More than a year after the Titan bathyscaphe disaster, in which on 18 June 2023 they 5 people lost their lives due to an implosion during an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic, a official reconstruction of the incident. The video was shown during a public hearing held yesterday Monday 16 September 2024 and requested by the Marine Board of Investigations from the Coast Guard United States. This allows us to clarify, among other things, the exact descent trajectory of the Titan. latest communications occurred between the bathyscaphe and the surface through short text messages. Among other things, in these hours several newspapers have reported that the last message from the Titan would have been “all good here” (“everything’s fine here“) but, in reality, this is not the case: even if this message was actually sent by the Titan, the last message was “dropped two wts” (“two weights dropped”) sent at 10:47, a few seconds before the loss of contact with the ship Polar Prince.
During the hearing, which lasted approximately 10 hourswere also shown unpublished images of the remains of the hull (taken on June 22, 2023 by Pelagic Research Services) and were questioned numerous witnesses and ex-employeesso as to shed light on the matter.
The summary of the communications: the last message is not “all is well here”
The Titan began its descent shortly before 9:20 a.m. At 9:52 the ship Polar Prince (hereafter, for brevity, PP), asked the Titan if it could identify the PP within their display. After 15 minutes of silence and 6 prompts, the crew finally responded in the affirmative. After signaling to the bathyscaphe that communications should be better on their part, someone from inside the Titan wrote “all good here“, meaning “everything’s fine here”. We don’t know exactly who sent the message, we only know that he signed it as “ph“: it is assumed that they were the initials of the name of Paul-Henri Nargeoletone of the victims of the disaster.
After a few minutes the communications continued with continuous requests for updates from the PP regarding the depth reached by the Titan. The bathyscaphe was also reminded to release a Niskin bottlethat is, a device usually used to sample water. They warn that they have not done so (“no niskin“) because the device was not clean. The last communication of the Titan, as we said at the beginning, is related to the release of two weights at o’clock 10:47. A few moments later the implosion would have occurred.
Hearing Statements: Titan’s Safety Problems
Thanks to the witness statements, many pieces of information emerged that were useful to the Coast Guard in shedding light on the incident. For example, it was discovered that a vessel suitable for transporting the Titan was not chosen due to the excessively high rental prices. In the end, the Polar Prince was chosen, a Canadian-flagged research vessel that, however, did not have enough space to transport the bathyscaphe on board: for this reason, it was “dragged” to the dive site and not loaded directly on board.
It also emerged that the employees were working under strong pressure from the company to meet the scheduled dates for each dive and that the vessel, during some trips, would not have been technically ready. This is also confirmed by Tony Nissenformer chief engineer at OceanGate (the company that built the Titan) until 2019 and the first witness at the public hearing, who allegedly refused to even get on the vehicle for fear of possible damage at depth. During yesterday’s hearing, several Titan safety concerns: Nissen said he was fired from OceanGate because he would not allow the bathyscaphe into the water due to concerns about the Titan’s safety. The bathyscaphe would have had 118 safety issues in the previous two years to that of the disaster: 70 in 2021 and 48 in 2022. According to Nissen’s statements, on May 25, 2023, less than a month before the implosion, the Titan would have half sunk following a storm that had hit the previous day, and damage to the fairing and 13 safety problems were subsequently found.
