For five harrowing days now, five monied thrill-seekers have been trapped in a vessel the size of a minibus dubbed “Titan” after their deep ocean journey mission to travel to the wreckage of the legendary 1912 sunken ship ‘Titanic’ took a different turn.
The vessel began the two-and-a-half-hour descent to the famous wreckage early Sunday when it suddenly lost contact with its mother ship, the Polar Prince, just an hour and 45 minutes into the journey.
The Titan submersible is a 22-foot (6.7-meter)-long vessel operated by Everett, Washington-based OceanGate Expeditions.
It first made a voyage dive to 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) in December of 2018, according to the company’s website, and first dove to the site of the Titanic – about 3,800 meters beneath the Atlantic – in 2021. It planned to make 18 such dives this year.
Unlike a submarine, a submersible has limited power reserves and needs a support ship – in this case, the Polar Prince – on the surface to launch and recover it.
While a submarine can stay underwater for months, a submersible, or in this case, the ‘Titan’, can only stay underwater for roughly 10 to 11 hours during each trip.
OceanGate Expeditions, which runs the Titan’s trips, charges $250,000 (approx. Ksh 35 million) for a seat.
British billionaire businessman Hamish Harding, French diver and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood have all been confirmed to be on board.
The fifth person is the OceanGate CEO and the submersible’s founder Stockton Rush.
With no GPS underwater, Titan communicates with its mother ship by text messages, and, according to OceanGate Expeditions’ website, the submersible is required to communicate every 15 minutes – the last communication between the vessel and the Polar Prince came in at 11:47 a.m. Sunday.
As news of the impending tragedy started spreading across the globe, top world governments and navy militaries immediately swung into action.
A massive number of aircraft, ships and underwater equipment from the U.S., Canada and France were all dispatched for the search for the missing Titan submersible.
As news continued to emerge, it was reported that the vessel only had about a 96-hour supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday.
Now, according to multiple world media reports, the oxygen has dangerously low and is about to run out.
US President Joe Biden, the King of the United Kingdom King Charles and several other world leaders spoke out on their concern for the tragic turn of events.
King Charles, whose charities Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood was an avid supporter of, requested to be “kept fully up to date on the situation.”
John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, said that US President Biden was watching the events closely.
Across the internet, and especially on Twitter, the story took a life of its own – celebrities weighed in, sea experts published their thoughts, thousands of memes were made and the topic became one of the most searched items on the internet in 2023 so far.
Millions of people have been glued to their television screens, to their gadgets, fascinated by maritime experts detailing the insurmountable hurdles for rescue efforts in a vast expanse of sea, with many unable to imagine the horrors and absolute nightmare the men in the submersible are going through.
Add that to the fact that these men are surrounded by absolute underwater darkness and you have the perfect John Carpenter horror blockbuster.
Black Twitter, always on hand to provide the perfect comic relief to global tragedies struck again – this time, lampooning the ‘billionaires’ for such a seemingly unwise excursion.
With reports of ‘banging sounds’ being circulated across the US media, one thing is for sure – the oxygen supply has, or will run out by the time you’re done digesting this article.
It’s a multinational maritime search like no other – and one that will certainly occupy the history books, just like the ill-fated Titanic, which inspired the whole tragedy.
