I just can’t get the people of the Titan off my mind.
There was several days of intense media coverage on the doomed submersible that imploded on its way to view the wreckage of the Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic.
Five souls lost.
As a non-adventurous type, I will never completely understand the passions of those who want to explore, test the limits, challenge their strengths, and go to unknown places.
While I can appreciate their passions, that just doesn’t make sense to me.
I feel we all take our lives in our hands on any given day in a hundred different ways, so it would never be my desire to tempt fate.
Other than OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush, who also perished in the doomed expedition, the others put their lives and trust in his hands rather than their own.
As the stories of red flags, warnings, concerns, and fears continue to surface, it becomes abundantly clear that this was a catastrophic accident waiting to happen.
Even without any knowledge on the mechanics of it, I would have been turned off by the fact the sub was so small. It could hold five people and there were no seats, so you sat on the floor. The trip was to last several hours, going to the infamous wreckage site some 12,500 feet down.
Arthur Loibl, a German businessman who took this exact trip in 2021, told the Associated Press: “It was like a kamikaze operation,” acknowledging you have to be a little bit crazy to do this sort of thing.
“Imagine a metal tube a few metres long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” Loibl told AP. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
Actually, I can’t imagine at all.
Some will say the participants knew the risks and made the decision to go. That may be true, but did they really have all the facts.
What kind of survival training was there? Would that have even mattered? Did they really understand they were taking such a big gamble?
Maybe some of them did, but my thoughts go to the father and son, from Pakistan, who took the place of another father and son, who backed out due to safety concerns.
Family members said 19-year-old Sulaiman Dawwood was “terrified” about the expedition, but did it to please his dad partially because it was going on Father’s Day.
What is the lure the Titanic? I think many of us tend to forget the giant failure of that expedition because we have romanticized it through films and lore.
We think Titanic the movie of 1997 and we think of that fabulous pose of Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslett on the bow of the ship. Romance!
Then, there was the beauty of that song My Heart Will Go On in all its mysterious glory.
Maybe we got blinded by the elegance of it all — the glamorous rich folk dining, drinking and dancing to the orchestra until the vessel hit an iceberg in April 1912. And that was that.
The movie prompted a Titanic museum that tours the world. I took it in, during a stop in Memphis, and was amazed at how fascinating it all was. It was astounding to see the items that did survive, such as dishes, a menu, a pocket watch — which stopped at the time the ship sank — and a violin.
There was even a gift shop, which was both fabulous and tacky. I swear they sold tiny packages of Lifesaver candy. Let that sink in.
So, I know it's not new that people like to get up close and personal to history, even as a result of a huge disaster.
And while the actual cause of this latest tragedy remains to be confirmed, there is part of me that feels like the participants got sold a bill of goods by a perhaps well-intentioned and passionate founder/promoter.
So many questions...
Maybe there was pressure from investors to start to make more money by taking more tourists on the deep dive?
Did the company cut corners?
Maybe the owner just got too greedy or too anxious to make his mark as an explorer?
In all this sadness, one can only hope death came fast and unexpectedly.
Canadian director James Cameron, who has made dives to the Titanic wreckage more than 30 times, made the most sense to me when he said: “I’m struck by the similarity to the Titanic disaster itself, when the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet, he steamed full speed ahead into an ice field on a moonless night. One wreck lying next to the other for the same damn reason.”
Grief as deep as the ocean.
