CNN – June 23, 2023
“Titanic” director worries implosion will have a negative impact on citizen explorers
Film director James Cameron said Thursday he’s worried that the Titan submersible’s implosion will have a negative impact on citizen explorers.
“These are serious people with serious curiosity willing to put serious money down to go to these interesting places,” the “Titanic” director told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I don’t want to discourage that. But I think that it’s almost now a lesson.
The takeaway is, make sure if you’re gonna go into a vehicle, whether it’s an aircraft or surface craft or a submersible, that it’s been through certifying agencies.”
Some background: Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, which operated the Titan submersible, and who died in the implosion, had spoken about his antipathy to regulations.
“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Stockton told journalist David Pogue in an interview last year. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”
“Titanic” director says news of submersible’s implosion did not come as a surprise
James Cameron, director of the hit 1997 film “Titanic,” says news of the Titan submersible’s explosion “certainly wasn’t a surprise.”
Cameron, who has made 33 dives to the wreckage himself, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that when he first heard the news of the Titan incident Monday morning, he connected with his small community in the deep submergence group and found out within about a half-hour that the submersible had lost communication and tracking, simultaneously.
“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion,” he told Cooper on Thursday. “A shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is.”
Cameron said he did more digging and got some additional information that seemed to confirm that the submersible had imploded.
“I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday,” Cameron said of his community group.
He said false-hopes kept getting dangled as search teams looked for the missing passengers over the following days.
“I watched over the ensuing days this whole sort of everybody-running-around-with-their-hair-on-fire search, knowing full well that it was futile, hoping against hope that I was wrong but knowing in my bones that I wasn’t,” Cameron told Cooper.
He expressed condolences for the families of the passengers.
Submersible heading to Titanic wreckage suffered “catastrophic implosion.” Here’s what we know
The five passengers on the Titan submersible that was diving 13,000 feet to view the Titanic on the ocean floor died in a “catastrophic implosion,” authorities said Thursday, bookending an extraordinary five-day international search operation near the site of the world’s most famous shipwreck.
The tail cone and other debris were found by a remotely operated vehicle about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, deep in the North Atlantic and about 900 east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
“This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, told reporters.