Global Courant
Global Courant —
A week after the Titan submarine embarked on what became a catastrophic underwater journey to the Titanic’s wreckage, killing all five people on board, US officials laid out their next steps in the investigation of the disaster.
The U.S. Coast Guard announced Sunday that it has convened a Marine Board of Investigation to investigate the implosion — the “highest level of investigation the Coast Guard conducts,” said U.S. Coast Guard Chief Investigator Captain Jason Neubauer.
The panel will have to determine what caused the tragedy and make possible recommendations “to appropriate authorities to impose civil or criminal sanctions if necessary,” Neubauer said at a Sunday news conference.
The Coast Guard probe — one of many announced since the Titan imploded — has just begun and will focus on collecting debris from the wreckage and interviews. Afterward, the board will hold a public hearing to collect additional testimony from witnesses, Neubauer said. It will then issue a report with evidence, conclusions and recommendations, he added.
While officials try to figure out exactly what happened, investigators will also review voice recordings from the mothership carrying the ship and the five occupants, Canadian officials said.
Canadian investigators boarded that ship, the Polar Prince, on Saturday “to collect information from the ship’s voyage data recorder and other ship systems that contain useful information,” Kathy Fox, chair of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said Saturday. A voyage data recorder stores audio from the ship’s bridge.
The crew and family members were also interviewed aboard the Polar Prince, which was returning to St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, with the flags flown at half-mast on Saturday.
The agency’s mission is not to assign blame, but to “find out what happened and why and find out what needs to change to reduce the likelihood or risk of such events occurring in the future” , Fox said.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is also investigating the incident, saying it is investigating whether “criminal, federal or provincial laws may have been violated”.
Communications between the submarine and the mothership will also likely be investigated by officials investigating the disaster. According to the OceanGate Expeditions archived website, the ship could communicate with the submarine through text messages, and is required to communicate every 15 minutes.
The latest announcements come about three days after the US Coast Guard announced that the ship suffered a “catastrophic implosion” that killed all on board. Military experts found debris in the ocean — about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic — consistent with the loss of the small craft’s pressure chamber, said U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral John Mauger.
The dead included Stockton Rush, CEO of the ship operator OceanGate Expeditions; British businessman Hamish Harding; French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and Pakistan-born businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, who were British citizens.
Meanwhile, the mission to recover debris from the submarine’s implosion is underway in the Atlantic Ocean, according to a statement from Pelagic Research Services, first seen by Global Courant, on Sunday.
The Odysseus 6K, a remote-controlled vehicle, is on the seafloor in its fourth dive since arriving at the Titan rescue site, the statement said.
The company added that Odysseus’ heavy lifting capabilities “have been and continue to be used” in the Titan recovery mission, but would not confirm whether any debris had been recovered and referred Global Courant to the US Coast Guard, which is leading the investigation into the implosion. and recovery effort.
Global Courant contacted the Coast Guard for comment.
The vehicles that collected information from the seafloor have been working to map the ship’s debris field, which lies more than 2 miles deep in the North Atlantic Ocean, said Mauger, the vice admiral of the US Coast Guard.
Five different large pieces of debris from the submarine were found Thursday morning, officials said. Each end of the pressure hull was found in a different place, according to Paul Hankins, the U.S. Navy’s director of Salvage Operations and Ocean Engineering.
ROV missions are expected to continue for about another week, according to Jeff Mahoney, spokesman for Pelagic Research Services, a company that specializes in ocean expeditions.
Any attempt to remove anything from the debris field will warrant a larger operation in conjunction with Deep Energy, another company assisting with the mission, as the debris will likely be too heavy for Pelagic’s ROV to lift on its own. Mahoney told Global Courant Friday. The salvage efforts include using rigged cabling to pull up any debris.
The multinational investigation comes amid growing questions about the Titan’s design.
A Global Courant review of OceanGate’s marketing materials, public statements from Rush and court documents show that while the company committed to safety measures, it rejected industry standards that would have imposed greater scrutiny on its operations and ships.
The company deviated from industry standards by rejecting a voluntary, rigorous safety assessment of the vessel, an industry leader said.
And when underwater expert Karl Stanley was aboard the Titan for an undersea excursion off the coast of the Bahamas in April 2019, he sensed something was wrong with the ship when loud noises were heard and sent an email to Rush , the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions , raise the alarm about suspected defects.
“What we heard, in my opinion… sounded like a flaw/defect in one area that was reacted to by the tremendous pressure and crushed/damaged,” Stanley wrote in the email, a copy of which Global Courant obtained.
“From the intensity of the sounds, the fact that they never quite stopped at depth, and the fact that there were sounds at about 300 feet that indicated a decrease in stored energy/would indicate that there is a part of the hull that is breaking getting down/spongy,” Stanley continued.
When asked for comment on Stanley’s email, an OceanGate spokesperson told Global Courant they could not provide any additional information at this time.
Voice recordings and data from the mothership
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