- Catastrophic implosion: The Titanic-bound submersible that went missing on Sunday with five people on board suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” killing everyone on board, US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said Thursday. A remotely operated vehicle found the tail cone of the Titan about 1,600 feet away from the bow of the shipwreck, he said.
- Who was on board:Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, and Stockton Rush, the CEO of the tour organizer, OceanGate Expeditions, died in the craft.
- About the trip: The submersible was descending to explore the wreckage of the luxury liner, located 900 miles east of Cape Cod and about 13,000 feet below sea level.
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These are serious people with serious curiosity willing to put serious money down to go to these interesting places,” the “Titanic” director told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I don’t want to discourage that. But I think that it’s almost now a lesson.
The takeaway is, make sure if you’re gonna go into a vehicle, whether it’s an aircraft or surface craft or a submersible, that it’s been through certifying agencies.”Some background: Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, which operated the Titan submersible, and who died in the implosion, had spoken about his antipathy to regulations.“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Stockton told journalist David Pogue in an interview last year. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”James Cameron, director of the hit 1997 film “Titanic,” says news of the Titan submersible’s explosion “certainly wasn’t a surprise.”
Cameron, who has made 33 dives to the wreckage himself, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that when he first heard the news of the Titan incident Monday morning, he connected with his small community in the deep submergence group and found out within about a half-hour that the submersible had lost communication and tracking, simultaneously.
“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion,” he told Cooper on Thursday. “A shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is.”
Cameron said he did more digging and got some additional information that seemed to confirm that the submersible had imploded.
“I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday,” Cameron said of
his community group.
He said false-hopes kept getting dangled as search teams looked for the missing passengers over the following days.
“I watched over the ensuing days this whole sort of everybody-running-around-with-their-hair-on-fire search, knowing full well that it was futile, hoping against hope that I was wrong but knowing in my bones that I wasn’t,” Cameron told Cooper.
He expressed condolences for the families of the passengers.
The five passengers on the Titan submersible that was diving 13,000 feet to view the Titanic on the ocean floor died in a “catastrophic implosion,” authorities said Thursday, bookending an extraordinary five-day international search operation near the site of the world’s most famous shipwreck.The tail cone and other debris were found by a remotely operated vehicle about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, deep in the North Atlantic and about 900 east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, told reporters.
Here’s what we know:- Debris: The remotely operated vehicle found “five different major pieces of debris” from the Titan submersible, according to Paul Hankins, the US Navy’s director of salvage operations and ocean engineering. The debris was “consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” and, in turn, a “catastrophic implosion,” he said. As of now, there does not appear to be a connection between the banging noises picked up by sonar earlier this week and where the debris was found.
- Timing: The US Navy detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion on Sunday and relayed that information to the commanders leading the search effort, a senior official told CNN. But the sound was determined to be “not definitive,” the official said. Mauger, for his part, said rescuers hadsonar buoys in the water for at least the last 72 hours and had “not detected any catastrophic events.” Listening devices set up during the search also did not record any sign of an implosion, Mauger added.
- What comes next: The remotely operated vehicles will remain on the scene and continue to gather information, Mauger said. It will take time to determine a specific timeline of events in the “incredibly complex” case of the Titan’s failure, Mauger said. The Coast Guard official said the agency will eventually have more information about what went wrong and its assessment of the emergency response.
- Response: Mauger applauded the “huge international” and “interagency” search effort. He said teams had the appropriate gear and worked as quickly as possible. The Coast Guard official also thanked experts and agencies for assisting with the search for the Titan submersible.
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Passengers lost in the “catastrophic implosion” of the Titan submersible remembered by loved ones
