More presumed human remains were recovered last week from the last of the debris of the Titan submersible, which imploded in June during a 2½ -mile descent to the Titanic shipwreck, U.S. Coast Guard officials said Tuesday.
Although salvage operations are over, the board will keep investigating the accident by interviewing witnesses and running forensic tests as it prepares to hold a public hearing on what caused the implosion and how officials can prevent similar catastrophes. The Coast Guard could ultimately recommend anything from new regulations on deep-sea submersibles to criminal charges for authorities to pursue. In a statement to The Washington Post, Coast Guard officials said they haven’t set a date for the hearing but will provide the public at least 60 days’ notice.
On June 18, the Titan submersible lost contact with the Polar Prince, the Canadian research vessel that served as its mother ship. That sparked a desperate search-and-rescue operation that a former commandant of the Coast Guard compared to efforts to save the Apollo 13 astronauts.
“Trying to extract a vessel from 12,000 feet is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible,” retired Adm. Thad Allen told The Post at the time.
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End of carouselA submersible vessel exploring the Titanic went missing in the North Atlantic after it lost contact 900 miles east of Cape Cod. On Thursday, the Coast Guard announced the submersible suffered a catastrophic loss of pressure that imploded the vessel, killing all five passengers aboard. Listen to a Post Reports episode about the unregulated industry of deep-sea tourism.
The search effort
The search effort could be the deepest search and rescue mission ever attempted.
What is a submersible?
A submersible is a type of vessel that can travel underwater and often refers to crafts designed for research and exploration with or without people in it. They’ve been used for tourism since the mid-1980s and are now found all over the world.
What’s it like inside the Titan sub?
The Titan sub is about the size of a minivan and is meant to carry five people, including the pilot, to depths of about 13,100 feet.
Who was on the missing sub?
Five people, including Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions and four passengers who paid for the expedition like billionaire Hamish Harding.
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After four days, the Coast Guard said that it had found a debris field 1,600 feet away from the Titanic, indicating that the submersible had suffered a “catastrophic implosion.” Everyone aboard was killed, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, 61, who was piloting the Titan during its final descent.
Within days, the Coast Guard opened a Marine Board of Investigation, its highest level of inquiry reserved for serious maritime incidents such as the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Coast Guard officials have said that the board’s investigation will look into whether “an act of misconduct, incompetence, negligence, unskillfulness, or willful violation of law” contributed to the deaths.
The board will publish a report making safety recommendations about submersibles, which many experts say could use tighter regulation. It has been tasked with submitting that report to the head of the Coast Guard by June. There weren’t many regulations governing OceanGate’s dives to the Titanic because they happened in international waters, beyond any single country’s jurisdiction.
Some in the submersible community had criticized OceanGate for years for not submitting Titan to a classification process, in which a private classification agency works with submersible manufacturers from the design phase and continues to inspect the crafts while they’re in operation. The process is voluntary but considered standard in the industry.
Rush had argued that regulations often throttled innovation, and OceanGate contended on its website that the classification process was unnecessary.
But for years, experts warned that Titan’s nonstandard oblong shape and experimental carbon fiber composite were too dangerous to make multiple 12,500-foot dives to the ocean floor. Most deep-sea submersibles are made of contiguous materials, such as titanium, and use a sphere shape that’s more structurally sound but offers less space for passengers willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on what was billed as a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
OceanGate sold tickets for $250,000 to take passengers 2½ miles to the ocean floor to see the remnants of the Titanic, where the pressure is 400 times the atmospheric pressure that people experience on land.
Ben Brasch, Tamia Fowlkes, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Sammy Westfall, Andrew Jeong, Kyle Melnick and Joel Achenbach contributed to this report.
