huge Riesending cave complex, the deepest in Germany. In normal conditions, he would be in an intensive care unit.

Instead he is strapped into a special stretcher, wrapped in a sleeping bag and layers of styrofoam to keep him warm. One of the biggest dangers for a man with his injuries is cold, medics say, and the temperature in the cave is 3C.

A doctor travelling with the rescue party is carrying a skull drill: Westhauser is at constant risk of bleeding in the brain, and if the pressure becomes too great, the doctor will have to relieve it by drilling through his skull in an emergency procedure.

So arduous is the journey ahead that different teams of rescuers will work in relay stages to bring the victim to the surface.

Cave rescue is highly specialised, and teams have converged across the Alps from Switzerland, Austria and Italy to help.

The entrance to the cave complex lies more than 1830m up in the Bavarian Alps, and can usually only be reached by a gruelling climb. Now a helicopter is ferrying supplies in.

The Bavarian authorities are refusing to comment on the cost of all this, but German newspapers are already predicting it will be the most expensive rescue operation in German history, and could run to millions of euros.

The rescue
14 rescuers and a doctor.
5km, 7 days to get to the surface.