The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed that the debris found of the Titanic tourist submersible Titan “is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.” All passengers of the Titan are presumed to have died.
In a press conference on Thursday, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said, “The debris field is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”
The debris found included parts of the sub’s pressure chamber, including a nose cone and the front and back end of the pressure hull.
The debris field was discovered by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) on the ocean floor about 1,600 feet from the Titanic’s bow, but the debris could not have come from the Titanic itself, according to Mauger.
Mauger said the implosion “would have generated significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up.”
He stated that they would try to recover the bodies of the passengers but noted the difficulty of such a recovery search.
“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Mauger said.
“We’ll continue to work and continue to search the area down there, but I don’t have an answer for prospects at this time,” he added.
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, commander of the First Coast Guard District, talks to the media, Thursday, June 22, 2023, at Coast Guard Base Boston, in Boston. The missing submersible Titan imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
OceanGate Expeditions, which operated the Titan, issued a statement acknowledging the deaths of the five passengers of the submersible, which began its descent into the North Atlantic on Sunday to visit the wreck site of the RMS Titanic, but lost contact with the surface less than two hours later.
“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,” the company stated.
OceanGate Expeditions sold seats on the Titan at $250,000 apiece. The vessel was carrying three fee-paying passengers: British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman. The other two on board were Paul-Henri “PH” Nargeolet, a veteran diver and expert on the Titanic wreck, and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions.
The U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards deployed ships and planes in an intensive search for the Titan to cover an era that was twice the size of the state of Connecticut. The search was some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, and 12,000-12,500 ft. below sea level. The rescuers deployed two camera-equipped remote-operated robots that can scan the seafloor in real-time at depths other vessels can’t reach.
View of the bow of the RMS Titanic photographed in June 2004 by the ROV Hercules during an expedition returning to the shipwreck of the Titanic. (Courtesy of NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island)
OceanGate Expeditions is now under increased scrutiny as documents show that the company had been warned that there might be catastrophic safety problems with the experimental vessel it developed.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations, said in a 2018 lawsuit that the company’s testing and certification was insufficient and would “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.”
Former passengers on OceanGate’s Titan submersible have also come forward with their own harrowing stories about difficulties experienced in past dives.