The CEO of a company that retrieved the Titan submersible wreckage told a press conference that ocean exploration is all about “a passion and a joy for exploration.”
Ed Cassano, the CEO of Pelagic Research Services, said ocean exploration was “very compelling” and that he was aware of OceanGate’s activities before the Titan sub’s fateful final trip. “It’s a very small community,” he said.
“Explorers, people who seek to be on the ocean, to go to depth – it’s very compelling. We certainly share those desires. The entire company was designed to promote research and deep science. There was a passion and a joy for exploration,” said Cassano.
His company sent down a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) called Odysseus 6K to search for the missing sub, and it quickly found the debris nearby the original Titanic wreck.
Odysseus 6K was the only ROV that took part in the search effort able to reach the depths of the Titanic wreckage.
He stated that although they were prepared to save the Titan submarine, it became apparent that passengers would not survive the trip.
“By 12 o’clock, sadly, a rescue turned into a recovery,” Cassano said, as Insider previously reported.
“Shortly after we arrived on the seafloor, we discovered the debris of the Titan submersible,” he added.
Cassano was visibly moved in the press conference, where he described his team’s efforts, appearing to hold back tears.
” “I apologize. We are still in the process of demobilizing. There are a lot emotions and people are tired,” said Cassano.
The submersible suffered a “catastrophic implosion” as it descended to view the Titanic wreck. All five passengers onboard the Titan, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, died during the incident.
The US Coast Guard announced that human remains were also recovered.
Also onboard the sub was British billionaire Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, and French sub-pilot and explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The company charged passengers $250,000 each to participate in the voyage.
Investigation into what went wrong on the doomed sub could take years
Though it’s difficult to know for sure what happened, an expert previously told Insider, based on analyzing images of the retrieved wreckage, that the most likely scenario was that the vessel’s carbon-fiber hull gave way under pressure.
Jasper Graham-Jones, associate professor in Mechanical & Marine Engineering at Plymouth University, said both the window failing and the hull failing would have led to the implosion of the ship.
It appears that safety concerns about the design and operation of the vessel were long ignored or dismissed.
Investigators will now be taking a close look at the remains of the ship to determine exactly what happened.
They’ll be “effectively looking under a microscope, at all the parts. Graham-Jones said that this would give you a good idea as to why it failed. On Friday, officials in the US said they would report back in one to two years.
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