The last 96 hours of the tragedy

The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed that human remains from the Titanic Implosion had been properly recovered, and will be flown to the United States

PORTLAND, Maine — Human remains have likely been recovered from the wreckage of the submersible that imploded during an underwater voyage to view the Titanic, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

The announcement that the debris from theTitan had arrived in St. John’s came at an hour after the news was first made. Twisted chunks of the submersible were unloaded at a Canadian Coast Guard pier.

“There is still a substantial amount of work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the Titan and help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again,” Coast Guard Chief Capt. Jason Neubauer said in a statement released late Wednesday afternoon.

The “presumed human remains” will be brought to the United States, where medical professionals will conduct a formal analysis, Neubauer said. He added that the Coast Guard has convened an investigation of the implosion at the highest level. The Marine Board of Investigation will analyze and test evidence, including pieces of debris, at a port in the U.S. The Coast Guard said the board will present evidence to a future public hearing, but did not specify a date.

Carl Hartsfield, who is the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic institute and is a consultant to the Coast Guard, says that authorities haven’t released details of the debris recovery because they didn’t want to jeopardize the investigation.

If the pieces are small, you can collect them together and put them into a basket or some kind of collection device. Bigger pieces could be retrieved with a remote-operated vehicle, or ROV, such as the one brought to the wreckage site by the Canadian ship Horizon Arctic to search the ocean floor. For extremely big pieces, a heavy lift could be used to pull them up with a tow line, he said.

Representatives for the company did not reply to inquiries about the company. Pelagic Research Services, based in Massachusetts and New York, can’t comment on the investigation because they are still on mission, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1184970204/presumed-human-remains-and-more-titan-debris-have-been-recovered-coast-guard-say

Footsteps to the Titanic: Expeditions to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to find the missing Polar Prince on June 18, 2023

Analyzing the recovered debris could reveal important clues about what happened to the Titan, and there could be electronic data recorded by the submersible’s instruments, Hartsfield said.

The data recorder from the mother ship to the Titan was sent to a lab for analysis, according to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

Stockton Rush, the Titan’s pilot and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned the submersible, was killed in the implosion along with two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

It would take two and a half hours for Titan and its crew to descend from the sky. The pilot and his four passengers sat in the inside of the hull as engineers closed the craft. From now until the end of their dive, the five of them would be encapsulated, separated completely from the world’s water and air.

They had departed from the Canadian port city of St. John’s, Newfoundland, at 8 am eastern daylight time on June 18, 2023. Now, roughly 375 nautical miles to the east, they were poised to begin their mission: to dive to the Titanic. Riding in the sub were Stockton Rush, president and founder of OceanGate, the exploration company that operated the craft; British billionaire Hamish Harding; French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman.

Already, time was against them. When doing dives way out into the ocean, a OceanGate was, “you’re roughly a half-week to a week out from help,” says Peter Girguis, an oceanographer at Harvard University. The US Coast Guard received a distress call after the crew of the Polar Prince had been on board for nearly eight hours. The US and Canada were tasked with locating a 22-foot long sub in an area twice the size of Connecticut, with waters 2 and a half miles deep. By the time of its press conference, the sub had about 63 hours of oxygen left.

One hour and 45 minutes later, communications with Titan were lost. If their vessel was still intact, regardless of where they were, the crew would run out oxygen in approximately 94 hours. An international search-and-rescue operation, set desperately against the clock, was soon to begin.

By the morning of June 19 the rescue mission was complete. The US Coast Guard had started conducting a search 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in collaboration with the Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels in the area. “It is a remote area and a challenge, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure we can locate the craft,” Coast Guard rear admiral John W. Mauger said in a press conference.

Titan wasn’t ready for the challenge: a ship without emergency radio beacons or recovery systems on a giant floating vessel with no emergency radio beams

There were more problems. Titan lacked an emergency radio beacon or a dedicated recovery system. The surface vessel could not send something down, help locate the sub or pull them up. And without a beacon, Titan could be floating on the surface unnoticed.