The US Coast Guard has confirmed that the crew of the Titan submersible died after a catastrophic event. A remotely operated vehicle from Horizon Arctic discovered the tail cone of the sub approximately 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic. “The debris is consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” said R Adm John Mauger, the first coast guard district commander.
Mauger noted that officials were unsure of when the “catastrophic implosion” took place. “We know that as we’ve been prosecuting this search over the course of the last 72 hours. Beyond that, we’ve had sonar buoys in the water nearly continuously and have not detected any catastrophic events when those buoys have been in the water,” said Mauger.
Families of the five crew members on board have been notified by the US Coast Guard, Mauger confirmed during a press conference. He added that he hoped the discovery provided some solace to families of crew members onboard during a difficult time.
Five different pieces of debris signaled to experts that they had discovered the remains of the Titan sub. Paul Hankin, an undersea expert, said that rescuers found the sub’s nose cone and the total pressure chamber.
Search teams are unsure of recovering bodies of crew members aboard the sub. Mauger said: “We’ll continue to work and continue to search the area, but I don’t have an answer for prospects at this time.”
The US Navy has said it detected an “anomaly” that was likely the Titan’s fatal implosion, soon after the submersible went missing. The navy analysed its acoustic data after the Titan was first reported lost. It found a sound “consistent with an implosion or explosion”.
Film director James Cameron said he knew the submersible was lost from the start of the four-day search, after his sources in the deep-sea exploration industry reported a “loud bang”. “We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost. A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded,” Cameron told the Reuters news agency.
OceanGate, the company that operated the submersible, released a statement confirming that the five passengers of the Titan have been “sadly 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,” read the statement in part.
The breakthrough in finding some of the remains of the Titan came from the deployment of deep-ocean ROVs for the first time on the fifth day of the search after their arrival by sea. A vehicle from the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic was the first to reach the seabed on Thursday morning, the Coast Guard said, joined later by another from the French ship L’Atalante.
The safety record of OceanGate, and the ability of the Titan sub to withstand massive pressure at depths of more than 12,000ft, had been called into question in recent days, with industry experts and former passengers expressing concerns.
James Cameron said he was sceptical when he heard OceanGate was making a deep-sea submersible with a composite carbon fibre and titanium hull. “I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face,” Cameron told Reuters.
