Officials are racing against the clock to find a private submarine that went lost Sunday in the North Atlantic while heading to the Titanic wreckage. It had five people on board.
The leader of search and rescue efforts said Monday afternoon that the 21-foot vessel has enough emergency supplies for four days. At the same time, crews from the US and Canadian coast guards kept looking over the surface of the water about 900 miles east of Cape Cod and using sonar to listen for sounds far below the water, which is up to 13,000 feet deep there.
The five people on board the ship were a captain and four “mission specialists,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, head of the US Coast Guard’s First District, at a news conference on Monday. The ship was on a trip to see the wreckage of the Titanic. He didn’t say who the five were, and he said that the police were still trying to get in touch with family members.
He told media to ask OceanGate Expeditions, the group in charge of the trip, what the term “mission specialist” means.
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Mauger said, “Right now, we’re working very hard to make sure we’re doing everything we can to find the submersible and save the people on board.”
Lt. Samantha Corcoran, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, said that the Canadian research ship Polar Prince told the military branch on Sunday that it had lost touch with the underground ship. The Coast Guard said in a tweet that the ship’s contact stopped about 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive.
Officials said that time is important. “In terms of hours, we knew that meant the operator could help in a rescue or emergency for 96 hours,” Mauger told reporters. “At this point, we think that there are somewhere between 70 and 96 hours available.”
One of the people on the submersible is a British investor who lives in the United Arab Emirates. His company, Action Aviation, posted on social media that one of the people on the submersible was Hamish Harding.
In an Instagram post on Sunday, the company said, “The sub was launched successfully, and Hamish is currently diving.”
Harding was one of the first people to go to the deepest point on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean. On Saturday, he wrote about the Titanic mission, “I am proud to finally announce that I have joined OceanGate Expeditions for their RMS TITANIC Mission as a mission specialist on the sub going down to the Titanic.”
Mauger said Monday that two C-130 planes were searching the surface, and two P-8 planes that use radar to find subs were also part of the search. There are also commercial ships involved, and one of them has radar, he said.
“Commercial operators are often the first boats on the scene,” Mauger said. “So, we’ve been in touch with more commercial vessels that are working in the area, and we’ve also started moving more Canadian Coast Guard and US Coast Guard surface assets into the area over the next few days.”
Mauger said that the US Coast Guard has also talked to the US Navy and the Canadian troops to find out what underwater escape tools are available, just in case.
OceanGate is helping with the search and said it is “exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely.”
“We are only thinking about the people in the submarine and their families. “We are very grateful to the many government agencies and deep sea companies that have helped us in our efforts to get back in touch with the submersible,” the group said. “We are doing what we can to get the crew back to safety.”
Chief Mi’sel Joe of the Miawpukek First Nation, which co-owns the Polar Prince, the expedition’s support ship, said he got a call Sunday afternoon telling him that the sub was two hours late and still hadn’t come up, and that they had lost contact with it. He said that at that point, calls for search and rescue had already been made.
Monday night, the US Coast Guard tweeted that its C-130 planes had gone back to North Carolina and that the P-8 planes would continue their searches in the morning.
The Polar Prince and the 106th Rescue Wing of the Air National Guard would search the surface until the evening, the Coast Guard said.
OceanGate Expeditions says its trip to the Titanic’s wreckage at the bottom of the ocean starts at $250,000. This is according to an old version of the company’s website that can be accessed through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
“Follow in the path of Jacques Cousteau and become an underwater traveler. Start with a dive to the Titanic. The website said, “This is your chance to get out of your normal life and find something truly amazing.” “Become one of the few people to see the Titanic with your own eyes.”
The eight-day adventure starts in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the trip to the wreck site, which is 400 nautical miles away, is the first part. There, up to five people, including a pilot, a “content expert,” and three paid guests, board a submarine called “Titan” and go to the bottom of the ocean over the course of two hours to get a close look at the Titanic.
OceanGate says that Titan is a submarine that weighs 23,000 pounds and is made of carbon fiber and metal. As a safety feature, the sub uses a “proprietary real-time hull health monitoring (RTM) system” that checks the pressure on the vessel and the strength of the structure.
In April 1912, on the ship’s first trip, it hit an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, killing more than 1,500 people. The Titanic’s wreckage was found in 1985, about 13,000 feet below the surface of the ocean southeast of Newfoundland. It is in two pieces.
NOAA says that a submersible doesn’t have as much power as a submarine, so it needs a mother ship that can launch and return it.
“Think positive,” writes a trip member on the Polar Prince
A member of the mission who was on the ship Polar Prince, which launched the missing submarine, said, “Everyone on board is focused on our friends.”
“We have a situation that is now part of a major Search and Rescue effort by major agencies,” Rory Golden wrote on Facebook after CNN called him. “Right now, that’s where our attention is.”
He told people not to ask or guess about who was on the lost submarine.
“I’ve already seen some comments on social media that are very rude and thoughtless,” he said. He also said that their online and internet choices were being limited “so that bandwidth could be used for the coordinated effort going on.”
“The response and offers of help from around the world are truly amazing, and it shows how good people can be in times like these,” he said. He thanked everyone at the end of the post and said, “Think positive. We are.”
