U.S. Navy searchers heard the disaster unfold on first day
THE submarine tragedy turned bitter yesterday after it emerged US Navy eavesdroppers heard the vessel imploding on day one.
And director of the 1998 movie Titanic, James Cameron, who has dived to the shipwreck 33 times, led an onslaught on the adventure tour company behind the tragic voyage, accusing it of ignoring safety warnings.
Emails showed swashbuckling tour boss Stockton Rush had dismissed concerns as ‘baseless cries “you are going to kill someone”,’ which he took as a ‘serious personal insult’. American Mr Rush, 61, was among those who perished in his experimental sub.
A massive international rescue mission was launched on Sunday when the 22ft Titan submarine, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, went missing during its £195,000-a-head voyage to the bottom of the sea to view the 1912 wreck of ocean liner Titanic.
In a race against time as oxygen supplies dwindled, planes, boats, remote submarines, equipment and personnel were all dispatched to the multi-millionpound mission, with the US Coast Guards vowing ‘We always have hope’ after sophisticated sonar buoys picked up possible ‘banging noises’ raising a chance the five trapped explorers were signalling for help.
Yesterday the US Navy admitted its ultra-sensitive underwater microphones – designed to detect enemy submarines – had picked up underwater noises consistent with the catastrophic implosion of the tourists’ craft on Sunday, soon after it had descended to the wreck two and a half miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic. The Navy said it had informed the US Coast Guard.
Mr Cameron, told BBC News that the four-day search by US and Canadian coast guard, military and commercial vessels ‘felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff’.
He added: ‘I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. And that’s exactly where they found it.’
And in a bitter echo of the 1912 Titanic disaster which claimed 1,517 lives, he said experts had written to OceanGate Expeditions expressing concerns that what they were doing was ‘too experimental’. The Oscar-winning director added: ‘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 people died as a result.
‘Our community of deep ocean engineers spoke out against it quite loudly. It’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded.’
Yesterday the BBC revealed emails between OceanGate’s CEO and Rob McCallum, an undersea expedition specialist who was among three dozen experts to sign a 2018 letter to Mr Rush warning that OceanGate’s approach could lead to ‘catastrophic’ problems.
Mr Rush replied: ‘We have heard the baseless cries of “you are going to kill someone” way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.’
As well as Mr Rush, the victims were French navy veteran Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, London-born billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, and UK tycoon Shahzada Dawood, 41, and his son Suleman, 19, a student at the University of Strathclyde,
‘It would have been so sudden’
Glasgow. Yesterday Mr Harding’s cousin, Kathleen Cosnett, said at her home in Twyford, Berkshire, that the rescue operation was ‘handled so badly, there should have been a lot better communication’.
It emerged earlier in the week that it took eight hours before the US Coast Guard was alerted to the crisis. Mrs Cosnett said: ‘The hours that were lost were at a great, great cost.’
Experts say there is little prospect of recovering the victim’s remains.
Dr Dale Molé, the former director of undersea medicine for the US Navy, said: ‘It would have been so sudden. You’re alive one millisecond, and the next millisecond you’re dead.’
Guillermo Sohnlein, co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions, said: ‘Any expert who weighs in on this, including Mr Cameron, will also admit they were not there for the design of the sub, the engineering of the sub, the building of the sub and certainly not the rigorous test programme the sub went through.’