"Titanic" director James Cameron sees "terrible irony" as OceanGate also got "warnings that were ignored"
The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that it would continue its investigation of the debris found near the Titanic wreckage to try to find out how and when the OceanGate Titan submersible imploded after diving to visit the famous shipwreck. An official told CBS News the U.S. Navy detected a noise consistent with an implosion shortly after the Titan first lost contact Sunday.
All five people who were on the Titan are presumed dead, and as CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi reports, it's unclear if their bodies will ever be recovered. It was not the outcome anyone had hoped for, but for some deep-sea dive veterans, it was clear days before the tell-tale debris was spotted Thursday that the Titan had likely met a "catastrophic" end.
"OceanGate shouldn't have been doing what it was doing. I think that's pretty clear," movie director and explorer James Cameron told CBS News' partner network BBC News on Thursday. "I wish I had been more vocal about that, but I think I was unaware that they weren't certified because I wasn't really studying it."
Cameron, who directed the Hollywood blockbuster "Titanic," has made more than 30 dives to the wreckage site, starting in the 1990s. He made the dives in Russian-made "Mir" submersibles, which were designed and operated by the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He also designed his own sub, built in Australia in conjunction with the National Geographic Society and Swiss watchmaker Rolex, which he used in 2012 to travel to the deepest part of the Ocean, in the Mariana Trench. That dive took him to a corner of the seafloor 35,876 feet below the surface — much more than twice the depth of the Titanic wreckage site.
Cameron told the BBC he knew an "extreme catastrophic event" had happened as soon as he heard the OceanGate submersible had lost navigation and communications at the same time on Sunday.
"For me, there was no doubt," Cameron said. "There was no search. When they finally got an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) down there that could make the depth, they found it within hours. Probably within minutes."
Cameron said remarks from authorities and information from OceanGate about there being 96 hours' worth of oxygen on the Titan, and the banging noises detected by surveillance planes scouring the search area, had only fueled a "prolonged and nightmarish charade" giving the families of those on the sub false hope.
The naval official who spoke to CBS News said the banging sounds reported by the Canadian aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday were likely from other ships in the area.
Cameron noted to the BBC that the wider global community of deep-sea explorers had previously raised concerns about OceanGate's Titan craft, including a letter penned by submersible engineers at the Maritime Technology Society in 2018, and he said there was a grim parallel between the Titan tragedy and the sinking of the Titanic itself in 1912.
"We now have another wreck that is based on, unfortunately, the same principles of not heeding warnings," he said, calling it a "terrible irony."
"OceanGate were warned," Cameron said. "It's not lost on me as somebody who studied the meaning of Titanic… it's about warnings that were ignored. That ship is lying at the bottom of the ocean, not because of the nature of its steel or the nature of its compartments, but just because of bad seamanship. The captain was warned, there were icebergs ahead, it was a moonless night and he plowed ahead."
Guillermo Soehnlein, who founded OceanGate alongside Stockton Rush but left the company in 2013, told a U.K. radio network on Friday that he didn't take part in designing the Titan, but he insisted Rush, who was piloting the submersible and had taken control of the company, "was extremely committed to safety."
"He was also extremely diligent about managing risks, and was very keenly aware of the dangers of operating in a deep ocean environment," Soehnlein told the Times Radio network in response to Cameron's remarks. "That's one of the main reasons I agreed to go into business with him in 2009."
In a statement, OceanGate said it was "grieving deeply over this loss."
The U.S. Coast Guard said that while it would continue to investigate the incident, it was starting to demobilize some of the international search effort led by its Northeast district as of Friday.
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- RMS Titanic
- Submarine
- James Cameron
- Submersible
Tucker Reals is the CBSNews.com foreign editor, based at the CBS News London bureau.
