Curated By: Shankhyaneel Sarkar
Last Updated: June 22, 2023, 21:07 IST
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
In a race against the clock on the high seas, an expanding international armada of ships and aeroplanes search for the submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic while taking five people down to the wreck of the Titanic. (Image: AP Photo)
Rear Admiral John Mauger and Guillermo Söhnlein, co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions, urged people to remain hopeful.
Rear Admiral John Mauger of the US Coast Guard told UK-based Sky News that the operation to find the missing submersible is “still an active search and rescue” operation.
When Sky News asked him about the availability of oxygen on board, Mauger did not directly respond. He said that teams are continuing the search and rescue operation keeping in their thoughts the crew members and their families in their thoughts. “We continue to keep the crew members and the families in our thoughts as we proceed with this search and rescue while we’re cognisant of the time and we’ve factored in a lot of data and information into the search,” Mauger was quoted as saying by Sky News.
“This is still an active search and rescue at this point and we’re using the equipment that we have on the bottom right now, the remote operated vehicles to expand our search capability,” Mauger further added.
ROVs or remote-operated vehicles have reached the sea floor and are searching for the missing Titanic submersible early Thursday morning. The US Coast Guard said that the French vessel L’Atalante is preparing their ROV to enter the water.
The vessel which is operated by OceanGate Expeditions began its two-hour descent into the Titanic shipwreck on Sunday morning but after almost one and a half hour it lost contact with the Polar Prince, the support ship that transported the craft to the location in the North Atlantic.
It remains unclear what happened to the submersible and why and how it lost contact with the mother ship and how far it was from the Titanic shipwreck when it went missing.
Guillermo Söhnlein, co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions, told news agency CNN that the time remaining to rescue passengers is longer than “what most people think”.
OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet are believed to be on board the submersible.
The search and rescue operation is at a critical stage and rescue teams are racing against time to locate the vessel. The submersible begins each trip with 96 hours of life support.
CNN also reported that a Canadian Navy ship carrying a medical team specialising in dive medicine and a hyperbaric recompression chamber which can hold up to six people have arrived on scene to help with the search and rescue operation.
