OceanGate Suspends Operations After Titan Submersible Implosion – OceanGate has decided to halt all exploration and commercial activities after the tragic incident in which their submersible vessel Titan collapsed, resulting in the loss of all five individuals on board. In a recent announcement on their website, the organization stated that they will no longer be dispatching personnel to explore the wreckage of the Titanic or any other locations.
Established in 2009 by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein, OceanGate is a private company that has been utilizing leased commercial submersibles to offer customers immersive experiences in various locations, including the shipwrecks of the Andrea Doria and the Titanic, over the past 13 years. OceanGate gained international recognition in June when one of its submersible vessels went missing.
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The US Coast Guard later confirmed that the Titan experienced a devastating implosion, resulting in the loss of all individuals on board, including Stockton Rush. The other victims were Hamish Harding, a British adventurer aged 58; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a 77-year-old French Titanic explorer; Shahzada Dawood, a 48-year-old British Pakistani businessman; and his 19-year-old son Suleman.
Recently, the presumed human remains of those who perished were successfully retrieved from within the wreckage. Officials have stated that the Coast Guard will transport the recovered evidence from the North Atlantic to a port in the United States. Medical professionals at the port are scheduled to conduct a formal analysis of the remains. “The evidence will provide investigators from several international jurisdictions with critical insights into the cause of this tragedy.”
“There is still a substantial amount of work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the Titan and help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again,” said Jason Neubauer, a chair captain with the Marine Board of Investigation. The film director and deep sea expert James Cameron told Reuters in the wake of the implosion that he was skeptical when he heard OceanGate was making a deep-sea submersible with a composite carbon fibre and titanium hull.
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“I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face,” Cameron said. Many other experts within the field reportedly shared their uneasiness with OceanGate’s submersible for this voyage, telling Rush and others at OceanGate prior to embarking that “there were multiple points of failure”.