The discovery of wreckage from the Titan submersible last Thursday on the North Atlantic seabed close to the wreck of the Titanic brought to an end a five-day vigil of hope around the globe. The chances of rescuing the five occupants of the missing sub always appeared slight, but it was perhaps the very unlikeliness of that outcome that increased the appetite to see it realised.
In the era of 24-hour news, few events grab the public imagination quite as firmly as a real-time people-in-peril story. And it’s hard to imagine a more extreme or unpleasant peril than being trapped in deep sea in a craft the size of a minivan, as the oxygen supply runs out, and there is nothing to do but attempt to control your breathing in a situation that screams panic.
That was the scenario that the world imagined that the five men – British businessmen Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood and Dawood’s 19-year-old son Suleman, American Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, the operator, and French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, veteran of about 30 dives – were facing.
But it seems that the Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion at the moment it lost communication with its mothership, when simultaneously the transponder signalling its position also stopped working. The film-maker and deep-sea explorer James Cameron, who directed the film Titanic, says he knew what had taken place the instant he heard about the dual failures.
No doubt many others in the rescuer community reached the same conclusion. The point is, however, that as long as there was a possibility that the men were still alive, there was a powerful urge to search for them. After all, there have been several notable incidents when people have been stranded in desperate circumstance in recent years and they were successfully located and returned to safety.
All of them became compelling stories, with round-the-clock updates, continual speculation and expert opinion to fill what was often a vacuum of hard information. It’s conceivable that this precedent, and the attendant public desire for the repeat hit of a happy ending, helped mobilise the huge rescue operation.
We heard that advanced sonar had picked up the sound of someone banging, an image of almost unbearable torment. It now appears that this sound was made by other vessels in the rescue operation, a tracking dog chasing its own tail.
While it would be wrong to dismiss the part that morbid fascination plays in such situations, it should not obscure the collective wish to see human ingenuity and spirit triumph over the most dire of circumstances.
Equally, some observers have compared the detailed coverage given to these privileged men with how little we know about the refugees – even their number – who perished 11 days ago in a capsized boat near Greece. It’s a fair point, yet to view this crisis purely through the lens of inequality would be to overlook the universality of the submariners’ plight. We can all can imagine the horror of being trapped in a confined space and the desperate desire to be freed.
That the submersible was on a dive to visit the wreck of the Titanic, 3,800 meters (12,500ft) below the surface of the sea, added a kind of romantic poignancy to the drama. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 lives was front-page news around the world, although with the limited communications of the time, the initial reports suggested the damaged ocean liner was afloat and being towed back to port.
In the years since, the ship’s encounter with an iceberg has become the subject of forensic study and myth-making – there have been countless books, documentaries and feature films devoted to the event. Since the wreck’s discovery in 1985, it has exerted an even greater pull on students of the disaster and explorers of the deep. Cameron believes both incidents came as a result of captains ignoring safety warnings – it’s said that Rush had been told that the Titan was an accident waiting to happen.
If it seems obscene to pay $250,000 for a seat on a journey to a sunken ship, its remoteness has been compared with a lunar mission – the Titanic lies more than two miles beneath the surface of the sea, where no sunlight intrudes and the pressure is about 390 times that on the surface.
The crew of the Titan may have put themselves in a more daunting position even than the crew of Apollo 13, probably the first people-in-peril incident to unfold in real-time in the TV age. “Houston, we have a problem,” is a phrase that has been immortalised (Jack Swigert actually said “Houston, we’ve had a problem”).
He was referring to a failure in the oxygen tank that meant the third moon landing was aborted. He and his two co-astronauts were forced to orbit the Moon and attempt an improvised return to Earth.
It was a desperate situation but at least the Apollo 13 crew were in contact with ground control most of the time, and were put to work on refashioning the materials they had at hand in the spacecraft to get them back home.
Claustrophobic settings are a common factor in these live drama events. In 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped 700 meters (2,300 feet) beneath the ground when the San Jose copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert collapsed. They spent a mind-crushing 69 days – over two months – in their subterranean prison.
It was unknown whether they were still alive. It took over two weeks before a drill broke through to them. They survived through a democratic system of mutual support and morale maintenance.
Getting out, however, was arguably the most mentally and physically demanding aspect of the ordeal – each man was put in a capsule that was just 21-inches wide, then lifted for between 10 and 20 minutes through almost half a mile of rock. A rock fall could have left the ascending miner in a vertical coffin. All 33 men made it out in one of the greatest human extraction operations in history.
The 2018 effort to rescue 12 young Thai footballers (from 11 to 16 years old) and their 25-year-old assistant coach from a flooded cave in Chiang Rai province was almost as impressive. It took just over two weeks, with oxygen levels lethally low in the cave, for the boys and their coach to be brought out by a team of divers, including four Britons.
The boys were unaware of the world’s interest and believed they would have to ride home on the cycles they’d left at the cave’s entrance a fortnight before.
These stories stand out because they had successful conclusions, although no less emotion was expended on Rayan Oram. The five-year-old Moroccan boy was trapped in a well last year and, despite the determined efforts of rescuers, he was pulled out dead after four days.
Even for those fortunate enough to survive these traumas the psychological repercussions can manifest long after the cameras have gone. You have to be alive, though, to contend with the mental toll.
That was the sole priority for all involved in the search for the Titan. You can call such life-and-death suspense a distraction from the often less concrete news that fills our screens. But watching these great rescue attempts is not just about our need for escapism. They are also a reminder of our fundamental need, even against all the odds, to see another dawn.
There was nothing anyone could have done to save the five men on the Titan. But that shouldn’t detract from our awe at the stirring efforts made to rescue them.
