James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic and an experienced explorer of the depths of the sea, said that many warnings about the safety of the tourist submersible were ignored which imploded near the famous ship, killing five people.
Cameron said the small vessel had caused widespread concern in the exploration community. oceanic, and pointed out the similarities between the tragedy and the sinking in 1912 of the huge ship that left some 1,500 dead.
“I am struck by the similarity between the Titanic disasterwhose captain was warned several times about the ice in front of the ship, and yet he sped at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, resulting in many people dying,” Cameron said in an interview with ABC News.
“And that a very similar tragedy, in which warnings were ignored, happens in exactly the same place, with all the diving that’s going on all over the world, I think it’s just amazing.”
“It’s really a bit surreal.”
The United States Coast Guard service confirmed this Thursday that the small ship, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, suffered “a catastrophic loss of chamber pressure” into the depths of the ocean, ending a multinational search and rescue operation that captivated the world.
Cameron, who in 2012 became the first person to go down to the deepest point in the oceanin a submarine designed by him, stressed that the risk of pressure implosion was always “first and foremost” in the minds of engineers.
“It’s the nightmare we’ve all lived with” in this field of exploration, he said, highlighting industry security brands over the past decades.
But “many people in the community were very concerned for this submersible,” he added.
“Several leading figures in the deep-dive engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that they were being very experimental when loading passengersand that they needed to be certified”.
aboard the submersible British millionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and their son Suleman were traveling. -both also British nationals-, the expert French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, which charged $250,000 per tourist.
Cameron mentioned his 25-year friendship with Nargeolet.
“That he tragically died in this way is almost impossible for me to process.”
The director visited the wreck of the Titanic while directing his epic 1997 filmstarring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and which won 11 Oscars.
“I know the wreck very well. In fact, by my calculations I spent more time on the ship than her captain did at the time,” he said.
