“Titanic” director James Cameron said: ABC News According to interviews, one of his longtime friends was among the passengers on the tourist submersible Titan, and the sensors likely triggered the alarm just before the disaster struck. All five people on board died in a “catastrophic implosion”, officials said.
Oceangate Expeditions released a statement on Thursday saying all five passengers had “tragically lost their lives” and the found debris was indeed from the missing submarine, the company confirmed. In response, Prime Minister Cameron spoke out on the tragedy.
“This Ocean Gate submarine has sensors inside the hull that will alert you when cracks begin to form.” he told ABC News. “And if that’s your thinking about safety, I think it’s wrong. Perhaps they were warning that the hull was starting to delaminate and crack. .. . [W]From within the community, I could understand that they had come up to deal with emergencies by dropping weights. “
The director of the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” is a longtime member of the diving community, has designed submarines that can withstand depths Titanic can’t, and was at the Titanic sinking site himself. 33 adventures.
Describing the implosion as a “violent event”, Cameron said engineers would typically focus most on underwater designs that maintain structural integrity against pressures that increase with depth.
“People in the community were very concerned about this submarine,” Cameron told the network. “Some of the top companies in the deep water engineering community have written to the company saying that what they are doing is too experimental to carry passengers and they need certification. I was struck by the similarity of the wreckage itself: despite repeated warnings of ice ahead of the ship, the captain plunged full speed into the ice field on a moonless night, resulting in many of people have died.
“For us, this is a very similar tragedy of ignored warnings. It’s surreal.”
The Times has obtained a 2018 letter written privately to Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush, who was one of the implosion fatalities. The Marine Technology Association’s Manned Submersibles Committee wrote to Rush, stressing the need for a third-party safety review of the Ocean Gate submersibles.
“We are concerned that the current experimental approach taken by Oceangate will have negative consequences, ranging from minor to catastrophic, that will severely impact everyone in the industry. It’s possible,” the letter said.
William Connen, chairman of the commission, told The Times that Oceangate “raised many people’s eyebrows.”
Also in 2018, David Lockridge, a former Oceangate employee, accused the company of safety concerns, citing “particularly Oceangate’s refusal to perform critical non-destructive testing on its experimental hull design.” He sued the company for dismissal after raising the red flag of Lochridge said its hull monitoring system “frequently detects failures.” [only] A few milliseconds before implosion. ”
He said he disagreed with Rush’s decision to “expose passengers to potential extreme dangers on the experimental submersible.”
Cameron also told ABC News that he was mourning the death of French Titanic explorer Paul Henri “PH” Narjolet, a longtime friend who was on board the Titan submersible.
“It’s really surreal and just amazing,” he said. “PH, a legendary French dive pilot, was a friend of mine. It is a very small community, but I have known him for 25 years before him.
“It is almost unacceptable to me that he died tragically in this way.”
