Rescuers rush to find submersible before oxygen runs out

Receive free marine accident and safety updates

We will send you a file myFT Daily Digest Rounding email to the latest Maritime accidents and safety News every morning.

US and Canadian search teams were making a last-ditch effort Thursday to find a submarine that went missing on the wreckage of the Titanic before the five people on board the small craft ran out of oxygen.

Remotely operated planes, ships and submarines from the United States and Canada are searching an area 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, focusing on places where sonar equipment has detected sounds likely to come from the rover.

The effort comes as evidence mounts of a long record of concerns about the safety approach of OceanGate, the private company that offered the trip, and the 10.4-ton Titan submarine that used it.

Titan is designed to receive 96 hours of oxygen from the start of any dive. Given that the ship began diving toward the wreckage of the Titanic at 9:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, that should give the ship enough oxygen until 1 p.m. London time or 8 a.m. EST on Thursday.

US Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick said researchers did not know the nature of the underwater sounds Canadian aircraft had detected in the area in recent days.

“The good news is . . . we are looking in the area where noises have been detected and we will continue to do so,” he said on Wednesday.

The John Cabot, a Canadian Coast Guard vessel with sonar capabilities, has been at the search site since Wednesday morning local time. Two merchant ships, the Skandi Vinland and the Atlantic Merlin, are also helping in the search.

Stockton Rush, founder of OceanGate, and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, French explorer, were widely reported to be among the five people on board. Relatives of Hamish Harding, a British businessman, Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani businessman, and Dawood’s 19-year-old son confirmed they were passengers on the plane.

Titan is one of a handful of manned submarines seeking to operate in the depths of the wreckage of the British passenger liner Titanic which sank in 1912, claiming the lives of around 1,500 people. The wreck lies about 3,800 meters below sea level, where pressures are about 380 times atmospheric pressure at the surface.

OceanGate’s website has assurances about safety systems on board the ship, including a “real-time health monitoring” system that it says makes it possible to accurately “assess hull integrity.”

“The on-board health analysis monitoring system provides early warning detection to the pilot with sufficient time to abort the descent and return safely to the surface,” the website says.

However, reports since the ship’s disappearance have revealed that as early as 2018, Will Cohnen, an expert with the American Marine Technology Association, described the company’s approach to safety as having potential negative consequences “from minor to catastrophic.”

Kohnen questioned OceanGate’s insistence on classifying its operations as “experimental” and not seeking industry certification. He called the company’s claims exceeding industry standards “misleading to the public” and breaching the “industry-wide code of conduct we all seek to uphold”.

Passengers paying the $250,000 cost of a trip on the Titan are required to sign a waiver warning in several places of potential fatal dangers.

There was more evidence of concerns about the company’s safety culture Legal action It was introduced in 2018 by David Lochridge, the company’s former Director of Marine Operations. Lockridge claimed he was dismissed for raising safety concerns, including whether the ship’s viewing port was certified to handle the stresses created by the extreme depth of the Titanic’s wreck.

Lochridge’s action was in response to legal action taken by OceanGate accusing him of leaking classified information.

OceanGate did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on the allegations made by Kohnen and Lochridge.