At Titanic Site, the Grim Job Now assesses the submarine’s debris

Now that the world knows what happened to the Titan, the submarine that disappeared Sunday while diving to view the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, officials are turning their attention to learning how and why the ship apparently imploded, killing everyone on board. life came.

Thursday’s discovery of pieces of the Titan on the ocean floor effectively ended a rescue operation that had attracted much of the world’s attention. The United States Coast Guard, which led the search, would now be “focused on documenting the scene,” Vice Admiral John Mauger said at a news conference Thursday.

The Transport Safety Board of Canada announced this on Friday announced that it launched an investigation into the disaster. The board is involved because the ship that landed and launched the Titan, the MV Polar Prince, is Canadian.

A team of investigators will collect information and conduct interviews in collaboration with other agencies, the board said.

The fate of the Titan was not known until Thursday morning, in part because it took days to transport remote-controlled vehicles capable of reaching the depths of the Titanic, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface. After the vehicles deployed, the Titanic’s debris was spotted within hours, in an area about 500 meters away from the Titanic’s bow, according to Admiral Mauger.

Experts said the remote vehicles will likely be used to continue investigating the site and retrieve some items. But parts of the stricken submarine will likely remain on the ocean floor indefinitely, they said. It remained unclear whether any human remains were seen or could be recovered.

“We should expect the ROVs to identify as much as possible on site and also to bring as much to the surface as possible,” said Jennifer K. Waters, the provost of the State University of New York Maritime College.

They wouldn’t be able to collect everything on the ocean floor, she said, but they could take some material that could be useful in research.

If the implosion occurred well above the ocean floor, fragments of the submarine could have spread over a wide area, said James G. Bellingham, a professor of reconnaissance robotics at Johns Hopkins University. “They will have to look for Titan debris among the Titanic debris at the bottom,” he added.

But the ocean is so deep there that “salvaging anything is a huge, expensive undertaking,” says Mike Jarvis, the president of the American Salvage Association, an industry group for marine salvage workers.

The military tends to invest resources in recovering its own sunken assets, Mr Jarvis said, but recovery efforts for private ships like the Titan would likely be limited by cost. He estimated that a Titan recovery mission could cost $250,000 a day.

The Navy this week sent a heavy underwater object lifting mechanism called the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage System to the scene of the disappearance to aid in search and recovery efforts. But it remains unclear if and when the system will be used.

The Titan, a 25-foot tubular vessel with a single porthole, was owned by OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, was piloting the submarine when it disappeared.

“The entire OceanGate family is deeply grateful to the countless men and women from multiple organizations of the international community who have accelerated extensive resources and worked so hard towards this mission,” the company said in a statement, adding that its employees were “exhausted and deeply saddened by this loss.”

OceanGate did not answer questions about recovery efforts or investigations, nor whether there had been some kind of data recorder — such as an airplane black box — on the Titan.

The Coast Guard and the Navy did not immediately respond to questions about the future course of salvage operations on Friday.

“I know there are a lot of questions about how, why, when this happened,” Admiral Mauger said Thursday, adding that authorities had the same questions. “That will, I’m sure, be the focus of future reviews.”