A multinational search and rescue team is for the fifth day today searching every inch of the sea at the site of the Titanic wreck in search of a tourist deep-sea vessel that has been missing since Sunday with five people on board, as they are estimated to have oxygen for a few more hours.
The 6.7-metre-long submersible Titan, owned by US-based OceanGate Expeditions, began its descent towards the Titanic wreck at 08:00 on Sunday morning (local time, 15:00 GMT). It lost contact with the support ship from which it detached after about an hour and 45 minutes, just minutes before reaching the famous wreck in a remote area of the North Atlantic.
When Titan was launched it had 96 hours of oxygen, according to the company, which means it will run out sometime this morning. How long the oxygen will actually last depends, experts say, on a number of factors, including whether the submersible still has electricity and whether the passengers keep their cool.
Search teams and relatives of the five occupants were heartened Wednesday after the U.S. Coast Guard announced that Canadian ships heard sounds from the seabed.
The coastguard noted that underwater search vehicles are heading towards the spot where the sounds were heard, but the submersible has not been located at the moment. In addition, officials stressed that these sounds may not have come from the Titan.
«This is an extremely difficult time for the families of the crew members who disappeared on the Titan,» U.S. Coast Guard Chief Jamie Frederick said during a news conference from Boston.
«When you are in the middle of a search and rescue operation, you always hope,» he added. But he stressed that «I can't tell you what those sounds are,» explaining that their analysis did not yield a concrete result.
Meanwhile, a French robot that can dive to a depth of 6,000 metres was on its way to the spot where the submersible is believed to be yesterday. It is the Victor 6000 unmanned robot that can help free the submersible if it is trapped in a spot, its operator said.
The French robot has remote-controlled arms with which it can cut cables or perform other manoeuvres to free a stalled vessel. It can also dive to greater depths than all the other equipment currently at the wreck site.
Tragedy at the bottom
The tragedy unfolds in the icy waters off the east coast of Canada, where the Titanic sank in 1912. The wreck lies at a depth of about 3,800 metres, east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA.
Five people are on board the Titan: 58-year-old British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58-year-old British billionaire, 48-year-old Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dayud and his 19-year-old son, 77-year-old French oceanographer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Narzollet and Stockton Rush, founder and head of OceanGate.
Sean Leet, head of the company that jointly owns the support vessel, the Polar Prince, told reporters yesterday that «all protocols were followed» but refused to give details of how the communication was interrupted.
Even if Titan is located, bringing it to the surface will be a difficult task. If it has already managed to return to the surface, locating it in the vast sea will be difficult and it is locked from the outside, meaning that the occupants cannot get out of the submersible without outside assistance.
If Titan is at the bottom, it will be even more difficult to retrieve it to the surface because of the high pressure and complete darkness at those depths.
Questions about the safety of the submersible were raised in 2018 during a symposium of industry experts, and later that year OceanGate's former head of marine operations, David Lochridge, took legal action against the company after he raised serious concerns about Titan's safety and was fired.
According to him, the porthole at the front of the submersible is built to withstand the pressure at 1,300 metres depth, not 4,000 metres.
