ST. LOUIS – On a quest to see the Titanic wreckage, five men lost their lives.
“Worst situation is something happened to the hull,” said G. Michael Harris.
Harris led the largest expedition to the Titanic wreck site in 2005, according to his website.
“Our fear is it imploded at around 3200 meters,” he said.
That fear was confirmed by the US Coast Guard on Thursday when they found debris from the submersible.
“We found five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan,” said Paul Hankin, the U.S. Navy Director of Salvage Operations. “Within that large debris field, we found the front-end bell of the pressure hull. That was our first indication that there was a catastrophic event.”
The Ocean Gate Expedition, known as Titan, took five passengers to the site of the Titanic, 900 miles off the coast of the U.S. in the North Atlantic. However, only two hours into the dive, the submersible lost contact.
A multinational search effort began between the U.S., Canada, and France to rescue the five passengers on board. There were four passengers and submersible pilot Stockton Rush who is also the CEO of Ocean Gate Expedition. British billionaire Hamish Harding made a habit of exploring. He visited the South Pole several times and outer space. Two members of a prominent Pakistani family Shanzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman were also on board along with 77-year-old former French navy diver Paul Henri Nargelot who was part of one of the first expeditions to visit the Titanic in 1987.
Ocean Gate’s first successful Titanic wreck voyage was completed in 2021.