CNN
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A week after the submersible Titan began what turned out to be a catastrophic underwater journey to the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board, US officials outlined their next steps in investigating the disaster.
The U.S. Coast Guard announced Sunday that it has convened a Marine Board of Investigation to investigate the implosion, the “highest level of investigation the Coast Guard conducts,” said the Guard’s chief investigator US Coast Guard Captain Jason Neubauer.
The group will be tasked with determining what caused the tragedy and making possible recommendations “to the appropriate authorities to pursue whatever civil or criminal penalties are necessary,” Neubauer said at a news conference Sunday.
The Coast Guard probe, one of several announced since Titan imploded, is just getting started and will focus on collecting debris from the wreckage and interviews. After that, the board will hold a public hearing to gather additional testimony from witnesses, Neubauer said. It will then issue a report with evidence, conclusions and recommendations, he added.
As officials try to piece together exactly what happened, investigators will also review voice recordings from the mother ship carrying the ship and its five occupants, Canadian officials said.
Canadian researchers He boarded that ship, the Polar Prince, “to collect information from the ship’s voyage data recorder and other systems on the ship that contain useful information,” Kathy Fox, chairwoman of the U.S. Transportation Safety Board, said Saturday. canada A voyage data recorder stores audio from the ship’s bridge.
Crew and family members were also being interviewed aboard the Polar Prince, which returned to St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, with its flags at half-mast on Saturday.
The agency’s mission is not to assign blame, but to “find out what happened and why and figure out what needs to change to reduce the possibility or risk of these happening in the future,” Fox said.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are also investigating the incident and said they are looking into whether “criminal, federal or provincial laws may have been violated.”
Communications between the sub and its mother ship will also be examined by officials probing the disaster. The ship would be able to communicate with the submersible via text messages and must communicate every 15 minutes, according to the archived website of OceanGate Expeditions.
The latest announcements come just about three days after the U.S. Coast Guard announced that the ship had suffered a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone on board. Military experts found debris in the ocean, about 1,600 feet off the Titanic’s bow, consistent with the loss of the small vessel’s pressure chamber, US Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said.
The dead were Stockton Rush, CEO of the ship’s operator OceanGate Expeditions; British businessman Hamish Harding; French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, who were British citizens.
Meanwhile, the mission to recover debris from the submersible’s implosion continues in the Atlantic Ocean, according to a statement from Pelagic Research Services, first seen by CNN on Sunday.
The Odysseus 6K, a remotely operated vehicle, is on the sea floor on its fourth dive since arriving at the Titan rescue site, the statement said.
The company added that Odysseus’ heavy-lift capabilities “have been and continue to be used” on the Titan recovery mission, but did not confirm whether any debris had been recovered and sent CNN to the Guard US Coast Guard, which is leading the implosion investigation and recovery effort.
CNN has reached out to the Coast Guard for comment.
The vehicles that have been collecting information from the The seabed has worked to trace the ship’s debris field, which is more than 2 miles deep in the North Atlantic, said Mauger, the rear admiral of the US Coast Guard.
Five different major pieces of debris from the submersible were found Thursday morning, officials said. Each end of the pressure hull was found in a different location, according to Paul Hankins, director of Salvage Operations and Ocean Engineering for the US Navy.
ROV missions are expected to continue for another week, according to Jeff Mahoney, a spokesman for Pelagic Research Services, a company that specializes in ocean expeditions.
Any attempt to recover anything from the debris field will warrant a larger operation in conjunction with Deep Energy, another company helping with the mission, because the debris will likely be too heavy for Pelagic’s ROV to lift on its own, he said Mahoney on CNN Friday. Recovery efforts would include using rigging to remove any debris.
The multinational investigation comes amid growing questions about the Titan’s design.
A CNN review of OceanGate’s marketing material, public statements made by Rush and court records show that while the company touted a commitment to security measures, it rejected industry standards that they would have imposed greater scrutiny on their operations and ships.
The company deviated from industry norms by declining a voluntary and rigorous safety review of the vessel, according to an industry leader.
And when in April 2019, when submersible expert Karl Stanley was aboard the Titan for an underwater excursion off the coast of the Bahamas, he felt something was wrong with the vessel when loud noises were heard and emailed Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions. , sounding the alarm about suspected defects.
“What we heard, in my opinion…sounded like a flaw/defect in an area that was acted upon by the tremendous pressures and crushed/damaged,” Stanley wrote in the email, a copy of which has been obtained by CNN.
“From the intensity of the sounds, the fact that they never fully stopped at depth, and the fact that there were sounds at about 300 feet that indicated a relaxation of stored energy/would indicate that there is an area of the hull that ‘it’s breaking. down/ it gets fluffy,” continued Stanley.
When asked for comment about Stanley’s email, an OceanGate spokesperson told CNN they could not provide any additional information at this time.
