A deep-sea submersible exploring the century-old wreckage of the Titanic was found in pieces due to a “catastrophic implosion,” killing the five people aboard the vessel, the US Coast Guard said, ending a five-day search for the vessel on June 22.
‘The Titan’ submersible, operated by the US-based OceanGate Expeditions, had been missing since it lost contact with the surface support ship on June 18, about 1 hour 45 minutes into what was supposed to be a two-hour dive to explore the Titanic’s wreckage.
On June 22, a robotic diving vehicle, deployed from a Canadian ship, discovered a debris field of The Titan on the seabed, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic’s wreckage. The Titan’s debris was found about 4 km beneath the surface level, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, the US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said. “The debris field here is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle,” Mauger said.
The Titan disintegrated into five major fragments, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, the Coast Guard officials said. However, the officials did not mention sighting human remains along with the debris.
Even before the US Coast Guard’s press conference, The Titan’s operator OceanGate Expeditions said that there were no survivors amongst the five passengers aboard the vessel. Notably, the company’s founder and CEO Stockton Rush was also onboard the submersible, piloting the vessel.
The other four passengers on the vessel included British billionaire Hamish Harding, French oceanographer and expert on the Titanic Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman.
The company said, “These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans.” It added, “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time”
James Cameron on The Titan’s Implosion
‘Titanic’ movie director James Cameron reacted to the demise of the five people onboard the vessel. He said, in an interview, “Many people in the (deep-submergence engineering) community were very concerned about this sub, and a number of you know of the top players in the community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and needed to be certified and so on.”
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night. And many people died as a result,” he said.
He added, “And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site, with all the diving that’s going on all around the world. I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”
Cameron also addressed the concerns voiced by experts about the safety of the 21-foot Titan.
“As a submersible designer myself, I designed and built us up to go to the deepest place in the ocean, three times deeper than Titanic. So I understand the engineering problems associated with building this type of vehicle and all the safety protocols that you have to go through. And I think (it) is absolutely critical to really get the take-home message from our effort … (that) deep submergence diving is a mature art. From the early ’60s, where there were a few accidents, nobody was killed in the deep submergence until now. (That’s) more time than between Kitty Hawk and the flight of the first 747,” he said.
Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 after hitting an iceberg, killing about 1,500 passengers and crew. The wreckage was found in 1985 and inspired diving enthusiast Cameron to make Titanic.
[with inputs from ANI]
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