2023-06-22 18:22:47
The Coast Guard of the United States maintains the hope of finding alive the five occupants of a submersible that disappeared near the wreckage of the Titanic, said this Thursday (22) the coordinator of rescue operations in the North Atlantic, despite the feared end of reserves. of oxygen.
“We continue to see particularly complex cases in which people’s will to live must also be taken into account,” Rear Admiral John Mauger, of the US Coast Guard, who coordinates operations, told NBC’s Today program.
“So we continue the search and rescue efforts,” he added.
The situation is increasingly complicated for passengers on the small deep-sea submersible Titan, owned by the private company OceanGate Expeditions. With emergency oxygen for 96 hours, the deadline would have ended at 11:08 GMT (8:08 GMT).
The announcement on Wednesday of the detection of underwater noise by Canadian P-3 planes in the search area raised hopes and oriented the international marine rescue team sent to the scene.
“We don’t know what the noises are,” said US Coast Guard spokesman Captain Jamie Frederick.
Communication with the small submersible Titan was lost on Sunday, almost two hours after the equipment began its descent towards what was left of the famous ocean liner Titanic, almost 4,000 meters deep and about 600 kilometers from Terra Nova, in the Atlantic North.
Traveling in the submersible are billionaire and British aviator Hamish Harding, president of the private jet company Action Aviation; Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, vice-president of the Engro conglomerate, and his son Suleman; French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operates the Titan, which charges US$250,000 (approximately R$1.2 million) per tourist.
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Five boats, to which another five were due to join this Thursday, equipped with sonar and state-of-the-art technology, are sweeping an area of 20,000 km², approximately the size of the state of Sergipe, and at a depth of almost four kilometers, while planes fly over the site in search of any sign of the submersible.
The Pentagon announced the sending of a third C-130 plane and three other C-17s, while an underwater robot, sent by the French Oceanographic Institute, will be added to the searches in the coming hours.
The Royal Canadian Navy has sent a ship with a hyperbaric chamber on board and specialists with medical assistance, which joins another Coast Guard service vessel equipped with advanced sonar instruments.
Horizon Maritime, the company that owns the Polar Prince, the boat that launched the submersible, is also sending another vessel with a deepwater search team.
The search location “makes the rapid mobilization of large amounts of equipment exceptionally difficult,” Captain Frederick explained.
– Danger of shipment –
In recent days, a report on security flaws on the vessel has been revealed.
David Lochridge, former director of marine operations for OceanGate Expeditions, the manufacturing company, fired for questioning the Titan’s safety, mentioned in a lawsuit that the submersible is the result of an “experimental and untested design”.
According to Lochridge, part of the submersible was designed to withstand pressure at a depth of 1,300 meters, not 4,000 meters.
Everyone was aware of the dangers of the expedition, told the BBC Mike Reiss, an American television writer who visited the wreck of the Titanic in the same submersible last year.
“You sign a document before boarding, and on the first page death is mentioned three times”, he said, remembering that, during immersion in such deep waters, “the compass stopped working immediately and started to turn”, causing that they had to move blindly in the ocean’s darkness to fetch the transatlantic, which sank in 2012, on its maiden voyage between the English city of Southampton and New York.
Of the 2,224 people on board the Titanic, around 1,500 died in one of the most famous shipwrecks in history.
Since the wreckage was discovered in 1985, the area has been visited by treasure hunters and thrill-hungry tourists alike.
Alistair Greig, professor of marine engineering at University College London, suggested two hypotheses about what could have happened to Titan.
The first would be related to an electrical or communication problem, which would not prevent the submersible from returning to the surface. Another scenario would involve damage to the pressure hull, which would dissipate hopes of finding the passengers alive.
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