A US Coast Guard member this Tuesday at the Corps’ base in Boston. JOSEPH PREZIOSO (AFP)
Stockton Rush, chief executive officer of OceanGate, was warned in 2018 by about thirty submersible industry officials that the company’s “current experimental approach” could cause problems “ranging from the minor to the catastrophic,” according to The New York Times, which had access to the letter. Rush is one of five passengers on board Titan, the submersible that began its dive to the remains of Titanic at a depth of 4,000 meters in North Atlantic waters on Sunday and whose tracks were lost less than two hours after the submersion. It is not known if OceanGate, which had organized several trips to the seabed and two to the liner’s wreck, responded to the warning signal from the industry, which made no secret of their “unanimous concern” about the ship’s design and certification processes. of it, reports the newspaper.
From Boston, the base of the rescue operations, an international team is fighting against the clock to locate the small 6.5 meter long submarine and rescue its five occupants alive: the then commander American Rush; a Frenchman, a Briton and two Pakistanis – runs out as the hours go by and the air in the ship stale. As of early Tuesday afternoon, there were still 40 hours of “breathable air” left, said Coast Guard First District Captain Jamie Frederick, while warning that the search had yielded “no results so far.” The deadline is Thursday at 6 a.m. (local time, noon in mainland Spain). Canada and France are cooperating with the US in the search.
Carl Schuster, a retired U.S. Navy captain, told The Wall Street Journal that many of the private submersible crews are ex-military officers trained in emergency procedures, including how to drop ballast to get the ship afloat again. Under normal emergency protocols, the crew would attempt to communicate with ships on the surface and would not release ballast until the submarine surfaced. Experts are considering four hypotheses for the event: a fire, a power outage or flood, or that it got caught on something.
Schuster explained that some submersibles have a transmitter buoy. In an emergency, the crew would bring the buoy to the surface and signal the rescuers. The seaman added that the sonar used by the Coast Guard could not detect the submarine when it was on the seabed. If the submarine cannot surface under its own power, “retrieving anything from that depth is a challenge” for rescue teams, who will likely need an unmanned underwater vehicle with highly skilled operators, like the one France sent to overcome the technical complexities of the rescue , which is added to the time frame. The US Army has a bathyscaphe for such a case, but its range is significantly less than the depth at which the Titan would be.
Founded by Rush in 2009, OceanGate is an example of the growing interest in extreme tourism. The Washington-based company owns three submersibles, including the Titan, which have completed more than 200 deep-sea dives, according to its website. OceanGate made two trips to the remains of Titanic in 2021 and 2022. An extreme scientific excursion, as the company describes it, extraordinary and with the allure of making a two and a half hour dive in the wreck of the Titanic Titanic, the ocean liner that sank in 1912 when it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage between Southampton and New York , with more than 2,200 people on board, of whom 1,500 drowned. It was one of the biggest traffic disasters of the 20th century. His remains were found in 1985.
The US Coast Guard reported that the Polar Prince, the mother ship that towed the submersible from the port of St. John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, about 700 kilometers away to the dive site, lost contact with the Titan about an hour and 45 minutes after the dive . The US Coast Guard, a branch of the armed forces, responded by dispatching two C-130 aircraft to the area, about 1,450 kilometers east of Cape Cod (Massachusetts, on the US northeast coast) and about 4,000 meters deep. A third C-130 was scheduled to join the search this Tuesday. The Canadian Coast Guard has mobilized an aircraft and a ship, while France is contributing a ship, the Atalante, equipped with an underwater robot capable of deep exploration. The US Navy can be mobilized if necessary, the spokesman for the White House National Security Council said.
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Rush was the commander of the sub. With previous experience as an airline pilot, he told AP in 2021 when he first dived into the wreck of the Titanic that the trip was a scientific mission to document the slow decay of the wreck. “The ocean is taking them away and we need to document that before it all disappears or becomes unrecognizable,” he said. In another interview with The New York Times last year, the businessman said the high-resolution images obtained during guided tours of the Titanic could benefit researchers. He also defended the safety of the submersible, although, as he stressed, nothing is without risk. “What worries me the most are the things that are preventing me from reaching the surface: ledges, fishing nets, entanglement hazards,” he told CBS News last year, adding that a good pilot can avoid those hazards.
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