The US Coast Guard began on Monday to provide some elements of the investigation into the implosion in June 2023, in the North Atlantic near the wreck of the Titanic, of the submersible Titan, which had left five dead. This small submersible of 6.5 meters long, of the American company OceanGate Expeditions, had dived on June 18, 2023 to observe the wreck of the Titanic and was to resurface seven hours later, but contact had been lost less than two hours after its departure.
A reconstruction by the U.S. Coast Guard revealed the last words spoken by the crew of the Titan submarine. The crew was communicating by text message with the OceanGate team on the support vessel Polar Prince. The communication was interrupted after a series of questions about the weight and depth of the submarine during its descent. Polar Prince repeatedly asked the Titan crew if they could still see the support vessel on its control screen. The last message received from the Titan was: “Everything is fine here.”
A huge, highly publicized rescue operation was launched to save the five passengers of the craft, which was supposed to have oxygen reserves for about four days. But the submersible was destroyed shortly after its dive by a “catastrophic implosion” killing all five men instantly, including 77-year-old French scientist Pierre-Henri Nargeolet, nicknamed “Mr. Titanic.”
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The other people who died 400 miles off Canada were OceanGate Expeditions boss Stockton Rush, 61, Pakistani-British businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and a 68-year-old British explorer, Hamish Harding.
“Presumed human remains” were discovered a few days later among the wreckage of the Titan, at a depth of 4,000 meters and 500 meters from the Titanic, according to the American coast guard, which then investigated for 15 months.
The investigation is “aimed at identifying any evidence of material errors (in construction or design) that could have caused the accident, in order to draw appropriate recommendations and prevent similar accidents from happening again,” the coastguard wrote in a press kit Sunday.
They held a conference in Charleston, South Carolina, on the eve of the opening Monday of two weeks of public hearings by their commission of inquiry in a court in the southeastern state.
Titanic submersible titan
