Cave tourism remains a big business in spite of recent incident of entrapment

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

At Ohio Caverns, business hasn’t dropped much ever since 12 boys and their soccer coach got ensnared in a flooded Thai cave and had to be saved. However, there has been a considerable growth in questions in terms of safety.

 
Manager Aaron Smith expects that visitors will not discontinue visiting the caves, which are about two hours northeast of Cincinnati.

 
“I think some people’s perception of caves changes when they hear when when people get trapped in caves, or there’s a problem,” he said.

 
For instance, the Buken family from West Chester wasn’t discouraged by the Thailand incident in anyway.

 
“This is beautiful,” Lunda Buken said, “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

 
And many visitors have been questioning about the Ohio Caverns flood, according to Smith. Nevertheless, in the more-than-90 years they’ve been open, they’ve never had flooding problems, he said.

 
“Flooding here is not a problem because we’re not really close to any streambeds or riverbeds,” he said. “The hill that this cave is contained in is all above the valleys around us where all the rivers and streams would be.”

 
Smith said they’ve never had rocks fall, either.

 
“The temperature is always 54 degrees, the humidity is always around 90 percent, you don’t have a raging river through here eroding out things, so it’s very stable,” he said.

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