2023-07-06 22:16:29
OceanGate, the company that owns the submersible that imploded with five people on board near the wreckage of the Titanic, has suspended all its activities, the company’s website said Thursday.
Read here: A capsule without amenities: what was the extravagant experience of the OceanGate submersible like?
OceanGate, based in the United States, reports that it “has suspended all its exploration and commercial operations”, appears on the left side of the website in English.
What happened to Titan?
The Titan, a small submersible about 6.5 meters long (the dimension of a ship taken along the axis of bow to stern or the total length of the same), submerged on June 18 to observe the remains of the shipwreck and was to return to the surface seven hours later, but less than two hours had elapsed, contact with the ship was lost.
A rescue operation was then launched in search of the passengers that ended four days later, on June 22, when teams discovered that the ship had imploded shortly after submerging, killing all five on the spot. occupiers, among whom was OceanGate boss Stockton Rush.
Who was in the submarine?
Also traveling on the ship were British millionaire Hamish Harding, president of the Action Aviation company; the Pakistani Shahzada Dawood, vice president of Engro, and his son Suleman –both also with British nationality–; the expert French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The remains of the Titan, found on the seabed about 500 meters from the wreck of the Titanic and almost 4,000 meters deep, were taken to St. John’s (Newfoundland, eastern Canada) to be analyzed.
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Canada and the United States have opened several investigations to determine the causes of the implosion. As soon as it became known that contact with the submersible had been lost, criticism focused on OceanGate, suspected of negligence.
In court documents from 2018, a former company executive, David Lochridge, claims he was fired because he had doubts about the safety of the submersible.
According to Lochridge, the porthole of the ship was not designed to withstand the pressure at a depth of 4,000 meters, which put passengers at risk.
William Kohnen, an engineer who heads a US committee on manned submersibles, told the BBC that his group had raised concerns about the Titan’s safety.
In late June, OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein declared security a “key element” of the company.
It may interest you: Former employee had warned that the Titanic submersible was in “potential danger” at extreme depths
The passengers had paid $250,000 each to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, one of the biggest maritime disasters of the 20th century.
They would have found human remains
The last thing that was known about the rescue of some remains of the submersible (pieces of what appeared to be the bow and the hull of the submersible) is that “presumed human remains” would have been found in them, according to information from the Coast Guard.
Jason Neubauer, the head of the Coast Guard investigation, indicated that the remains will be analyzed in the coming weeks and could provide “crucial elements to understand the cause of this tragedy.”
A US Coast Guard ship will transfer the parts of the submersible and the suspected remains to a US port, where they will be analyzed by investigators.
Read more: Journey to the bottom of the sea: how is the descent towards the Titanic that the missing submersible was trying to do?
Search operations ended
One of the managers of the company Pelagic Research Services, which had deployed its remotely controlled underwater robot (ROV) to explore the bottom of the Atlantic, confirmed that it had completed its operations.
“We have finished our part at sea,” his spokesman, Jeff Mahoney, told AFP.
“It has been an extremely risky operation, both for the ROV and for the team, who have worked 24 hours a day with virtually no sleep during the entire operation,” he continued, confirming that all the teams were returning to the United States.
Captain Neubauer praised the efforts “to recover and preserve this crucial evidence at extreme depth and distance from shore,” according to the US Coast Guard statement.
“Much work remains to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of Titan and to help ensure that a tragedy like this is never repeated,” Capt. Neubauer concluded.
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