An American who helped rescue cave explorer Mark Dickey after he was trapped more than 3,000 feet underground in Turkey is now speaking out about the “grim” situation his friend faced, saying it within the Morca “there are no flat places to walk on”. Cave.
Carl Heitmeyer, who told NBC’s “Today” on Tuesday that he helped communicate between Dickey and rescue teams, said it was “great to finally see him get out, because it was in the first few days of this rescue.” very bad.”
“There are no flat places to walk on, no flat surfaces. A lot of it is vertical, but even the spaces that you go through – what we call, you just break through – it’s still more of a climbing, climbing, climbing down over rocks, sometimes with sloping surfaces,” he continued. “And then sometimes you squirm through crawling, push yourself through belly crawling.”
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“Cave explorers can move around there, but if you put them on a stretcher, it becomes so bulky and stiff that it can’t bend,” Dickey added. “That’s why it becomes so much more complicated when a rescue occurs.”
American mountaineer Mark Dickey was rescued from the Turkish cave more than a week after falling ill
Mark Dickey is a 40-year-old experienced cave explorer who became seriously ill with stomach bleeding on September 2nd. (Mert Gokhan Koc/Dia Images via AP)
Dickey, a 40-year-old veteran speleologist, became seriously ill with stomach bleeding on September 2 more than 3,000 feet below Morca Cave in southern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. Hundreds of people from the climbing community, including cavers and rescue personnel from several countries, gathered to save him.
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Early Tuesday, Turkey’s Speleological Federation released a statement confirming that Dickey was safely above the surface.
“Mark Dickey has emerged from Morca Cave,” the association said in a statement. Dickey was removed from the last exit of the cave at 12:37 a.m. local time.
“He is doing well and is being cared for by rescue workers at the camp above,” the statement said.
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DICKEY SHARES INSPIRING VIDEO MESSAGE FROM TURKISH CAVE
American explorer Mark Dickey (center) is pulled out of Morca Cave near Anamur in southern Turkey early Tuesday, September 12. (AP/AFAD)
An emergency team was able to initially treat Dickey, but he was ultimately too weak to climb out of the cave, so rescuers carried him on a stretcher.
They made several stops at makeshift camps set up along the way before finally reaching the surface early Tuesday.
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Heitmeyer described Dickey as a cave explorer who “went where no man had gone before.”
American explorer Mark Dickey (center) speaks to journalists after being pulled out of the cave on Tuesday. (Mert Gokhan Koc/Dia Images via AP)
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“There are very few places like this left on the surface of the planet where someone hasn’t walked for eons,” Heitmeyer also told NBC about Dickey, adding that he would “bet” that Dickey would, despite this returned to caving after the incident.
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Landon Mion of Fox News and The Associated Press contributed to this report.