The US Navy detected on Sunday the sound of an underwater implosion that was probably that of the Titan submersible, service officials confirmed to various US media on Thursday.
According to the Navy, the information was immediately shared with the authorities in charge of the rescue mission, who decided to continue the search to try to save the lives of the five crew members, collects The Washington Post.
The remains found on Thursday raised fears for the worst and shortly after the company responsible for the expedition to the remains of the Titanic, OceanGate, confirmed the suspicions. None of the five crew members aboard the submersible, the Titan, have managed to survive what authorities have described as a “catastrophic implosion” after a loss of pressure, almost completely ruling out the possibility of recovering the bodies.
“Our hearts go out to these five souls and each member of their families during this tragic time. We are sorry for the loss of life and the joy they brought to everyone they knew,” OceanGate said in a statement. “This is a very sad time for the entire exploring community and for every single family member of those lost at sea.”
John Mauger, the US Coast Guard spokesman and rear admiral, confirmed in a subsequent press briefing that a drone found the Titan’s tail cone about 1,500 feet from the Titanic’s bow. “The wreckage is consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” he said. “The submersible likely imploded and there were no survivors. Upon this determination, we immediately notified the families on behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire Unified Command. I offer my deepest condolences to the families,” he said.
It is the tragic end of a massive search operation that kept his relatives and half the world in suspense due to the complexity of the rescue, carried out some 700 kilometers from the coast of Newfoundland, in Canada, from where the expedition initially departed. On Tuesday and Wednesday “sounds” were detected in the depths of the Atlantic that left the door open to a rescue, knocks that the Coast Guard has now ruled out as having anything to do with the submersible.
The 96-hour oxygen reserves the ship was equipped with run out Thursday morning, according to authorities’ calculations, around the time the Coast Guard reported finding a “debris field” in the vicinity of the remains of the Titanic that could mean the end of the search. According to David Mearns, a diving expert quoted by the BBC, the wreckage included “the landing frame and rear deck” of the ship. Now it has been confirmed that there are five pieces found of the artifact of just over 6.5 meters in diameter.
The deceased are Stockton Rush, the pilot and also the CEO of the company that organized the expedition; a British businessman with a long record of adventures, Hamish Harding; two Pakistanis, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, father and son, members of one of the richest families in the country; and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, one of the leading experts on the Titanic, a catastrophe that left 1,514 dead in April 1912. The youngest is Suleman Dawood, 19, a fan of science fiction and volleyball who was studying at the University from Strathclyde to Glasgow, Scotland.
Up to the place of the search, 10 boats had moved, in a massive rescue deployment with several countries involved, including the United States, Canada, France, Norway and the United Kingdom. In addition, three US Army C-130 planes had joined the rescue efforts, scouting an area described by authorities as “twice the size of Connecticut.” Until now, an area of ??more than 26,000 square kilometers had been combed, the equivalent of the provinces of Córdoba and Granada combined.
In the air, the question of who will face the cost of such a rescue operation, which will surely reach several million dollars. With multiple countries involved, it’s hard to know if it will ultimately fall into each country’s public purse, which could fuel further criticism of the nature of the expedition.
Each one of the members of the adventure had to pay 250,000 dollars to descend to almost 4,000 meters deep and be able to contemplate the wreck of the Titanic, with the well-known risk that the operation implied and the complaints of lack of homologation of the device that the company decided ignore.
Two of the crew had already made the same trip and were willing to repeat it despite the extreme conditions that the adventure entails, stuck in a titanium and carbon cylinder without seats and a single window about 50 centimeters in diameter. In principle it was all they needed for a tour of 10 hours in total, between the descent, the exploration of the remains of the Titanic, and the ascent to the surface. But something went wrong this time and they lost their lives.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
