This is the time for prayers, mourning, the wake and tributes to the five crew members of the Titan, who went in search of the remains of the Titanic.
The White House and the governments of the United Kingdom, France and Canada remembered these millionaires in their prayers in a (fake) gold boat.
All five of the Titan died chasing a photo on social media. All? It seems not. That Suleman, 19, the son of millionaire Shahzada Dawood, expressed doubts about this adventure. According to his aunt, Suleman, who had just finished his first year at the university, “was very worried and felt bad” thinking about that excursion to the mythical sunken wreck at the bottom of the North Atlantic.
But in the end he gave in because the challenge started around Father’s Day and he wanted to please him after so much insistence.
So it hatched, which is what it was. Filmmaker James Cameron, who has made several dives to the Titanic ship, told the BBC he thought this would end “in an extreme catastrophe” as soon as he learned contact had been lost on Sunday. Cameron described the reports about the 96-hour supply of oxygen available in the contraption, the noises and the blows as a “protracted farce and nightmare”.
“This was preventable, OceanGate (Titan’s company) had been warned and what happened was foreseeable,” he added.
Many of those experts who demanded a great deployment have now taken to attacking a submersible made of patches, with poorly assembled parts and without control. Because it is also time to take its toll, since the remains of the Titan were found on Thursday and it was learned that, on the same Sunday, it imploded and was destroyed.
The bodies of the new Titanic victims are still missing. In addition to the Dawoods, father and son with a passion for science fiction and travel, the other crew members included Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Stockton Rush, the pilot and founding president of OceanGate.
More and more reproach falls on Rush, on the design, the lack of certifications and the zero respect for safety regulations. In a report, he confessed that “security, at some point, is pure waste.” He also claimed that “I have broken some rules to do this.” Faced with complaints about his recklessness (arrogance, according to Cameron), Stockton responded that they were “baseless lies” from other members of the industry who only wanted to prevent him from entering the market.
“Things started to go wrong as soon as we started doing test dives,” said Brian Weed, a Discovery Channel cameraman who tested the Titan in May 2022.
Given its piecemeal construction, experts believe that a minimal defect in the hull could have caused a leak that served as the wick for the catastrophe. “The submersible imploded because the force of the water was too strong,” said Armin Cate, a coast guard at the reserve. “When you crush this tube in the middle it’s like when you crush a Coke can,” he added on NBC.
