Injured Kiwi caver rescued after three days underground

A New Zealand cave explorer injured in a rock slide was carried to safety today after a three-day rescue, and said he had realised he would die if his friends could not get him to the surface.

Michael Brewer, 47, broke his pelvis and suffered head injuries on Saturday in the Middle Earth cave system on New Zealand’s South Island.

His climbing partners said they were almost two miles from the cave’s entrance and 1,300 feet underground when falling rocks caught Brewer.

“The hardest thing was realising I was going to die unless my friends could help get me out of there,” he said from his Nelson Hospital bed today.

“One of the problems was that I know the (cave) system so well that I could lie there and visualise every single damn squeeze (narrow area) and awkward bit that I had to get through to get out,” he said.

Two of his partners spent six hours climbing out to raise the alarm, while one stayed behind with Brewer. A team of 50 rescuers hauled him back to the surface.

In tight passages, the rescuers had to lie prone and lift Brewer’s stretcher hand-over-hand, said rescue co-ordinator Sergeant Mike Fitzsimmons.

They used hammers and chisels to chip at obstructions, while Brewer used his hands to help guide the stretcher past snags. He sometimes had to be taken off the stretcher and lifted up vertical shafts up to 40 feet high, rescuers said.

Brewer praised his rescuers for being “amazingly tolerant” as he issued directions and instructions from his stretcher as they moved through the dank, cold cave.

He remembered little of the incident that seriously injured him.

A rock had “come from somewhere and whacked me in the back and I’d fallen and whacked my head,” he was told later, Brewer said.

“It’s one of those things where you cross the threshold from being an able-bodied person … able to get through this cave in a couple of hours to a person suddenly being a stretcher case and taking days to get out,” he added.

A caver with 20 years’ experience and a specialist cave rescue doctor, Dr Brewer has been involved in every cave rescue in the Nelson region in recent years.