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An undated photograph shows a tourist submarine from OceanGate beginning to descend into a sea. US Coast Guard search and rescue operations in Boston continue after a tourist submarine bound for the Titanic wreckage off Canada’s southeast coast went missing.
OceanGate | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The race against time to find a submarine that disappeared heading for the wreckage of the Titanic entered a new phase of desperation Thursday morning as the last hours of oxygen that may still be aboard the small vessel ticked down.
Rescue workers have rushed more ships and craft to the scene of the disappearance, hoping that underwater noises they detected for a second straight day could limit their search in the urgent, international mission. But the crew had only four days of oxygen supply when the ship, called the Titan, departed around 6 a.m. on Sunday.
Even those optimistic warned that many obstacles remain: from locating the ship’s location, to reaching it with rescue equipment, to bringing it to the surface – assuming it’s still intact. And all this must be done before the passengers’ oxygen supply runs out.
The entire area searched was twice the size of Connecticut in waters as deep as 4,020 feet. Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District said authorities still hold out hope for a rescue the five passengers on board.
“This is a search and rescue mission, 100%,” he said Wednesday.
The area of the North Atlantic where the Titan disappeared Sunday is also prone to fog and stormy conditions, making it an extremely challenging environment in which to conduct a search and rescue mission, said Donald Murphy, an oceanographer who served as chief scientist of the coast. Guard’s International Ice Patrol.
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Meanwhile, newly discovered allegations suggest that it did important warnings about ship safety during the development of the submarine.
Frederick said that while the detected sounds offered an opportunity to refine the search, their exact location and source had not yet been determined.
“We don’t know what they are, to be honest,” he said.
Retired Navy Captain Carl Hartsfield, now the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, said the sounds have been described as “bangs,” but he cautioned that search crews “need to put the whole picture in context and eliminate other potential man-made sources than the Titan.”
The report was encouraging to some experts because crews of submarines unable to communicate with the surface are taught to bang on their submarine’s hull to be detected by sonar.
The US Navy said in a statement Wednesday that it was sending a specialized recovery system capable of lifting “large, bulky and heavy submarine objects such as aircraft or small craft.”
The Titan weighs 20,000 pounds (9,071 kilograms). The U.S. Navy’s Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System is designed to lift up to 60,000 pounds (27,216 kilograms), the Navy said on its website.
Lost aboard the ship is pilot Stockton Rush, the CEO of the company running the expedition. His passengers are 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 ship reported late Sunday nightheading for the search in waters about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s.
Officials have said the ship had a 96-hour supply of oxygen, giving them early Thursday morning to find and retrieve the Titan.
Frank Owen, a submarine search and rescue expert, said the estimated oxygen supply is a useful “target” for searchers, but is only based on a “nominal amount of consumption.” Owen said the diver aboard the Titan would likely advise passengers to “do whatever it takes to lower your metabolic rate so you can actually extend it.”
At least 46 people successfully traveled on the OceanGate submarine to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. district court in Norfolk, Virginia, which oversees cases related to the shipwreck of the Titanic. Titanic.
One of the company’s first customers featured a dive he made to the spot two years ago as a ‘kamikaze operation’.
“Imagine a metal pipe several feet long with a metal plate for the floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close together,” says Arthur Loibl, a retired businessman. and adventurer from Germany. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
U.S. Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick provides an update on the search for five people aboard a missing submarine about 900 miles off Cape Cod on June 20, 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Scott Eisen | Getty Images
During the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick.
The dive was repeatedly delayed to resolve a problem with the battery and balancing weights. The journey took 10.5 hours in total.
OceanGate has been criticized for using a simple commercially available video game controller to control the Titan. But the company has said many of the ship’s parts are available off the shelf because they have proven to be reliable.
“It’s meant for a 16-year-old to throw it around,” and is “super durable,” Rush told the CBC in an interview last year as he demonstrated by throwing the controller around the Titan’s tiny cabin. He said a few spare parts are being kept on board “just in case”.
The submarine had seven backup systems for returning to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes falling down and an inflatable balloon.
Jeff Karson, professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University, said the temperature is just above freezing and the ship is too deep for human divers to reach it. The best chance of reaching the submarine might be to use a remote-controlled robot on a fiber optic cable, he said.
“I’m sure it’s awful out there,” Karson said. “It’s like being in a snow cave and hypothermia is a real danger.”
An undated photograph shows a tourist submarine from OceanGate beginning to descend into a sea. US Coast Guard search and rescue operations in Boston continue after a tourist submarine bound for the Titanic wreckage off Canada’s southeast coast went missing.
OceanGate | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Documents show that OceanGate was warned that catastrophic safety issues could arise from the way the experimental ship was being developed.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of maritime operations, said in a 2018 lawsuit that the company’s testing and certification were inadequate and would “expose passengers to potentially extreme danger in an experimental submarine.”
The company insisted that Lochridge “was not an engineer and had not been hired or asked to perform any engineering services on the Titan”. The company also says the ship under development was a prototype, not the now-missing Titan.
The Marine Technology Society, which describes itself as “a professional group of ocean engineers, technologists, policymakers and educators,” also expressed its concerns in a letter to Rush, OceanGate’s CEO, that year. The airline said it was critical that it subject its prototype to testing under the supervision of an expert third party before launching to protect passengers. The New York Times first reported on those documents.
The passengers lost on the Titan are British adventurer Hamish Harding; Pakistani nationals Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, whose eponymous company invests across the country; and French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
Retired Navy Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, who is now deputy director of the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University, said the disappearance underlines the dangers associated with deep-water operations and recreational reconnaissance. of the sea and space.
“I think some people think that because the modern technology is so good, you can do this kind of thing and not have an accident, but that’s just not the case,” he said.
