An undated photo shows the tourist submersible belonging to OceanGate beginning its descent in the sea. The U.S. Coast Guard continues a search and rescue operation in Boston after a tourist submarine en route to the wreck of the Titanic went missing off Canada’s southeastern coast.
Ocean Gate | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
race against time to find lost submersible En route to the site of the wreck of the Titanic, a new phase of desperation entered Thursday morning as the tiny ship’s possible final hours of oxygen were ticking down.
Rescuers have herded more boats to where they went missing, hoping the underwater sounds they detected for a second day in a row could help narrow their search in an urgent international mission. But when the ship, called the Titan, set sail around 6am on Sunday, the crew had only four days’ supply of oxygen.
Even those who express optimism warn that many hurdles remain: from pinpointing the ship’s location, to reaching it with rescue equipment, to bringing it to the surface — assuming it’s still intact. And all of this has to happen before the passengers’ oxygen supply is depleted.
The entire area being searched is twice the size of Connecticut, in water depths of 13,200 feet (4,020 meters).Captain Jamie Frederick of the 1st Coastguard District said authorities still had hope of saving five passengers on board.
“It’s a search and rescue mission, 100 percent,” he said on Wednesday.
The North Atlantic region where Titan disappeared on Sunday is also prone to fog and stormy weather, making it an extremely challenging environment for search and rescue missions, said oceanographer Donald Murphy, who is chief scientist for the Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol.
Meanwhile, newly discovered allegations suggest that IMPORTANT WARNING REGARDING SHIP SAFETY During the development of the submersible.
While the detected sounds offer an opportunity to narrow the search, their exact location and origin have yet to be determined, Frederick said.
“Frankly, we don’t know what they are,” he said.
Retired Navy Capt. Carl Hartsfield, now director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, said the sounds had been described as “thumping,” but warned that searchers “have to put the whole picture together, they have to eliminate Potential man-made source other than Titan.”
Some experts were encouraged by the report because submarine crews who could not communicate with the surface were taught to knock on the submersible’s hull so it could be detected by sonar.
The U.S. Navy said in a statement Wednesday that it was fielding a specialized salvage system capable of hoisting “large, cumbersome subsea objects such as aircraft or small boats.”
Titan weighed 20,000 pounds (9,071 kilograms). The US Navy’s Flyaway deep sea salvage system is designed to lift up to 60,000 pounds (27,216 kilograms), the US Navy said on its website.
Missing on board was navigator Stockton Rush, CEO of the company that led the expedition. His passengers were a British adventurer, two members of a Pakistani business family and a Titanic expert. OceanGate Expeditions oversaw the mission.
authorities The 22-foot (6.7-meter) carbon-fiber boat was reportedly overdue on Sunday nightthe search began in waters about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s.
Officials said the ship had a 96-hour supply of oxygen, allowing them to meet a Thursday morning deadline to find and salvage Titan.
Submarine search and rescue expert Frank Owen said the estimated oxygen supply was a useful “target” for searchers but was based on “nominal consumption”. Divers on the Titan might advise passengers to “do whatever it takes to lower your metabolic rate so you can actually prolong it,” Owen said.
At least 46 people have successfully traveled to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022 in OceanGate’s submersibles, according to letters filed by the company with the U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, which oversees the Titanic’s sinking .
One of the company’s first customers depicts a dive he made to the site Two years ago as “Operation Kamikaze”.
“Imagine a few meters of metal pipe and a metal plate as the floor. You can’t stand, you can’t kneel. Everyone sits next to or on top of each other,” said retired businessman Arthur Leuber. Loibl) said adventurers from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
On June 20, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick gave an update on the search for five people on board a missing submersible about 900 miles off Cape Cod.
Scott Eisen | Getty Images
During the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to save energy and the only illumination came from glow sticks, he said.
The dive was repeatedly postponed to address battery and counterweight issues. The trip takes 10.5 hours in total.
OceanGate has been criticized for using simple commercial video game controllers to manipulate Titan. But the company says many of the ship’s components are readily available because they have proven to be reliable.
“It’s suitable for a 16-year-old to throw around,” and it’s “super durable,” Rush told CBC in an interview last year when he demonstrated it by throwing the controller around the Titan’s tiny cabin. He said there were several spare parts on board “just in case”.
The submersible has seven back-up systems for returning to the surface, including sandbags and dropped lead pipes, and an inflatable balloon.
The temperature was just above freezing and the ships were too deep for human divers to reach, said Jeff Carson, professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University. The best chance of reaching the submersible may be with a teleoperated robot on a fiber-optic cable, he said.
“I’m sure it’s scary out there,” Carson said. “It’s like being in a snow cave, where hypothermia is a real danger.”
An undated photo shows the tourist submersible belonging to OceanGate beginning its descent in the sea. The U.S. Coast Guard continues a search and rescue operation in Boston after a tourist submarine en route to the wreck of the Titanic went missing off Canada’s southeastern coast.
Ocean Gate | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
OceanGate has been warned that the way the experimental ship was developed could pose catastrophic safety concerns, the documents show.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of maritime operations, said in a 2018 lawsuit that the company’s inadequate testing and certification would “expose passengers to potentially extreme danger in experimental submersibles.”
The company insists that Lochridge “was not an engineer and was not hired or required to provide engineering services on Titan.” The company also said the vessel under development was a prototype, not the now-missing Titan.
The Ocean Technology Association, which describes itself as a “professional body of marine engineers, technologists, policymakers and educators,” also expressed concern in a letter to OceanGate CEO Rush that year. To protect passengers, it is vital that the company submits its prototype to tests supervised by third-party experts before launch, the association said. The New York Times first reported the documents.
Missing passengers on the Titan were British adventurer Hamish Harding; Pakistani national Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, whose eponymous company invests across the country; and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
Retired Vice Admiral Robert Muret, now associate director of the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University, said the disappearance highlights the dangers associated with deep-water operations and recreational exploration of the oceans and space.
“I think some people think that because modern technology is so good, you can do something like this and not have an accident, but that’s not the case,” he said.