“I saw their faces: five people smiling. They all seemed eager to go away.” Renata Rojas described her observation of five individuals getting ready to descend into the Titanic. These people were on the verge of getting into the submersible built by Oceangate.
However, just 90 minutes into the venture, the mission ended tragically when the sub imploded, marking a profound disaster. These pictures from the Atlantic Ocean reveal the devastation of the sub—submerged in the deep waters, battered, torn apart, and scattered all over the ocean bed. These photos captured screenshots from videos that the US Congress legal and national security subcommittee presented in response to the inquiries about the catastrophic failure in June 2023.
The recently completed inquiry confirmed that investigators ignored some safety warnings, previous safety concerns, and records of malfunctioning equipment. And day by day, particularly during the last two weeks, new details surfaced regarding the previous hours of those at the site, which was far from the end of the storyline.
Passengers did not know the disaster that was about to strike Titanic
British explorer Hamish Harding and British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, who took along his 19-year-old son Suleman, had paid Oceangate a sum to go under the water and see the wreck of Titanic, which lies 3800m deep in the ocean.
The sub was performing under the direction of Stockton Rush, Chief Executive Officer of Oceangate, whoFrench Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet assistedt as a co-pilot. After being immersed, the vehicle would relay its messages to the surface using brief text messages. A message from a water depth of about 2,300 meters read, “All good here.”
Nevertheless, after approximately an hour and a half of the dive, from a water depth of 3,346 meters, Titan’s last message revealed the release of two weights to tame thecraft’s downward rush as ith was fast approaching the seabed.
As for the US Coast Guard, those messages revealed nothing that would suggest to the passengers that their craft was indeed going to be failing. The process occurred very quickly, leaving the passengers no time to comprehend what was happening.
Carbon Fiber: A Weak Point Titanic
Roy Thomas from the American Bureau of Shipping emphasized that using carbon fiber in deep-sea submersibles is unsafe because carbon fibers can fatigue and fail without warning. The National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) did report analyzing some of the marine vessel Titan’s hull remnants after its construction, revealing defects in the substance.
The examination also revealed splices within the carbon fiber layers, commonly known as delamination, along with swelling, waviness, and air pockets in the construction. This insinuates that the submarine had defects even before it took the plunge.
The NTSB crew also noticed evidence of delamination in the parts of the wreck recovered from the bottom of the sea. Although the hull mostly destroyed, the remaining carbon fibers delaminated in several areas and showed signs of crushing.
