The Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion killing the five people onboard. Photo / AP
OPINION
The loss of the Titan must lead to better safety - just like the loss of the Titanic did.
When Rear Admiral John Mauger, the commander of the First Coast Guard District, addressed the cameras last Thursday, four days had passed with no word on the fate of the Titan submersible or the five people it carried. After the long wait, the news that all five were presumed dead, from an instantaneous collapse of the vessel under tremendous pressure, sounded to many like an agonising but definitive conclusion to the story. Lieutenant Samantha Corcoran added that there were no more scheduled briefings.
But as wrenching as the news was, it is not the end of the story. It can’t be. Undersea voyages should and will continue, whether as research to better understand our planet or as tourism, to invite people to imagine and appreciate so much life unseen. To ensure the safety of all who go below, the hardest work is yet to come.
Confirmation of the Titan’s demise answers the most immediate and overwhelming question, but it raises a great many others. Why was OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the vessel, allowed to put people in an uncertified and experimental submersible? Why had its leader, Stockton Rush, not heeded dire concerns about safety issues? Should we change a system in which so much effort and expense was devoted to the rescue of a few millionaires and adventurers, especially as thousands of migrants die at sea unattended? What nation’s responsibility was this, and whose should it have been? What does the loss of the Titan mean for the future of human underwater research?
To resolve these issues and many others, we need a thorough investigation, conducted in public, with the goal of clear accountability — and clear consequences.
The Polar Prince, the ship from which the submersible was launched, is of Canadian registry and based out of Canada. Owing to that jurisdiction, the Canadian Transportation Safety Board has announced it will investigate not just the wreck but “the circumstances of this operation.” The US Coast Guard declared the loss a “major marine casualty” and said it would also convene a Marine Board of Investigation, alongside the US National Transportation Safety Board. These are positive developments. But much depends on how the mandate is executed. The scope of the investigation, the manner in which it is conducted, the degree of transparency it maintains and the force of its findings should be of vital concern not just to the submersible community but to everyone.
There is reason to hope that some good will be salvaged from a horrific wreck. Ironically, that’s what happened over a century ago, when the Titanic sank on a cold April morning in 1912. Both the United States Senate and the British Board of Trade led investigations into the loss of the ocean liner. Those investigations led to the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) treaty, which required nearly all oceangoing ships to have sufficient lifeboats, conduct lifeboat drills, use standardised distress signals and respond to vessels in trouble, hence the robust and large rescue effort for Titan. Today, ocean shipping is regulated by myriad conventions and laws, with international treaties — overseen by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organisation — that ensure ships, no matter where they hail from, all meet certain standards anywhere in the world.
These rules typically do not apply to submersibles, which are usually covered by national regulations, but only in territorial waters.
Today the horizons of thrill seeking extend even to private rocket trips, with stratospheric price tags. As risky as those undertakings may seem, those craft, launched in the United States, operate within the jurisdiction of the Federal Aviation Administration and within the parameters of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The Titanic wreck site is in international waters as identified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982. The sea beyond territorial waters remains an outlaw ocean. The United States has not even ratified the UN convention. How, then, can we prevent another Titan disaster?
The first option is for the International Maritime Organisation to set safety standards for submersibles and require that they register with a nation, much like oceangoing ships. This would place the onus on the flag state to ensure that the submersible meet those requirements. It would also allow, under port state authority, other countries to examine and inspect these submersibles to the same standard. The other option is to adopt a provision from the Outer Space Treaty that says that states shall be responsible for national activities carried out by government or nongovernment entities. Meaning that if Titan was launched from a Canadian ship, from a Canadian port, Canada has jurisdiction. At present, it’s unclear which country has jurisdiction in the Titan investigation, as the craft was reportedly built in the United States but launched from a Canadian vessel.
Another idea being widely discussed to prevent future Titan disasters is to end human voyages to the deep sea, particularly for tourists paying fees. This would be a terrible mistake.
It’s wonderful that unmanned vehicles can beam us videos of marine life and shipwrecks in high definition and 4K quality. But nothing can replace the value of human eyes. Nothing can replace the experience of riding on a small boat out to a submersible, climbing in, closing the hatch and feeling the sea swirl around the vessel as it begins its descent. Humans challenge the highest reaches of Everest to see that vista or strap themselves into rockets to see the earth from above. That same drive will always tug people down to see the deepest depths.
When the first sailing craft failed to return home and the first steam-powered vessels caught fire, we did not stop sailing on the sea. When the Titanic sank and lost more than 1,500 lives, we did not stop crossing the Atlantic. When the early commercial jets suffered fatal crashes, we did not give up on jet airliners. The same goes for space travel and nearly every other form of human endeavour. We have gone 63 years since the bathyscaphe Trieste plunged to the bottom of the Mariana Trench — Challenger Deep, a depth about two and a half times as great as the one where the Titanic lies. We should not let this be the last statement on submersibles.
If humans retreat from submersibles and just rely on remotely operated vehicles, will we also retreat from other pursuits that expose us to danger but provide potential scientific discoveries and human understanding of the greatest mysteries on the planet? When we watch the next rocket blast off to the vacuum of space, we should remember that we conquered that frontier through trial and error, and we will also do the same with the great pressures exerted by the deep sea.
Salvatore Mercogliano is an associate professor of history at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, an adjunct professor at the US Merchant Marine Academy and the host of the YouTube Channel What’s Going On With Shipping.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Salvatore Mercogliano
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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