James Cameron, director of the film Titanic and avid explorer of the seabed, openly denounced on Thursday June 22, 2023 the “ignored warnings” concerning the safety of the tourist submersible which imploded near the wreck of the famous ocean liner, killing five people.
The craft was a source of much concern within the small world of underwater exploration, recalled the filmmaker, who visited the wreck many times to produce his planetary success of 1997, which won 11 Oscars. The keen diving director drew a parallel between this new accident and the sinking of the ocean liner in 1912, which caused the death of 1,500 people.
“I am struck by the similarity to the Titanic disaster, where the captain was repeatedly warned of the presence of ice ahead of his ship, and yet he raced at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night. “, he noticed on the american channel ABC News. “That a very similar drama, where the warnings were ignored” is happening “in the same place, (…) it is simply astounding”, lashed out the director of the film Abyss. “It’s really surreal.”
The US Coast Guard announced Thursday that the OceanGate submersible, missing since Sunday in the North Atlantic, had suffered a “catastrophic implosion” in the depths of the ocean. The five men who were on board are now considered dead.
The risk of a submersible imploding is always a “primary” concern during its construction, said Mr Cameron, who in 2012 became the first person to dive solo to the ocean depths on board a underwater vehicle that he himself helped to design. “It’s the nightmare we’ve all lived with since we entered this field,” he insisted, pointing to the impeccable safety achieved by most players in the world of underwater exploration.
But “many people in the community were very concerned about this submersible” from OceanGate, he recalled. “A number of key players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers.”
Since the beginning of the research, information implicating OceanGate has been revealed on possible technical negligence of the underwater tourism device. A 2018 complaint says a former company executive, David Lochridge, was fired after raising serious doubts about the safety of the submersible. Mr. Cameron was also moved by the death of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the French explorer who is one of the five victims of the accident. The director had known this man nicknamed “Mr. Titanic” for his numerous dives on the site. “It is almost impossible for me to accept that he died tragically in this way,” he regretted.
