The Two Trapped Below

Side story by:
Jose "Primo" Bermudez

Before getting into the final sump, we had to go through a difficult crawl, approximately eighteen feet long; the ceiling was very low, around sixteen inches at the most, so we had to go down on our bellies, without pack-sacks, and crawl over loose sand and pebbles. The solid limestone walls were about two feet apart.

Once past this crawl, the ceiling raises to about fifteen feet and the passage widens a little until you hit the eighty degree inclined forty to forty-five foot long pit that ends at the sump. Once we got to it, my cousin Randall and I dedicated ourselves to rigging the pit, while Ricardo and Gustavo checked things out.

At a certain moment, about ten minutes after entering, Ricardo had to go back to the crawl to bring some caving stuff left inside the sacks. He was almost there when, all of a sudden, he heard Carlos' voice. (Carlos had remained alone at room number five). He started shouting to us that something wrong (?) was happening... and that we should recover the rope and all of the equipment, and leave the pit. Then Gustavo took José Alfaro, and started to pass the crawl, when he figured something was really wrong, and he shouted to us, "guys, hurry, leave the rope, and get the hell out of here!" We heard him, but we took a short time to back the end of the rope. We didn't believe there was such an emergency. But as precious seconds went by, we started to hear and feel the rumble and noises Carlos was trying to tell us about.

When we got finished, the noises and rumbles and the trembling were frightening, we were terrified, almost like if it were a magnitude eight earthquake. The two of us threw the rope up as high as possible, over a ledge and then we ran for our lives. I was leading , but the moment I put my hands to the ground to start crawling they got covered by muddy water. "We still have enough time to go across," I said to myself, but when I was about halfway thru, I suddenly felt on my helmet a violent , strong blow, that swept us both away, almost to the edge of the pit; it was something like being hit by a powerful explosion, that's all I can recall. Somehow, we managed to get a hold on something, and we quickly stood up and climbed on top of some large rocks, and then moved up along the side-walls, so that the awesome flash flood wouldn't drag us into the sump, a sure death, whether it were from getting crushed against the solid walls or just simply drowning. "Oh my God, we're trapped! What on earth are we going to do, Randall? What? What?!"

The first thing we did was search for the highest accessible place where we could have some chance to survive, since we soon realized that the final sump would at some moment be unable to take in all that water, and the level would start rising ( as it really happened). We soon found one, too narrow for both of us to fit in, and fully covered with very wet mud. That detail pointed out to me right away, that the flood waters had recently been there, and thus I envisioned the moment we would be face to face with the invading waters. Just then, I thought that if we were later on to be sucked into the sump. Our bodies would hardly ever be found, so I brought out the idea of tying