Maximum urgency to save the occupants of the Titan submersible

(Boston) The United States Coast Guard still hopes to find alive the five occupants of a submersible which disappeared near the wreck of the titanicsaid Thursday the head of the vast rescue operations in the North Atlantic, despite the feared depletion of oxygen reserves.

“We continue to see in particularly complex cases that people’s will to live really needs to be considered as well,” U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger, head of search operations, said early Thursday. on the NBC channel.

“And so we continue to search and continue our rescue efforts,” he added.

Rescuers had estimated 11:08 GMT as the time passengers could run out of oxygen on board the Titan, a small deep-sea explorer from the American private company OceanGate Expeditions. Missing since Sunday, the machine has a theoretical autonomy of 96 hours in diving.

Wednesday’s announcement of the detection of underwater noises by Canadian P-3 planes raised hopes and oriented the multinational armada of rescuers dispatched to the scene, without the origin of the noises being determined.

“Main Hope”

Aerial surveillance using C-130 or P3 aircraft, ships equipped with underwater robots: the means deployed in particular by the American and Canadian armies continue to arrive at the site where the Polar Prince, the ship of which left the submersible Titan.

The Atalante, a French research vessel from Ifremer, arrived on site early Thursday, we learned from the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea. It is equipped with a robot , the ROV Victor 6000, capable of diving to the wreckage of the titanic which lies nearly 4000 meters deep.

The Victor 6000 is the “main hope” for an underwater rescue operation, Rob Larter, an expert with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS, a Cambridge-based British research body), told reporters.

The surface search area covers 20,000 square kilometres.

According to Captain Jamie Frederick of the United States Coast Guard, “the location of the research, 1450 km east of Cape Cod (on the northeast coast of the United States, editor’s note) and 640 km south-east of Saint John of Newfoundland (in Canada), makes it exceptionally difficult to rapidly mobilize large quantities of equipment”.

An American, a Frenchman, a Briton and two Pakistani-Britons dived on Sunday morning aboard the Titanabout 6.5 meters long.

He was expected to resurface seven hours later, but contact was lost less than two hours after he left. Tuesday noon, the US Coast Guard had warned that there were “about 40 hours of breathable air” on board.

Potential negligence

Since the search began on Sunday, details implicating OceanGate have emerged over potential safety negligence on the underwater tourism device.

A 2018 complaint seen by AFP says a former company executive, David Lochridge, was fired after raising serious doubts about the safety of the submersible.

According to this former director of marine operations, a porthole at the front of the device was designed to withstand the pressure experienced at 1300 m depth and not at 4000 m.

The boss of OceanGate, the American Stockton Rush, is on board, alongside a wealthy British businessman, Hamish Harding (58), of the French specialist in titanic Paul-Henri Nargeolet (77) – nicknamed “Mr. Titanic” –, Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood (48) and his son Suleman (19) – both also having British nationality.

For $250,000, they embarked on an exploration of the remains of what was one of the greatest maritime disasters of the 20th century.

THE titanic wrecked on her maiden voyage in 1912, after colliding with an iceberg, killing nearly 1,500 passengers and crew.

Since the discovery of the wreck in 1985, scientists, treasure seekers and tourists have visited it, thus maintaining the myth.