The search for the submersible that disappeared en route to the Titanic wreckage site appeared more dire by the minute on Tuesday, with the U.S. Coast Guard conceding it’s uncertain when salvage equipment will arrive at the remote Atlantic Ocean location—if they’re able to locate the missing sub at all.
Capt. Jamie Frederick said at an afternoon press conference that those on the submersible, named the Titan, have about 40 hours of “breathable” oxygen left if the sub remains intact.
Attempts to locate the Titan were beefed up Tuesday, with private companies and foreign governments sending deep-water vessels to assist in the search, but officials said nothing of substance had been spotted on the surface or by sonar. And Frederick was unable to say whether rescue equipment capable of reaching the depths of the Titanic would arrive by then—or if such equipment even exists.
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“Obviously getting salvage equipment on scene is a top priority,” he said. “There are ongoing operations right now via the U.S. Navy and TransCom [United States Transportation Command] to get equipment staged in St. John’s and to get it on scene. I can’t give you an exact timeline for when that’s going to happen. What I can tell you is there is a full court press effort to get equipment on scene as quickly as we can.”
Asked if the Coast Guard had equipment that could save the group if the Titan was found, Frederick responded, “I don't know the answer to that question.”
“What I will tell you is we will do everything in our power to to effect a rescue,” he said.
The small sub brought a group of well-heeled tourists on Sunday morning to the final resting place of the Titanic, roughly 435 miles south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. It left port with a 96-hour supply of oxygen, according to owner and operator OceanGate Expeditions. The craft is believed to be 13,000 feet, or nearly 2.4 miles, beneath the surface, which, if successful, would make it the deepest recovery in history.
However, the Navy’s underwater rescue vehicle has a maximum depth rating of just 2,000 feet. Its CURV-21 salvage vehicle, which can go as deep as 20,000 feet, has a lift capacity of 4,000 pounds. But the Titan weighs more than 20,000 pounds.
Although one retired U.S. Navy submarine captain said he believes the group’s chances of survival are “about one percent,” deep-water rescue expert Walt “Butch” Hendrick, former safety coordinator for the U.S. Army’s Green Beret Diver Trainer Program, told The Daily Beast, “We have to be positive.”
The oxygen supply can still keep the occupants of the sub alive for nearly two more days, Hendrick noted, with the caveat: “If the unit hasn’t flooded.”
Still, it is unlikely 40 hours of oxygen will actually last that long, he said. As anxiety levels among the passengers increase, breathing levels go up, and when that happens, oxygen gets depleted more rapidly. This, Hendrick noted, is “a concern.”
However, Hendrick told The Daily Beast that the Titan does not have a beacon, such as those on airplanes, to help searchers more easily home in on its location. It does have the ability to surface on its own, “but if its electrical system short-circuited because of salt water getting into it, that system doesn’t work anymore,” he added.
“This unit never met international safety standards because it was both innovative and experimental,” Hendrick said, pointing out that past expeditions turned back within an hour or two because of mechanical problems.
Others with experience in such rescues worry that the sheer depth of the water makes it difficult to imagine a successful rescue.
“While the submersible might still be intact, if it is beyond the continental shelf… there are very few vessels that can get that deep, and certainly not divers,” Alistair Greig, a professor of marine engineering at University College London, said. “If it has gone down to the seabed and can’t get back up under its own power, options are very limited.”
Hendrick said there are ways to reach the submersible using unmanned underwater vehicles. The robotic arms would need to be fitted with state-of-the-art cutting tools, which can cut through four inches of steel, he said.
However, the unmanned vehicles in use are not capable of bringing the Titan back up to the surface if its a solid dead weight, and “we don’t have a 13,000-foot cable to pull it back up,” said Hendrick. The only way to recover the sub would be to get close enough to attach lift cables measuring 100 feet or so, with heavy-duty airbags at the top, he went on. The difficulty, however, would then be filling the bags with air at such depths.
“It’s not going to be done at the surface,” he told The Daily Beast. “Just getting enough air to it, what are the chances that I could have a remote fill that’s using a, 12000 foot-long hose?”
By Tuesday morning, the Coast Guard said search crews had combed some 10,000 square miles of ocean, an area about the size of Connecticut. Canadian research icebreaker and Titan support vessel Polar Prince was going over the search area assisted by a Canadian P-8 Poseidon sub hunter aircraft, three U.S. C-130 Hercules aircraft, and additional surface searches by the U.S. Air Force 106th Rescue Wing out of Westhampton Beach, New York. The New York Air National Guard’s 106th Rescue Wing is also on the scene, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul. Multiple sonar buoys were dropped into the sea by Canadian forces in an attempt to pick up any audible signs of life from the Titan.
Norwegian pipe-laying ship Deep Energy arrived in the area Tuesday morning to aid in the search, a spokeswoman for TechnipFMC, the vessel’s owner, told The Daily Beast in an email. The Coast Guard said Deep Energy is being controlled remotely.
David Concannon, who has taken submersibles to the Titanic for decades, was slated to be on this weekend’s dive but called off the trip at the last second to attend to an “urgent” matter, he wrote on Facebook.
In writing about past expeditions, Concannon spoke candidly about the risks of voyaging 2.5 miles into some of the deepest depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
“If anything goes wrong, we have little chance of survival,” Concannon wrote after a dive in 2000—the first of the 21st century. He recalled the checklist of everything that could go “fatally wrong,” writing that fire, suffocation, implosion, drowning, or freezing to death were all plausible possibilities.
Concannon wrote to Facebook that he began aiding with rescue efforts as soon as he heard the Titan had gone missing. He did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
