Tragedy under the sea

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The aftermath of an undersea tragedy.

Last week, a submersible taking tourists to view the Titanic went missing in Atlantic waters 13,000 feet deep. Agencies worldwide launched searches for it, hoping they could find it before the oxygen ran out.

NICK EICHER, HOST: But then on Thursday officials found the sub’s wreckage not too far from the Titanic wreckage. Turns out the sub imploded early in its voyage. What happened, and why did it take four days to find out?

WORLD’s Mary Muncy has the story.

WILLIAM TOTI: There are times in your life when you think you're right and you hope you're wrong.

MARY MUNCY, REPORTER: That’s William Toti, a retired Navy submariner who has spent a total of more than four years of his life underwater.

TOTI: It was merely a guess that the moment that they lost contact a catastrophic event had occurred.

On Sunday, June 18th, five crew members: A British billionaire, two members of a Pakistani business family, a Titanic expert, and the pilot who was also the CEO went down in the Titan submersible. Less than two hours later, they lost contact with the mothership.

Submersibles differ from submarines in that they require another ship to launch and return.

The owner of the submersible, Oceangate Expeditions, said the Titan had about four days’ supply of oxygen.

SOUND: [Rescue plane searching]

So officials sent planes to see if it had surfaced somewhere else and dropped sonar buoys into the ocean to try to hear them.

But they were searching for a needle in a haystack.

Then, on Thursday, they found pieces of debris on the ocean floor about sixteen hundred feet from the Titanic.

First Coast Guard District Rear Admiral John Mauger:

JOHN MAUGER: This is a incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.

The U.S. Navy also said Thursday it had detected a sound consistent with an implosion at the time the sub lost contact. So why didn’t the Navy say so sooner?

TOTI: When you have something like this happen, there's no automated system that says, hey, that's an implosion, something bad just happened.

Toti says the Navy would have had to sift through noise from other people and the ocean itself, sometimes from miles away.

TOTI: So you don't if you don't know what you're looking for, it takes you a lot of time to say, "hey, that's suspicious."

He says they still would have launched the search even if they’d known about the implosion sound on Sunday.

TOTI: Because you're not going to say, “Oh, we got an implosion. Everybody give up, they're dead.” You're not going to do that. Okay, you're gonna still do the kinds of things we did, until you know with certainty that, you know, there's there's no hope.

OceanGate has made two previous expeditions to the Titanic, in 2021 and 2022. According to its website it had also planned 18 dives this summer.

In 2018, more than three dozen people signed a letter to OceanGate saying the company’s “experimental” approach would lead to catastrophe on its mission to visit the Titanic.

The Titan is a 22-foot-long vessel made of titanium and carbon fiber with one window in the front.

TOTI: Titanium is a very strong metal, but it's also very difficult to weld well.

He says welding defects could have caused the failure.

TOTI: But there can also be metallurgical defects in the crystalline structure of the metal that might cause it to crack and fail.

Carbon fiber, on the other hand, is a new material in the last 30 years or so, and Toti says it's even newer to vessels that experience internal or external pressure.

TOTI: And carbon fiber has a defect mechanism where it delaminates and gets weaker if it's not handled very gingerly.

It also doesn’t join well with any other material, including titanium.

TOTI: This company was known for wanting to lean into the technology.

OceanGate published a blog post in 2019 that said the Titan wasn’t certified because it would have taken years for the technology to be approved.

Instead, they said they performed their own tests and used their own risk management team.

There are several agencies that certify submersibles, but those are voluntary. There are no governments that regulate vessels in international waters where the submersible was being used.

A government may have certain standards for the vessel that left its shores carrying the submersible, but it likely wouldn’t regulate the vessel onboard.

Toti is concerned that the submarine illustrates that if a person has enough money, he or she can build something without any oversight.

TOTI: For decades, people have been climbing up Mount Everest and dying, doing it. And there's no international organization that certifies you that you're prepared, ready, and ought to be someone who climbs Mount Everest.

The argument is that if someone knows the risk, has enough money to do it, and can convince a sherpa to take him, he should be allowed to do it.

TOTI: I'm not sure these people actually knew the risk.

He says people generally understand the risks of Mount Everest—they know whether they are physically capable of making the journey.

TOTI: In this case, there's no way to independently assess your readiness, and your vessel's readiness to take that journey, you have to push the I believe button.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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