Titanic director James Cameron is speaking out in the wake of the disastrous Titan submarine loss, which resulted in the death of five people on board. After a grueling multi-day manhunt, the search for the OceanGate Expeditions submersible was called off when debris was found, indicating the Titan had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”. Cameron spoke to ABC News about the tragedy, offering a unique and expert opinion. In addition to directing, Cameron is himself a deep sea explorer, and has visited the Titanic wreckage dozens of times. He has designed deep sea submersibles and has visited The Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench.
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many died as a result. It’s a very similar tragedy at the exact same site. It’s astonishing and really quite surreal,” Cameron said.
He added, “Many people in the [deep-submergence engineering] community were very concerned about this sub, and a number of you know of the top players in the community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and needed to be certified and so on.” He continued, “deep submergence diving is a mature art. From the early ’60s, where there were a few accidents, nobody was killed in the deep submergence until now. [That’s] more time than between Kitty Hawk and the flight of the first 747.”
The loss of the Titan is a disturbing parallel to the Titanic disaster itself. Both were luxury seacrafts which bore their wealthy elite passengers to a watery grave. To make the comparison even more disturbing, OceanGate CEO and pilot Stockton Rush was married to Wendy Rush, whose great-great-grandparents Isidor and Ida Straus died together on the Titanic.
All in all, it’s a tragic story and a grim reminder that no one, not even the wealthiest, are immune from disaster. Especially not when they court it so brazenly, as the OceanGate expedition did.
(via ABC News, featured image: screencap/ABC News)
