Posted on 06/22/2023 6:11:45 AM PDT by Red Badger
As of yesterday afternoon it was thought just 20 hours of oxygen remained in the vessel.
LAST UPDATE | 7 minutes ago
It is estimated that the Titan will run out of oxygen within hours Experts are divided over the source of noises heard by ships in the search area Additional resources, including a vessel with the ability to dive to the depth of the Titanic wreck, have arrived at the scene today ADDITIONAL HELP IS being sent to find the missing Titan submersible with just hours of oxygen thought to be left for those onboard.
The vessel lost communication with tour operators on Sunday while about 435 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland, during a voyage to the Titanic shipwreck off the coast of Canada.
As of yesterday afternoon it was thought just 20 hours of oxygen remained in the vessel, meaning it would have run out at some point this morning or early afternoon.
The chief coordinator of the mission to find the submersible said he remains focused on rescuing the five-member crew alive, as concerns grew that their oxygen had run out.
“We continue to find in particularly complex cases that people’s will to live really needs to be accounted for as well. And so we’re continuing to search and proceed with rescue efforts,” the US Coast Guard’s Rear Admiral John Mauger told NBC’s Today show.
“This is still an active search and rescue at this point. We’re using the equipment that we have on the bottom right now, the remote operated vehicles, to expand our search capability and then also to provide rescue capability as well.”
Mauger added that the operation was making the most of good conditions at sea.
Organizers of the multinational response – which includes US and Canadian military planes, coast guard ships and teleguided robots – are focusing their efforts in the North Atlantic close to the underwater noises detected by sonar.
Earlier today, a French research ship equipped with an unmanned robot able to search deep underwater arrived near the wreck of the Titanic.
The French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea confirmed that the Atalante ship had begun operations at the scene in the North Atlantic.
It carries the Victor 6000, a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) capable of descending to a depth of 6,000 metres.
The Titanic wreck sits at a depth of 3,800 metres, making it a particularly difficult area to search – or reach for a potential rescue mission.
The Atalante has begun using its multibeam echo sounder to create a map of the nearby seabed to “allow Victor 6000 to have a more efficient dive,” a spokesperson told AFP.
But the echo sounder, which bounces acoustic waves off the seafloor to work out its depth, would not be able to detect the submersible itself.
The submersible, a 6.7m (22ft)-long OceanGate Expeditions vessel, which has British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding on board, reportedly had a 96-hour oxygen supply in case of emergencies.
Also in the undersea craft are UK-based businessman Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, and OceanGate’s chief executive and founder Stockton Rush, reportedly with French submersible pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Source of noises detected The US Coast Guard has been leading an international rescue effort which was stepped up after underwater noises were heard on Tuesday and again yesterday, although experts have been unable to determine the cause of the sound.
Former US Navy submarine commander, David Marquet, told the BBC the noises may not be coming from the submersible.
“I don’t think the noise is them, it could just be natural sounds,” he said.
“We’re hearing noises and more ships are coming into the area, and then we’re hearing more noises, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
However, deep-sea explorer Dr David Gallo believes the noises are a cause for optimism but believes it will “take hours” to rescue the submersible once it’s found.
He told Good Morning Britain: “Maybe two days ago my hope was sliding downward rapidly, but then these noises appeared and there seems to be very credible sources there, credible and repeatable.”
“In this case, the noises are repetitive, every half hour I believe.”
“Three different aircraft heard them in their sensors at the same time and it went on for two days-plus.
“It’s still going on apparently. There’s not a lot in the natural world we can think of that would do that every 30-minute cycle.
“We have to, at this point, assume that that’s the submarine and move quickly to that spot, locate it and get robots down there to verify that is where the submarine is.
“They’ve got to go fully ready as if that was the sub because it takes a while to locate it and get it up to the surface, it takes hours.”
Marquet said he remains hopeful rescuers will find the vessel with the introduction of the ROVs.
The area of the search has been expanded, with the surface search now about 10,000 square miles, and the sub-surface search about 2.5 miles deep.
embedded272696413OCEANGATE EXPEDITIONS / PA Titan is used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic
The coast guard had five surface vessels searching for Titan yesterday and they expected there to be 10 by today, captain Jamie Frederick said at a press conference yesterday.
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OceanGate Expeditions: Elon Musk, Macklemore and video game controllers He added: “What I can tell you is, we’re searching in the area where the noises were detected, and we’ll continue to do so and we hope that when we’re able to get additional ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) which will be there in the morning.
u-s-coast-guard-capt-jamie-frederick-left-faces-reporters-as-paul-hankins-u-s-navy-civilian-contractor-supervisor-of-salvage-right-looks-on-during-a-news-conference-wednesday-june-21-2023ALAMY US Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick (left) speaks at a press conference in Boston
“The intent will be to continue to search in those areas where the noises were detected, and if they’re continuing to be detected, and then put additional ROVs down on the last known position where the search was originally taking place.”
Asked whether the mission was changing to become a recovery search, he said:
“This is a search-and-rescue mission 100%, we are smack dab in the middle of search and rescue and will continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and the crew members.”
Titan is believed to be about 900 miles east and 400 miles south of Newfoundland. It is not known how deep the vessel is, with the seabed being around 3,800m from the surface.
Safety questions Questions have been raised about the safety of the vessel after it emerged earlier in the week that a former employee of OceanGate had raised concerns over “safety and quality control issues regarding the Titan to OceanGate executive management”.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, claimed in an August 2018 court document that he was wrongfully fired after flagging worries about the company’s alleged “refusal to conduct critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental design”.
Yesterday Kathleen Cosnett, a cousin of Harding, 58, told the Telegraph that OceanGate’s eight-hour delay before contacting the authorities was “far too long”.
She said: “It’s very frightening. It took so long for them to get going to rescue them, it’s far too long. I would have thought three hours would be the bare minimum.”
Sean Leet, co-founder and chairman of Horizon Maritime Services, which owns the Polar Prince mothership from which Titan launched, defended the company at a separate press conference on Wednesday.
He said: “OceanGate runs an extremely safe operation.
“Our full focus right now is getting that submersible located and getting those people brought back safely.”
Additional reporting by AFP
As one would expect in this day of “facts don’t matter”, estimates on the oxygen seem all over the place. No one really seems to know how long the air will hold out. Maybe it’s already gone. Maybe they have a few hours left. Maybe they imploded at the start of this fiasco.
Nothing is real anymore. Nothing is true.
IMHO, They are dead............
Sounds like they will send the French ROVs down there. If nothing is found, the Coast Guard will end this thing.
The REAL reason all 5 lives are/will be lost - not enough lifeboats. If only we regulated the number of lifeboats aboard this sub, this tragedy could have been averted.
With 5 souls aboard, this sub had 0 (zero!) lifeboats.
If there was even one lifeboat, the woman and children aboard could have been saved.
I do too. I question a catastrophic hull failure. Titan’s hull was made of a combination of carbon fiber and titanium. Which nautical engineers advise against, yet the CEO championed it a “innovative”.
Eventually I guess we’ll find out.
I th9ink here, ‘Innovative’ = remarkably cheaper and conducive to faster cost recovery and profit margins.
I do not KNOW but suspect the casual 96 hours thrown about does not take into consideration that panicking trapped people use up available oxygen 2 or 3 times as fast as that nominal number of hours suggest. These are/were normal people, not Shaolin priests who can control their bodily functions to reduce oxygen needs by sheer power of will.
Waste of taxpayer resources.
Well, something is real but we don’t know what. We have few facts and an avalanche of speculation.
Carbon fiber has a habit of creating tiny stress fractures that you cannot see.....................
The original Titanic is a gravesite in the cold dark depths. When you go snooping just remember not all of the dead may still be dead.
Titanic Part 2 - Jack’s Revenge
utterly insane design: GLUING titanium end rings onto a 5” thick carbon fiber tube to act as attachment points for the titanium end domes ... carbon fiber, glue, and titanium: utterly dissimilar materials with massively different deformation behavior at their junctions when under extreme pressure ...
REAL engineers would have started with computer simulations of the stresses at those junctions with those materials, and then, assuming simulations showed it might work, would have proceeded to pressure test an actual vessel at its maximum depth with dozens of attached telemetric stress gauges ... assuming THAT testing didn’t fail, then they would have proceeded to cycle a vessel between maximum pressure depth and atmospheric pressure until the vessel failed (or not) ... and no doubt, Stockton Rush did none of the above standard materials engineering and testing ...
Stockton proudly hired only neophyte DEI children for his engineers, instead of experienced submarine engineers, eschewing experienced sub engineers as fuddy duddy “old white men” ... after all, he said, fuddy duddys engineers wouldn’t “appreciate” (approve) of his “revolutionary designs” [where have we heard that before? oh yeah, from Elizabeth Holmes, who just started an eleven year Federal prison sentence related to her “revolutionary” medical testing scam ... ]
Stockton Rush rushed to join the ranks of true revolutionaries, Musk and Bezos ... instead, Stockton Rush joined the Elizabeth Holmes sociopath category: he killed customers with a bogus submarine, while she killed customers with bogus medical tests ...
“If there was even one lifeboat, the woman and children aboard could have been saved.”
Oh, so, you’re one the “them”. You think you can misgender people and save them. Just great.
It’s a range because oxygen consumption is based on behavior and that can’t be predicted or known.
It seem ridiculous in this day and age that such a sub doesn’t have a dedicated locater to sound its position. Too high tech I guess.
He was a cheap bastard.......................
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