A robot is combing the sea floor for debris from the fatal implosion of the Titan submersible as authorities in both the US and Canada turn their attention from search and rescue to investigating what led up to the maritime disaster and whether any laws were broken.
Investigating The Implosion
The US Coast Guard has convened a Marine Board of Investigation to probe the implosion – the “highest level of investigation the Coast Guard conducts,” US Coast Guard chief investigator Capt. Jason Neubauer announced Sunday. The board will work to determine the cause of the catastrophic implosion and fatalities, as well as make recommendations “to pursue civil or criminal sanctions as necessary,” Neubauer said. For now, investigators are prioritizing recovering debris from the sea floor. Military experts found debris from the ill-fated submersible about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on Thursday, the US Coast Guard previously said.
“My primary goal is to prevent a similar occurrence by making the necessary recommendations to enhance the safety of the maritime domain worldwide,” Neubauer said Sunday. The Titan was 1 hour and 45 minutes into its descent to the Titanic’s wreckage on the ocean floor last Sunday when it lost contact with its mother ship, kick-starting a days long multinational search and rescue operation in the North Atlantic that ended Thursday, with the discovery of its debris. Canadian investigators boarded the Polar Prince on Saturday “to collect information from the vessel’s voyage data recorder and other vessel 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. “This case has been extremely complex, involving a coordinated international, interagency and private sector response in an unforgiving and difficult to access region of the ocean,” US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, said Sunday.
Faulty Design?
While the debris field is mapped out and pieces from the submersible are collected, experts are raising questions about the Titan’s design. A CNN review of OceanGate’s marketing material, public statements made by Rush and court records show that even as the company touted a commitment to safety measures, it rejected industry standards that would have imposed greater scrutiny on its operations and vessels. A former employee who worked briefly for the company as an operations technician had concerns about the hull’s thickness and adhesion, he said, speaking to CNN on the condition of anonymity. “This was a company that was already defying much of what we already know about submersible design,” Rachel Lance, a Duke University biomedical engineer who has studied physiological requirements of survival underwater said.
When submersible expert Karl Stanley was aboard the Titan for an underseas excursion off the coast of the Bahamas in April 2019, he felt there was something wrong with the vessel when loud noises were heard and sent an email to Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, sounding the alarm on suspected defects. “What we heard, in my opinion … sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged,” Stanley wrote in the email.
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Source: EditionCNN
