London, November 29: A Narrow crevice in a Utah cave will become a cave explorer’s final resting place after authorities decided to permanently seal the cavern and not recover his body.
Local officials said on Friday it would be too dangerous to pursue efforts to recover the body of John Jones, who was pronounced dead shortly before midnight on Wednesday, about 28 hours after getting stuck at the Nutty Putty caves, about 100km south of Salt Lake City.
“The body will stay inside and the cave access will be permanently sealed,” Utah County sheriff’s department spokesman Spencer Cannon said.
“Continuing the rescue operations is too dangerous and too difficult.”
He said cave access will be sealed within the next week or two. A statement on the cavern’s website said all caving there is prohibited due to the tragic incident.
Nearly 100 rescuers had worked frantically around the clock to try to free Mr Jones, who was trapped 46 metres underground and 213 metres from the entrance of the cave.
The medical student, married with a daughter and another child on the way, was stuck upside down in a vertical shaft known as Bob’s Push that’s about 45cm wide and 25cm high.
The decision to make the cave Jones’s tomb came “with assurances to the family that the cave would be closed and that his body would never be disturbed”, cave management said on the Nutty Putty website.
A memorial was planned for Saturday in Stansbury Park. The caver’s family invited emergency rescue personnel and volunteers to attend the service and a dinner afterward “so that they can meet with the family and personally express their thanks”.
In the past 10 years, four other people had to be rescued from the Nutty Putty Cave, but none of them had died there, Mr Cannon said.
By 2005, the well-known cave, which was never fully mapped, was receiving nearly 5000 visitors a year.
—Agencies