Personally I think the coach should be commended for keeping all those boys safe and alive in such conditions. He couldn't have known the cave was going to flood, the signs say don't go in in between July and September - they entered in June. Without a strong leader this probably would have been a very different outcome already and they'd be dealing with retrieving corpses.
I actually find comments like yours really grating. Blaming people for situations largely beyond their control is not productive or helpful, especially when ended with inflammatory questioning designed to provoke.
Actually, it was irresponsible to take them on a cave tour this time of year because the rains often start in June, regardless of when the official start of rainy season is called. It's been like that as long as I've lived here, and there have been quite a few cases of cave tourists getting trapped during rainy season. So he did a good job of taking care of them once they were in trouble, but he should have not taken them in there in the first place.
He lives in Thailand so he knows it often rains in June. He entered the cave only one week before the official start of rainy season. He took a rather large group of kids, not adults who could assess the risk themselves and decide whether or not to take the risk. I would say that adds up to being very irresponsible.
I assume it was his decision to take all those children down there, so it was not beyond his control. Did he at least check the weather forecast?
If my comment was designed to provoke, then it was to provoke people to think. We need to be able to think for ourselves sometimes.
I actually find your comment somewhat unhelpful and grating.
It is all very well everyone being a hero and never admitting to any wrong decisions but that is exactly the sort of attitude that leads to these situations and to their repetition. If nobody has done anything wrong, there is nothing to learn.
Your idea of learning from this is to say "What was he thinking?", which in your context is is a rhetorical question. You're not trying to understand the thought process, instead you're making a statement to imply that the leader wasn't thinking about the group's safety when taking them into the cave and is negligent.
This may or may not be true, or could be somewhere in between. But it specifically does not, and actually actively pushes against finding a solution that ensures this never happens again.
By blaming someone for an error instead of the system that allowed, encouraged and enabled them to make that error you end up not solving anything, and the same problems crop up again, and again.
Blaming the system works in urban environments or corporate engineering processes. Vast swathes of the world have no "system" to protect you, except for maybe a sign if sufficiently many people have died from a hazard and somebody cared enough to make one (and overcame pushback about disturbing the environment). Examples of such environments include backcountry travel, rural living (even in developed countries), and most certainly caving.
I actually find comments like yours really grating. Blaming people for situations largely beyond their control is not productive or helpful, especially when ended with inflammatory questioning designed to provoke.