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After an urgent race to recover a 22-foot submarine that kept five men on board to see the Titanic, search and rescue teams found outer parts of the Titan near the site of the Titanic wreck Thursday morning. OceanGate, the company that led the mission, said the men on board are dead.
“This is a very sad time for the entire explorer community and for each of the relatives of those lost at sea,” the company wrote.
The debris found on the ocean floor about 500 meters from the bow of the Titanic was “consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” in the submarine, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a news conference. Thursday afternoon. Coast Guard officials said it’s too early to say when the Titan imploded.
The Coast Guard said the families of the five people on board have been notified. Read for live updates on this disaster USA TODAY’s live blog here.
What happens next in the Titan rescue mission?
U.S. Coast Guard officials said remote-controlled vehicles, known as ROVs, would continue to operate on the seafloor around the Titanic and survey the debris field.
“At this point, our thoughts are back with the families and we are making sure they understand what happened as best we can and they are starting to find closure,” an unnamed official said at the news conference.
Mauger said he didn’t know if the Coast Guard would be able to recover the bodies of the five passengers aboard the Titan. “This is an incredibly brutal environment,” he said.
Where’s the submarine?
On Thursday, search and rescue crews discovered a “debris field” near the Titanic, the Coast Guard said. After evaluating the debris, the Coast Guard determined that the debris contained pieces of the Titan, including a landing frame and tailgate from the ship. The debris was discovered after the submarine was expected to run out of oxygen.
“A debris field has been discovered in the search area by an ROV near the Titanic,” the Coast Guard wrote on Twitter.
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A Coast Guard official praised the massive search efforts leading up to Thursday’s findings at the news conference.
“We really had the right equipment on site and worked as quickly as possible to deploy all the capabilities we needed for this search and rescue,” the official said. “It was a huge international multi-agency effort to make this happen.”
This photo from OceanGate Expeditions shows a submarine named Titan used to visit the wreckage of the Titanic. In a race against time on the high seas, a growing international armada of ships and planes searched for the submarine that disappeared in the North Atlantic on Tuesday, June 20, 2023 while delivering five people to the wreckage of the Titanic. (OceanGate Expeditions via AP) ORG XMIT: NYPS209
What happened to the Titan?
On 16 June, the submarine and support ship departed from St. John’s in Newfoundland, Canada. Two days later, the submarine began its dive to see Titanic, which is about 370 miles from Newfoundland and 12,500 feet deep in the North Atlantic. About an hour and 45 minutes into the dive, the Canadian support ship Polar Prince, charged with guarding the submarine, lost all communication with the ship.
OceanGate said it was equipped with a 96-hour supply of oxygen. That would have lasted until Thursday morning. The Coast Guard led the frenetic rescue mission with US and Canadian ships, planes and other equipment. As of Wednesday, search crews were searching a portion of the ocean about twice the size of Connecticut.
Who were the passengers?
The five men who set out to see the Titanic in the submarine included OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French maritime and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and a father and son from a of Pakistan’s most prominent families, Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families at this tragic time,” said OceanGate in a statement Thursday.
hurry, 61, Founded OceanGate in 2009. He also co-founded Ocean Gate Foundation, a non-profit organization “which aims to catalyze emerging marine technology for further discoveries in marine science, history and archaeology,” according to the company’s website. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning last year, Rush said, “What worries me most is things that keep me from surfacing.”
Harding, 58, was president of Action Aviation, a global business aviation sales company. He held three Guinness World Records related to his explorations by air and in the deep ocean. He had also been in space. “Due to Newfoundland’s harshest winter in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only crewed mission to Titanic in 2023,” Harding wrote in a statement. Facebook message announcing that he would be aboard The Titan.
Nargeolet, 73, was Director of Underwater Research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic, Inc. He successfully dived 37 times in a submarine to the site of the Titanic wreck and “saw oversight of the recovery of 5,000 artifacts,” according to EMGroup’s websitewho also says he is “widely regarded as the lead authority on the wreck site.”
Shahzada Dawood, 48, served on the board of directors of the Dawood Foundation, an education nonprofit, according to the World Economic Forum, the board of the SETI Institute, a non-profit research organization, and served as vice-chairman on the board of Pakistan’s Engro Corporation. His son, Suleman Dawood, 19, loved science fiction, solving Rubik’s Cubes and playing volleyball, the New York Times reported.
Shahzada Dawood’s elder sister told NBC news she was “absolutely heartbroken” about the deaths.
“I feel like I got into a really bad movie, with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you were counting down to,” she said. “I personally found it a little hard to think about them.”
What did the sub look like?
The submarine, owned by the Washington-based private company Ocean Gate Inc. , was 22 feet tall and weighed 25,000 pounds. The ship is designed to hold and descend five people 13,123 feet in the ocean, according to the company. It had a titanium crew compartment, a carbon fiber hull and an interior toilet.
The cost for a trip was $250,000, according to OceanGate. The company conducts commercial projects, scientific research and deep water exploration. After the disappearance of the submarine, information surfaced revealing previous concerns about the safety of the group’s expeditions.
This undated image, courtesy of OceanGate Expeditions, shows their Titan submarine beginning a descent.
Contributors: Jeanine Santucci, Isabelle Butera, Javier Zarracina, Janet Loehrke, and Grace Hauck
Please contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @kaylajjimenez.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Missing Titanic Submarine Found: No Survivors After Catastrophic Implosion
