On Monday, the US Coast Guard, for the first time, released an image of the Titan submarine lying on the ocean floor following its catastrophic implosion last year as an inquiry hearing into the tragedy began.
All five people were killed on board in June last year during its doomed final dive to the Titanic wreck after an international search and rescue operation.
The image, released Monday, shows the tail cone of the submersible broke off and rests on the murky blue floor of the North Atlantic, with a shredded piece of the vessel lying close by its edges jagged where it broke off from the rest of the craft.
The investigators testified on the first day of a hearing in North Charleston, South Carolina, which is scheduled to go until September 27. According to them, finding the wreckage took several days of searching a few hundred yards from where the Titanic lay.
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The Marine Board of Investigation stated in an opening statement that on June 22 last year a remotely operated vehicle located the tail cone, along with other debris, providing “conclusive evidence” that the submersible suffered a catastrophic implosion, or a sudden inward collapse caused by extreme pressure.
It became the resting place of adventurer Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, and Stockton Rush, founder and CEO of the vessel’s operator.
The DNA testing and analysis allowed recovered remains to be matched to the five men on board, the Marine Board of Investigation said on Monday.
On Monday, the board called its first witnesses, including former employees of OceanGate, the company that designed and operated the submersible. The presenter also revealed for the first time the last message by the submersible that occurred six seconds before it lost communication with the surface.
The Titan’s message to its mother ship was: “Dropped two wts,” short form for weights the submersible may drop in the event that it needed to head to the surface. It lost contact with the mother ship shortly after it was “pinged” for the last time.
In the days that followed, a global search and rescue effort took place in isolated seas a few hundred miles southeast of Canada’s Newfoundland.
According to previous statements from the Coast Guard, it would address “pre-accident historical events, regulatory compliance, crew member duties and qualifications, mechanical and structural systems, emergency response, and the submersible industry .”
While “uncovering the facts surrounding the incident” is the main mission of the hearing, board head Jason Neubauer said on Monday that the committee also has the responsibility to find “misconduct or negligence by credential mariners.”
“And we would be making a recommendation to the Department of Justice if there is any criminal activity found,” he said.
