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UPDATED BELOW. As I’m writing this, the oxygen level in the submersible Titan is dwindling, leaving its occupants with a just a few hours of O2. The crew of five men started out on Sunday with dreams of seeing the most famous shipwreck in the world: the HMS Titanic. Now they’re missing, left in a small vessel with just a few hours of breathable air remaining. In fact, they may be dead at the time this post publishes.
One sign of hope for rescue of the Titan crew has been a banging sound that a Canadian search plane detected in the target area on Tuesday evening. Coming at 30-minute intervals, the noises have also been occurring throughout Wednesday. Capt. Jamie Frederick of the US Coast Guard said, “We have to have hope.” However, he added that the analyses from remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have been “inclusive.”
Carl Hartsfield of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said at a press conference on Wednesday that sound is “very much complex in the ocean.” But Jeff Eggers, a retired Navy commander experienced in piloting submersibles added:
There’s lots of things in the ocean that will make noise and be heard on a sonobuoy, but there are few things that will sound like regular banging on metal.
So the watch continues, not only among members of the ocean-going community but civilians around the world. Will the five passengers aboard the Titan survive?
It didn’t take long for questions to come out about the construction of the Titan, as well as the business practices of OceanGate, which owns the submersible and charges $250K for a dive and a peek at the wreck of the HMS Titanic.
For example, legendary submariner Don Walsh appeared with Ashley Banfield on NewsNation, expressing criticism of the submersible’s construction. The name of Don Walsh may not be recognizable, but he is a former Navy submariner who, along with engineer Jacques Piccard, reached the deepest part of the ocean — the Marianas Trench — in 1960. In short, the man knows submersibles.
But Walsh is no fan of OceanGate, or of the Titan. In fact, he was a signatory to a letter sent to CEO Stockton Rush in 2018 warning of potential “catastrophic” problems with the Titan’s design. Ironically, Rush is aboard the possibly doomed craft.
More has emerged about Stockton Rush and his business dreams which translated into practices that may have doomed the Titan. In a 2020 interview with Teledyne Marine, Rush explained how he didn’t want to hire the usual “ex-military submariners … a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys.” Instead:
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational. So we’ve really tried to get, um, very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new…We can train people to do that, we can train people to pilot the sub, we use a game controller so anyone can drive the sub.”
A game controller?
Yikes.
The CEO of OceanGate, which is operating the missing Titanic tourist submarine, explains that the company didn’t want to hire any experienced “50 year old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational.” pic.twitter.com/kxXkhBn7oL
— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) June 21, 2023
You knew this was going to happen. Media of all sorts are serving up their hot takes on the Titan disappearance. Some of the voices raise pertinent issues, while others are more political.
NBC News, for example, pointed out how last week a fishing boat with Libyan refugees sank in waters off Greece, leaving hundreds dead. Why is everyone paying attention to the plight of these rich people? asked NBC:
As rescuers raced to find a handful of wealthy people and explorers who vanished after launching a mission to survey the Titanic, another disaster at sea that’s feared to have left hundreds of people dead has been swept from the spotlight.
That inspired an indignant Twitter user to post this:
Some lives are valued more than others. The contrast between the rescue efforts for 600+ people seeking safety vs. 5 billionaires on a tourist trip is sickening. Shame on everyone!#submarinemissing #shipwreck #Greece #titanicsubmarine #TitanicRescue #Titan #Submersible pic.twitter.com/vJ96KVWiA5
— Qudrat Ullah (@Qudrat079) June 21, 2023
Meanwhile, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire had the opposite take:
Why is social media rooting against billionaire tourists?
What do you have against them?
[For] the sake of exploration and discovery. I respect that…the world needs people like that. And don’t tell that, oh it’s not exploration it’s just rich people on vacation…stop that, they are going to a place where almost no other human has been, they are going to the bottom of the freaking ocean, you idiot.
Walsh sounds a bit like Fred Hagen, who was on a previous Titan dive to the Titanic. Hagen, who described the Titan as a “state of the art vehicle,” has made the rounds on cable news protesting that the passengers are “not tourists.” Instead, “these are mission specialists who are passionate about science.”
No, they’re not, except for Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet who is onboard. One passenger is a 19-year-old kid who accompanied his father — hardly a highly trained “mission specialist.”
Rather, these are billionaires who took an expensive risk, and probably lost their lives as a result.
That’s a hard, but necessary question.
Leland Vittert of NewsNation raised this issue on Wednesday night, pointing out that no company would insure any of the Titan’s passengers. The trip was too dangerous. So now, with a number of planes and ships sent to the possible site of the submersible in a rescue attempt, an enormous cost has racked up. Who will pay for it?
However harsh the question of “should we spend money and resources to rescue these people?” may sound, it’s not unique.
For example, over the past 30 years an average of 6.2 people have died each year on Mt. Everest. The numbers of dead, in fact, keep growing as more people attempt the summit. Nor can the dead be removed; over 200 bodies remain on the mountain.
There’s also the case of David Sharp, an Englishman who died on Everest in 2006 after other climbers failed to rescue him as he was dying in the “Death Zone.” Controversy erupted.
But as one mountaineering writer pointed out:
It is well established that an immobile climber in the so-called “Death Zone” above 26,000 feet cannot be rescued, no matter what resources are put against the task.
Should the same criteria be applied to imperiled adventurers who dive to the depths of the oceans as those who attempt to reach the roof of the world? If the passengers of the Titan emerge from the vessel alive, who should be financially responsible for the cost? And if the worst happens, and they succumb, who should be responsible for the retrieval of the bodies?
As extreme adventure tourism grows among the very wealthy, the industry will need to answer its critics, and take greater responsibility when things go haywire.
UPDATE: On Thursday morning the US Coast Guard reported a debris field within the search area.
A debris field was discovered within the search area by an ROV near the Titanic. Experts within the unified command are evaluating the information. 1/2
— USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 22, 2023
UPDATE 2: OceanGate has announced in a statement that the crew is lost:
We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.
UPDATE 3: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Navy heard the implosion as it happened days ago. Meanwhile other ships and planes embarked upon a futile search.
Breaking: A top secret U.S. Navy detection system designed to spot enemy submarines first heard the Titan submersible implosion days ago https://t.co/oEpLq02Cxh
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) June 22, 2023
Featured image: violin of Titanic musician Wallace Hartley; on display at Titanic Belfast Museum, Northern Ireland. Personal image.
Drew458 says: While I will hope for a miracle, my guess is that they are dead, that the submersible imploded just 90 minutes into the dive when communication was lost. From what I’ve read the design of this thing was more than questionable, it was negligent. Quality issues with the carbon fiber hull material, the use of carbon fiber itself, no emergency buoyancy system, not much extra air, not enough redundancy in the design, not enough testing, etc, right down to firing the engineer who forced management to hear his concerns. All of these are what 50 year old white guys with decades of experience would bring to the table. Innovate all you want, you can’t beat physics.
And speaking of other sinkings of lesser importance, a few days before the dilapidated fishing boat full of illegal immigrants foundered off the Greek coast, a wooden ship carrying a wedding party of over 300 sank in Nigeria, drowning everyone in the middle of the night. At least 106 died. This was barely a blip in the news.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/14/africa/river-niger-boat-capsize-intl/index.html
GWB says: I don’t know that the use of carbon fiber, itself, was a fatal flaw. It’s been used to replace metal in a lot of high-strength applications. The discerned flaws in it, though… oh yeah.
I have been informed it did have an emergency buoyancy system. At least some of the ballast is external and designed to dissolve after 24 hours. Of course, if they got caught on something (as it did once before) now having upward forces wedging you further against whatever has you snagged could be a problem.
You would think 4 days of air for a 16 hour trip (based on what I’ve read) would be sufficient margin. But I think it relies on self-rescue – all those backup/emergency parts working. It isn’t enough margin for something else breaking and someone has to generate a rescue mission.
Not enough testing? Maybe. They certainly didn’t answer the engineer’s questions by saying “We’ve tested that to our specifications” or “Sure, let’s do more testing.” (Firing someone is not how you normally answer the question of “We don’t have enough test data to make this an informed risk.”)
GWB says: Another post lost to WordPress’ stupid filters, or something.
Maureen says: There is so much pressure on the public purse these days, some justified, a lot for nonsense projects, that dealing with super rich idiots should be off the table. Canada’s military is involved and yet we sent troops on a peacekeeping mission WITHOUT HELMUTS. WTF?
NTSOG says: Aside from bringing out the critics I wonder how long before the lawyers are brought out by family members of those who died? The whole sad exercise reads like an opportunity for a ‘lawyers’ picnic’ – or am I just being cynical?
Kim Hirsch says: Cynical? No, not at all. The US is quite a litigious nation, especially for those with deep pockets who can afford top end lawyers. In fact, I saw an interview with a maritime attorney who said that he would be checking out the waivers the passengers signed for any type of loophole.
This will be a rich hunting ground for maritime attorneys who are looking to make hay on this tragedy. Or perhaps I’m the one being cynical?
GWB says: And waivers aren’t bullet-proof, either. Some have been tossed out because the company didn’t provide adequate information to analyze the risk correctly. Basically it’s a form of fraud. Given what we think we know, it’s not cynical in the least.
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