OceanGate Expeditions, the corporation responsible for the trip, is unlikely to cover the expense of the efforts to recover the passengers of the Titan, the submersible whose debris was located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Rescue specialist David Mearns said that once you locate a debris field, the implication is a catastrophic failure, and generally, that is an implosion.
As Mearns put it, the only good news is that everything would have happened so fast (in milliseconds) that the passengers wouldn’t have had time to realize what was occurring.
P-8 Poseidon, CP-140 Aurora aircraft, Canadian P-3 Orionas, and their vessels Glace Bay and Horizon Arctic were among the many boats, aircraft, and submersibles used during the four-day rescue operation. Three American C-17, C-130 aircraft, and transport planes worked with the French ship L’Atalante.
According to Chris Boyer, the National Association for Search and Rescue executive director, the rescue operation would “probably cost millions.”
Retired Admiral Paul Zukunft, who headed the US Coast Guard from 2014-2018, said, OceanGate will be treated just like any private citizen who goes out and has a marine accident. They get them. The Coast Guard doesn’t make people pay for accidents.
“The Coast Guard, by default, always hopes that victims rise to the surface and live to see the next day.
The U.S. Navy also dispatched the Flyaway Deep Ocean Salvage device (FADOSS), a winch device that can retrieve things from depths of up to 20,000 feet but requires 24 hours to weld onto a boat to the site of the submerged submersible.
Reports on Thursday suggested that the passengers may have perished early in the voyage when the submersible exploded, killing them instantly; thus, the extra time may not have mattered in the end.
