TORONTO: About 40 hours of oxygen is left in the lost Titanic tourist submersible, which disappeared Sunday on an expedition to explore the famed shipwreck, the US coast guard said Tuesday.
Coast Guard members provided an update to search efforts to find the submersible and answered questions from reporters.
“There’s about 40 hours of breathable air left based on that initial report,” Anadolu Agency reported Captain Jamie Frederick from the First Coast Guard district response department said.
“The search efforts have focused on both surface with sea 130 aircraft searching by sight and with radar and subsurface with p3 aircraft. We’re able to drop in monitor sonar buoys, today, those search efforts have not yielded any results,” he said.
The search teams are working in an area that is 900 miles east of Cape Cod, 400 miles south of St. John’s, Canada, and it takes time and coordination to bring assets to bear, which makes it an incredibly complex operation, he said.
Regarding search and rescue operations, the US Navy is “on standby should they be needed,” according to the White House.
The Navy has “some deep water capabilities that the Coast Guard wouldn’t necessarily have,” it also reported National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said in a news briefing.
Authorities in the US and Canada are racing against the clock to locate the vessel that was carrying people to see the Titanic wreckage site in the North Atlantic Ocean.
When it went missing, the submersible had 96 hours of additional oxygen available.
Five people are on board, including Hamish Harding, a British billionaire explorer, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a renowned French diver.
In London, safety fears had previously been raised about the deep-sea vessel which went missing on a dive to the Titanic shipwreck, reported German news agency (dpa).
The submersible, named Titan, lost communication with tour operators on Sunday while about 435 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland, during a voyage to the shipwreck off the coast of Canada.
Titan has five people on board, including British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, and on Tuesday, the US Coast Guard estimated the 6.7 m long OceanGate Expeditions vessel had just 40 hours of oxygen left.
The others on board are Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman and OceanGate’s chief executive and founder Stockton Rush, reportedly together with French submersible pilot Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
It is understood King Charles III is being kept informed of the search efforts, as Shahzada Dawood is a long-time supporter of The Prince’s Trust International and The British Asian Trust, both of which are charities founded by the monarch.
As the race to find the vessel intensified on Tuesday, it emerged a former employee of OceanGate had raised concerns over “safety and quality control issues regarding the Titan to OceanGate executive management,” according to court filings.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, claimed in the August 2018 court document he was wrongfully fired after flagging worries about the company’s alleged “refusal to conduct critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental design”.
After “issues of quality control” with Titan were raised, the filings say Rush asked Lochridge to conduct a “quality inspection” report on the vessel.
During this process, Lochridge “identified numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns” but he was allegedly “met with hostility and denial of access” to necessary documents before later being fired.
The document claims he became concerned about a “lack of non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan”, and that he “stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths”. – BERNAMA-ANADOLU AGENCY
