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With hopes of rescue dashed, investigators are turning to documentation and, in all likelihood, the recovery of parts of the imploded ship, while an investigation into the crisis is conducted.
By Jacey Fortín
Now that the world knows what happened to the Titan, the submersible that disappeared Sunday during a dive to see the wreckage of the R. M. S. Titanic, officials are dedicated to figuring out how and why the ship allegedly imploded, killing everyone on board.
Thursday’s discovery of the Titan at the bottom of the ocean ended a rescue operation that had attracted much of the world’s attention. The U. S. Coast Guard Mauger said Thursday at a news conference.
On Friday, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada announced it has opened an investigation into the disaster. The council is concerned because the ship that transported the Titan to the scene and introduced it, the M. V. Polar Prince, is Canadian.
A team of investigators will collect data and conduct interviews in coordination with the agencies, the council said.
The Titan’s fate was only known Thursday morning, in part because it took days to send remotely operated cars capable of reaching Titanic’s intensity to the site more than 3 kilometers below the ocean’s surface. Once the cars were deployed, debris from the Titan was seen within hours, in a domain about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, according to Admiral Mauger.
Experts said remote cars will most likely be used to continue examining and retrieving some items. noticed or can be simply recovered.
“We hope the on-site ROV will identify as much as it can and bring to the surface as much as it can,” Jennifer K said. Waters, Chancellor of the Faculty of Maritime at the State University of New York.
They wouldn’t be to collect everything on the ocean floor, he said, but they may only bring fabrics that would be useful in research.
If the implosion occurred high above the ocean floor, it’s possible the submersible’s fragments were spread over a wide area, said James Bellingham, a professor of exploration robotics at Johns Hopkins University. They will have to search for Titan debris among the Titanic debris in the background,” he added.
But the ocean is so deep there that “recovery is a huge and expensive task,” said Mike Jarvis, president of the American Salvage Association, an industry organization for maritime rescue workers.
The military has a tendency to invest resources in its own sunken assets, Mr. Jarvis, but efforts to customize ships like the Titan would likely be constrained by expenses. He calculated that a project to rescue the Titan could cost just $250,000 per day. .
This week, the Navy sent a lifting mechanism for heavy underwater objects, called the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System, to the site of the disappearance to aid in search and recovery efforts. But it’s not yet clear if or when the formula can be used.
The Titan, a 22-foot-long tube-shaped ship with a single porthole, belonged to OceanGate. The company’s general manager, Stockton Rush, was piloting the submersible when it disappeared.
“OceanGate’s entire circle of family members is deeply grateful to the countless men and women from various organizations in the overseas network who accelerated far-reaching resources and worked toward this mission,” the company said in a statement, adding that its workers were “exhausted and deeply distressed by this loss. “
OceanGate answered questions about recovery efforts or investigations, or whether some kind of knowledge recorder, such as an airplane’s black box, had been on the Titan.
The coast guard and military did not respond Friday to questions about how recovery operations would progress in the future.
“I know there are a lot of questions about how, why, when this happened,” Adm. Mauger said Thursday, adding that the government had the same questions. “I’m sure it will be the subject of a long-term review. “
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