‘NIGHTMARISH’: Director knew about sub’s implosion on Monday

Star filmmaker James Cameron who directed award-winning film Titanic, has labelled the rescue mission to find missing submersible Titan “futile” after he was told on Monday it had imploded. 

The 68-year-old sea expert said he was informed there was a noise that sounded like the OceanGate vessel imploding just a day after it had lost communication with its mothership.

His explosive claims were aired during an interview with veteran journalist Anderson Cooper on CNN on Friday.

“I’ve been living with it for a few days now, as have some of my colleagues in the deep submergence community,” he said.
 

“I tracked down some intel that was probably of a military origin, although it could have been research – because there are hydrophones all over the Atlantic – and got confirmation that there was loud noise consistent with an implosion.”

While he wasn’t shocked by the news, the director – who has travelled down to the wreckage of the historic ship several times – said he still felt “heart sick from the outcome”. 

“I‘ve been living with it for a few days now, as have some of my colleagues in the deep submergence community,” he said.

“I was out on a ship myself when this happened on Sunday.

“The first I heard of it was on Monday morning. I immediately got on my network – because it’s a very small community in the deep submergence group – and found out some information with about a half-hour that they had lost comms and they had lost tracking simultaneously.

“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion. A shockwave event so powerful 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 let his inner circle know of the implosion and they raised their glass to the crew on Monday, Perth Now reports. 

“Then 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.”

The US Coast Guard confirmed the five people aboard the missing sub died in what appears to have been a “catastrophic implosion” on Friday.

A Canadian robotic diving sub discovered a debris field on the seabed, made up of five significant fragments of the Titan including the sub’s tail cone and two pressure hull sections.

Earlier Cameron said the sub had been the source of widespread concern in the close-knit ocean exploration community, and drew parallels to the 1912 ocean liner sinking in which around 1,500 people died.

“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result,” he told ABC News.

“And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site, with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing.

“It’s really quite surreal.” 
 

Cameron – who in 2012 became the first person to make a solo dive to the very deepest part of the ocean, in a submersible he designed and built – said the risk of a sub imploding under pressure was always “first and foremost” in engineers’ minds.

“That’s the nightmare that we’ve all lived with” since entering the field of deep exploration, he said, pointing to the sector’s very strong safety record over recent decades.

But “many people in the community were very concerned about this sub,” he said. “A number of the top players in the deep-submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers, and that it needed to be certified.” 

The Hollywood director added that he had personally known one of the lost submersible passengers, French ocean explorer Paul-Henri “PH” Nargeolet.

“It’s a very small community. I’ve known PH for 25 years. For him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process.” 

Cameron has visited the Titanic shipwreck many times in the course of – and since – directing his 1997 epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, which won a joint-record 11 Oscars.

“I know the wreck site very well … I actually calculated that I spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day,” he said.

– With Perth Now and AFP