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This has been such an awful, strange, macabre and ultimately tragic story. Sunday morning, OceanGate lost contact with their tourist submarine, a vessel which carried people down to the site of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean. The Titanic site is and should be considered a mass gravesite, and it’s deeply inappropriate to see it become a “tourist attraction” for the idle rich, men with too much money and too little sense. That’s exactly what happened here: OceanGate’s Titan submersible went missing and lost contact, and endless resources were spent Monday through Thursday to locate the vessel and perhaps attempt a search-and-rescue mission. Then, on Thursday, some news: debris was found near the Titanic site. All five men on the submersible are presumed dead, and it’s believed that the submarine imploded on Sunday, as it descended to the Titanic mass grave site.

All five people aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday were believed to be dead, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday, ending a dayslong rescue effort that gripped much of the world.

“On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families,” Rear Admiral John Mauger said in a news conference on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, a remote-controlled vehicle located debris from the Titan submersible, including its tail cone, on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, he said.

“The debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” Admiral Mauger said.

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, was piloting the submersible. The four passengers were a British businessman and explorer, Hamish Harding; a British-Pakistani businessman, Shahzada Dawood, and his teenage son, Suleman; and a French maritime expert, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had been on over 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

For rescuers, the search for the pilot and four passengers aboard the submersible, the Titan, was always a race against time. When the submersible, a 22-foot-long vessel owned by OceanGate, lost contact with a chartered ship on Sunday morning, it was more than halfway into its dive to the wreck of the Titanic, and it was believed to be equipped with only four days’ worth of oxygen.

Asked what the prospects were of recovering the bodies of the victims, Admiral Mauger said he did not have an answer. “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor,” he said.

[From The NY Times]

As the NYT noted (from the Coast Guard’s presser), the possibility of a recovery operation for the remains is an open question. I hope that they do not attempt any recovery operation – let the dead bury the dead. A mass gravesite claimed five more souls. Let this be the end of this kind of Titanic tourism.

Which isn’t to say that this should be the end of the reporting or the accountability. OceanGate needs to reimburse the government for the expense of these search-and-rescue efforts, and I would imagine that the victims’ families will be suing the f–k out of OceanGate too. There should be a consensus about adding more safety regulations to these kinds of submersibles too – from what I understand, the science of this submersible never made any sense, and a tragedy like this was sadly inevitable.

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