Rescuing the five people alive who were traveling aboard the OceanGate submersible with the intention of seeing the remains of the Titanic seems an impossible mission. There is no communication with the small ship, the search area is large and it is about 3,800 meters deep. However, there is hope. This is stated by Pere Forès, founder and director of the Catalan civil submarine company ICTINEU Submarins and chief pilot of the Ictineu 3, with the capacity to reach depths of up to 1,200 metres.
“If we go by the statistics, the chances of survival are not remote,” says the engineer, who is currently writing a book on the history of civilian submarines in the world. The last fatal accident of one of these devices, he says, occurred in 1980. “In the last seventy years there has not been a crushed submarine,” he says.
There are success stories. In 2005, a Russian civilian submarine managed to surface after being trapped by nets in the depths of the ocean and spending up to 76 hours incommunicado. Its seven crew members saved their lives. In 1973, the two crew members of the Pisces III were rescued safely after a 76-hour mission in the Celtic Sea.
Forés explains that “normally a submarine with these characteristics can surface even without electricity.” There are several options. They could do it autonomously by throwing some blocks of lead to raise the ship or by injecting air into some tanks (although this possibility would not work for the OceanGate due to the depth at which it is located). “There is always a rescue plan,” says Forès. The support ship has a pinwheel with a steel cable that could be attached to the submersible to make it rise, something that could also be done with a robot.
But the first thing is to locate or recover contact with the OceanGate, something that has not been achieved so far. With so few clues, now only hypotheses can be made about what happened. “The submarine may have had an electrical failure or is out of the area where it can be heard. Underwater communications are complicated,” says Forès. Another possibility would be that the submarine had landed on the Titanic and had suffered some failure or break in its antenna, making communication impossible.
In the event that it was a communication problem and not the operation of the machine, Forès explains that the order is to go up to the surface after 30 minutes of being incommunicado with the outside world. “They may have made it to the surface but have been swept away by the current and are some distance away,” he speculates.
Another possibility could be that they had been trapped in an area that made communication impossible, such as “a wall from the Titanic, which are very high,” says the expert. Or that a network made their movements impossible. In that case, it would be necessary for another underwater vehicle to come to the rescue. “There is oxygen for 96 hours of stress,” recalls Forès hopefully.
