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CBC
04-06-2025
- Business
- CBC
History repeats itself, says widow whose husband and son died in Titan sub implosion
History repeats itself as unheeded warnings foreshadow the Titan's fatal implosion 9 hours ago Duration 1:48 Social Sharing On June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible disappeared during a dive to the iconic wreck of the Titanic. The world watched in shock as authorities mounted a laborious, four-day search-and-rescue operation that located debris on the sea floor, less than 500 metres from the bow of the Titanic. The submersible had imploded shortly after launch, killing all five on board. The Nature of Things documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster, coming to CBC Gem on June 6, examines a series of warnings and red flags that were raised in the years and months leading up to the tragic implosion. With unprecedented access to the United States Coast Guard's Marine Board investigation and interviews with key witnesses and experts, the film details the systemic issues and design flaws that led to the Titan's ultimate failure. Who was OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush? In this clip, we meet Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who died on the doomed expedition. He was an inventor with a grand vision to make deep-sea exploration more accessible. "His family legacy was really about the closest that you could get to royalty within the United States," says submersible pilot and designer Karl Stanley in the film. Two of his forefathers were signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, Wendy, was the great-granddaughter of Isidor and Rosalie Ida Straus, the owners of Macy's department store who died when the Titanic sank in 1912. Rush was wealthy, with vast connections in the American business world, and deep-sea exploration was his life's passion. Was the Titan submersible doomed to fail? Rush had built the Titan submersible out of carbon-fibre, an unconventional material for deep-sea exploration that, in hindsight, doomed the vessel. The sub had already made 13 trips to the wreckage of the Titanic, some 3,800 metres below the surface, before its final trip. The 15-month investigation into the tragedy revealed that each trip to the depths weakened the hull. "Hardly anybody in the public is familiar with carbon-fibre," says OceanGate safety diver Tym Catterson in the film. "It's stable. All the way up until this magic point that it is not. When it finally pops, it will catastrophically fail." There were early signs that the Titan was unsafe; in 2020, a large crack formed during a dive and the hull had to be rebuilt entirely. In 2022, a l oud bang was heard as Titan was surfacing from the depths, suggesting that the carbon-fibre hull suffered structural damage. "In one of my emails, I tell [Rush] that the hull is yelling at him and he needs to listen," submersible expert Karl Stanley recalls. In spite of all this, Rush continued his missions, undeterred. "Why is arrogance more important than safety?" asks Christine Dawood, whose husband, Shahzada and 19-year-old son Suleman died on the dive. "The irony is not lost on me that the Titanic sunk for exactly the same reason. So history repeats itself." Watch Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster on CBC Gem and The Nature of Things YouTube channel on June 6, 2025. Airing on CBC TV Wednesday, June 18 at 8 p.m.
Daily Mail
28-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
The surprising item that SURVIVED the OceanGate sub implosion
The US Coast Guard recovered a still intact ink pen, along with other items, while sifting through the remains of the ill-fated OceanGate Titan submersible. In a recent video, a member of the US Coast Guard detailed the painstaking recovery process of the Titan wreckage, revealing how the pen - identified as belonging to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush - was discovered among the waterlogged wreckage of the deep-sea tragedy. Alongside the pen, investigators recovered various items, including business cards, Titanic-themed stickers, clothing remnants and human remains. The recovered artifacts have been cataloged by the Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation. The Titan submersible, a carbon fiber and titanium vessel designed to take paying customers to view the wreck of the Titanic nearly 3,800 meters below the surface, suffered a catastrophic implosion during a June 2023 descent, killing all five people on board. In the video, posted to TikTok by Discovery, a member of the US Coast Guard broke down the process of sorting through the remains explaining that the Titan's 'endcap' was still intact. 'Let's consider the endcap to be a bowl, a mixing bowl,' the Coast Guard official explained. 'Items that were inside of the Titan at the time now become incased inside of the endcap.' Once drained of all the water, officials were then able to sift through the submersible's 'sludge-like' remains - which included carbon fiber, fiberglass, electronic parts - only to discover a still intact sleeve of Stockton Rush's suit. 'We were all just kind of getting all-hands-in and separating what needed to be considered as human remains and what was just other wreckage pieces,' the official said. 'As we were pulling it apart that is how we realized it was Mr. Rush's clothing.' The official explained that the Titan pilot's clothing was found 'caked inside' of sand. 'It was a piece of his sleeve that survived, not the whole suit, just that. Inside of the sleeve of it was the ink pen, business cards and stickers for the Titanic and there was nothing else but that.' The survival of any item in such conditions was unexpected, but the ink pen's intact state stunned investigators. 'Each one of those pieces, even the pen, was still intact. It hadn't been broken. All of this debris, all of these things shattered but his pen was still intact,' the Coast Guard official said. Rush had championed innovation in deep-sea exploration and was one of the major driving forces behind the Titan's creation and use for tourism. The MBI continues to examine recovered debris.
