James Cameron, the director of the 1997 blockbuster movie “Titanic,” has drawn parallels between the Titan submarine disaster and the sunken Titanic, calling it “surreal,” and pointing to safety concerns regarding the recent incident.
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result,” Cameron said in a June 23 interview with ABC News. “And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site, with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think is just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”
Cameron pointed out that “many people in the community were very concerned” about the Titan sub. In addition, several top people from the deep submergence engineering community wrote letters to OceanGate, warning that “what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers.”
The Titan submersible was reported overdue on Sunday afternoon while on a trip to explore the sunken Titanic ship in the North Atlantic Ocean. A search and rescue attempt followed but did not yield any positive results. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had found a debris field near the wreckage of the Titanic.
At a press conference, Coast Guard Admiral John W. Mauger revealed that the Titan submersible was a “catastrophic implosion” which was “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” inside the craft. The five passengers inside the sub are presumed dead.
Titan’s trip to the Titanic wreckage was led by OceanGate Expeditions. At the time of the explosion, the sub was carrying OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a leading expert on Titanic, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, a wealthy father-son duo from Pakistan, and Hamish Harding, a businessman and adventurer from Britain.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement on June 23. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”
