Overview
- Kowallis’s new blog post details the final rescue hours for 26-year-old John Jones, whose 2009 entrapment in Utah’s Nutty Putty Cave ended in death.
- Jones was wedged upside down in the cave’s tight “birth canal,” unable to change position due to the passage’s extreme narrowness.
- Rescuers considered widening the tunnel with a jackhammer despite expected severe lacerations and multiple fractures, described as the only remaining chance.
- Chiseling progress led Kowallis to estimate a three- to seven-day extraction, a timeframe rescuers did not have as Jones’s condition deteriorated.
- He was pronounced dead at about 11:52 p.m. from cardiac arrest and suffocation, leaving a pregnant wife, Emily, a daughter named Lizzie, and a son later named in his honor.