The Ocean Gate Titanic submersible tragedy shocked the world as multiple countries worked frantically to save five billionaires trapped under the sea. The effort ended in tragedy, as all aboard the sun died, including the founder Stockton Rush.
Now, there is a film in development which will explore the incident, according to Deadline.
The film’s title is ‘Salvaged’ and the producer is E. Brian Dobbins, who is also working with his company MindRiot Entertainment to produce a docuseries about Kyle Bingham, the former director of Ocean Gate.
“The Titan tragedy is reminiscent of the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986: it’s a tragedy I’ll never forget,” said Justin MacGregor, the group’s head of European content
James Cameron,the director behind the 1997 romantic thriller ‘Titanic’ criticised the idea of making a film on the Oceangate tragedy, saying, “It doesn’t respond to offensive rumors in the media usually but I need to now.”
“I’m NOT in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be,” the Avatar director said.
It is truly an interesting coincidence that the famous animated television serial The Simpsons has managed to predict a variety of current events. Whether it was Trump running for president or Lady Gaga’s 2017 superbowl performance, the FOX comedy series has gained cult classic notoriety for its cutting satire seemingly accurately predicting world events.
Fans of the show have jumped on the bandwagon again in light of the missing Titan submersible. The episode “Simpson Tide” aired in 1998, scenes of which bore a striking resemblance to the events of the missing OceanGate sub.
In the episode, ‘Homer’s Paternity Coot’, Homer and his alleged dad Fairbanks stumble upon the wreckage of a massie sunken ship packed with treasure. However, Homer gets lost and trapped in a coral reef. He tries to free himself as an “oxygen low” light shines.
When asked for a comment, the Simpsons writer Mark Reiss told the New York Post, “That’s my show. Even I forgot about that.” He went on to explain, “We did that episode because the movie ‘Crimson Tide’ had just come out. We didn’t predict the future, we just did it off that movie and 20 years later, something like that happened.”
Reiss has himself descended 13,000 feet to view the Titanic wreckage. According to the Post, Reiss signed a waiver warning multiple times of possible death, knew the risks, and apparently even took extra paper with him to write his last jokes in case something went wrong.
“Death is always lurking, it’s always in the back of your mind,” Reiss said, reflecting on the voyage.
In a Wall Street Journal exclusive, it has been revealed that the U.S. Navy heard sounds of the OceanGate Titan implosion hours after it began its voyage on Sunday.
A top secret acoustic detection system, used by the American Navy to detect enemy submarines, first registered the sound of an implosion near the recently discovered debris site on Sunday, US defence officials told WSJ.
“The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told the Journal, as reported by The Insider.
“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
On the topic of withholding this information from the public, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Washington Post:
“What you’re looking at is just lines on a graph [referring to the registered sounds]. And if you try to convince people you weren’t doing a search because the lines on a graph indicated an implosion, that wouldn’t be acceptable to many.”
In a previous interview with The Insider, professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney, Stefan Williams, said that in the case of an implosion, the five passengers’ death would have been instantaneous.
An anticipated tragedy
Turns out the U.S. Navy was not the only one with knowledge of the detected sounds. In an interview with CNN, Hollywood director James Cameron revealed that his contacts in the deep sea exploration community had revealed the Titan had likely imploded.
Cameron is a big deep sea enthusiast, having travelled to the wreckage of the Titanic himself in 1995, prior to creating his iconic movie about the vessel’s tragic maiden voyage.
When Cameron learned from his colleagues in what he calls the “deep submergence community” that both communications and tracking of the craft had been lost simultaneously, he began to suspect an implosion, “a shockwave of events so powerful that it actually took out” the tracking and comms.
He went on to say, “I took that as a factor…I couldn’t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch and did not surface.”
History repeating itself?
In an interview with ABC News, Cameron went on to comment on how ‘struck’ he was by the similarities between the missing Titan submersible and the Titanic shipwreck.
Namely that both catastrophes took place because of the failure to heed prior warnings. The original Titanic sank when the captain rammed the ocean liner into an iceberg (at full speed), in spite of being warned about the ice.
Similarly, Cameron criticised OceanGate for failing to heed warnings about the submersible’s experimental approach – the tourism company had been warned in 2018 by a group of industry professionals about its vessel not meeting voluntary industry standards and the possibility of “minor to catastrophic” outcomes.
In 2018, a whistleblower was fired from the company for raising concerns about the safety of its Titan submersible.
The late 19 year old Suleman Dawood, son of the late Shahzada Dawood, Vice-Chairman of Engro Corporation, was reportedly ‘terrified’ before his trip aboard the OceanGate submersible, according to his aunt Azmeh Dawood.
In an interview with NBC news, Azmeh – Shahzada’s older sister – shared that the young Suleman had informed a relative prior to his voyage to see the Titanic wreckage that he “wasn’t very up for it” and “felt terrified”.
However, the trip tragically fell over Father’s Day weekend and young Suleman, eager to please Shahzada, ended up accompanying him. According to Azmeh, Shahzada was very passionate about the lore of the Titanic.
She recalls her younger brother was “absolutely obsessed” with the Titanic from a young age, recounting the time when Shahzada met her husband and asked if they could sit down and watch a four-hour documentary about the Titanic.
Thus, she was hardly surprised when she learned that her brother had purchased tickets for the OceanGate mission.
The Dawood family released a statement on Twitter, announcing the death of their loved ones and extending their condolences to the families of the other departed passengers.
On the fourth day of the frantic search to find the OceanGate submersible before its oxygen supply ran, search parties discovered debris 1600 feet from the bow of the Titanic that were said to be part of the OceanGate craft.
The U.S. Coast Guard said the debris found on the seafloor was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.” All aboard have been presumed dead.
A summary of events
The OceanGate submersible disappeared Sunday during a mission to survey the wreckage of the Titanic.
The Coast Guard said on Thursday that a “debris field” had been found in the search area. Today, it was confirmed that the debris found was “consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel.”
A sound consistent with an implosion was heard Sunday, shortly after the submersible lost communications, according to a senior U.S. Navy official, reported by NBC. The sound was not definitive, the official said.
James Cameron, director of the blockbuster film ‘Titanic’ and a prolific deep sea explorer, in an interview with CNN shared that he knew the vessel had likely imploded by Monday. He learned through his sources of a sound detected in the vicinity of the Titanic on Sunday.
The OceanGate Titan submersible dominating global headlines lost connection and went missing an hour and forty minutes into its expedition on Sunday.
U.S. and Canadian navies, marine authorities and commercial deep-sea companies began a frantic search beneath the North Atlantic Ocean.
It was confirmed through a statement by the Dawood family that Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Sulaiman, were onboard the vessel.
But who are the Dawoods?
The Dawoods are a prominent business family primarily based in Karachi. Shahzada’s grandfather, Seth Ahmed Dawood, migrated to Karachi from Bombay when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947.
He and his brothers started Dawood Corporation Ltd. In the following decades, Dawood founded several businesses and chaired companies in a plethora of industries including cotton, textiles, paper, consumer goods, oil, logistics, insurance, jute, chemicals, motorbikes, home appliances, electronics, and fertiliser industries in East and West Pakistan.
Seth Ahmed Dawood was a major figure in the industrialisation of Karachi. Pakistan’s former president Ayub Khan would often consult Dawood on trade and industry affairs.
Seth Ahmed Dawood with former president of Pakistan, Ayub Khan
When Bangladesh achieved independence in 1971, Dawood lost his factories in Dhaka and Chittagong. Back home in Pakistan, the nationalisation process initiated by the government led to him losing his most profitable industrial projects. One of these projects, Dawood Petroleum Limited, became an official part of PSO (Pakistan State Oil) in 1974.
In spite of the massive losses, Dawood continued to develop projects on a relatively smaller scale. The fertiliser business founded by the family in 1965 eventually grew to become one of the biggest companies in the country today: Engro Corporation.
Engro operates through four divisions: Food & Agriculture, Energy & Related Infrastructure, Petrochemicals, and Telecommunication Infrastructure. Shahzada, who is lost somewhere at the bottom of the North Atlantic with his son, is currently the acting vice-chairman of the company.
Pakistan’s philanthropists
The family also set up a not-for-profit foundation called The Dawood Foundation. It has financially assisted Pakistanis affected by the 2005 earthquake and the catastrophic 2010 floods.
During the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Pakistan, Shahzada’s father Hussain Dawood, pledged one billion rupees on behalf of Engro Corporation and Dawood Hercules Group, another company predominantly owned by the family.
Moreover, the foundation has funded a variety of formal and informal education projects, the most notable ones including Dawood University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi School of Business and the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University.
In a frantic search for the missing OceanGate Titan submarine, a Canadian maritime surveillance aircraft is reported by Al-Jazeera to have detected ‘banging sounds in the area every 30 minutes.’
On Sunday, the submersible went missing in the North Atlantic Ocean 100 minutes into its voyage to see the wreck of the Titanic. Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood are onboard the vessel.
The United States Coast Guard said that one of the Canadian aircrafts involved in the search for the deep-sea vessel has detected “underwater noises in the search area”.
Additionally, the data from the P-3 aircraft has been shared with our U.S. Navy experts for further analysis which will be considered in future search plans. 2/2 #Titanic
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) were then relocated “in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises”, the coastguard said on Wednesday, Al-Jazeera reports.
So far, the ROVs have “yielded negative results”, said the coastguard in a tweet. Still, they are continuing their search.
Rolling Stone magazine, citing internal US government communications, was the first to report the news of what was described as “banging sounds in the area every 30 minutes”.
The magazine cited an internal email sent to U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials. “Four hours later additional sonar was deployed and banging was still heard,” the magazine reported.
The oxygen supply on OceanGate’s Titan will run out by Thursday morning, according to officials.
A foreseeable tragedy?
The former director of marine operations for OceanGate, David Lochridge, had previously raised safety concerns about Titan before being fired from his position.
Lochridge’s concerns about the safety of the missing submersible are still contained in a response he filed to the lawsuit that OceanGate brought against him for breaching a non-disclosure agreement.
Lochridge wrote an engineering report in 2018 that said the craft under development needed more testing and that passengers might be endangered when it reached “extreme depths”.
According to his claim, he learned the vessel was built to withstand a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate planned to take passengers to 4,000 meters, CBS news reports.
Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood are currently onboard a missing OceanGate tourist submersible vessel that was carrying five people to see the wreck of the Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.
The Dawood family has released the following statement:
“As of now, contact has been lost with their submersible craft and there is limited information available. A rescue effort that is being jointly led by multiple government agencies and deep-sea companies is underway to reestablish contact with the submersible and bring them back safely,” read the statement.
“We are very grateful for the concern being shown by our colleagues and friends and would like to request everyone to pray for their safety while granting the family privacy at this time. The family is well looked after and are praying to Allah for the safe return of their family members,” it added.
Shahzada Dawood is a trustee of the SETI Institute in California and vice chairman of Dawood Hercules Corporation, part of the Dawood Group.
The OceanGate Titan craft submerged Sunday morning, and its support vessel lost contact with it about an hour and 45 minutes later, The Independent has said.
OceanGate Expeditions is a company that offers eight-day missions to see the Titanic debris at a cost of $250,000 per person. The organisation confirmed its submarine was lost at sea with crew members on board, and that it is exploring all options to rescue the five people onboard. The company’s chief executive is also believed to be on the craft.
Officials confirmed government agencies, the US and Canadian navies and commercial deep-sea firms are helping in the rescue operation, as reported by the BBC.
The craft they were on board dives with a four day emergency supply of oxygen. Addressing a news conference, Rear Adm John Mauger of the US Coast Guard said there is somewhere between 70 and the full 96 hours of oxygen available at this point
British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding and renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet are also among the passengers onboard.
