Submarine Blues
If someone turned to me and said, “Hey! Good buddy… I have a quarter of a million to spare, and you’re my good friend and you deserve this: join me on the Titan to descend to the ocean floor and see the Titanic — on me!” I would say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” There is no way I would last five minutes bolted securely inside what resembles to me nothing more than a drainpipe. I would die of an anxiety attack, pure and simple, before we even set sail.
As a kid though, in the Sixties, television was all about new frontiers. We were shown the Jacques Cousteau films in school on rattling 16-mm projectors. I watched every episode of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” (and “Star Trek”, for that matter). I wanted to learn how to scuba dive. I wanted to be a marine biologist. Never got around to thoes things, but I’ve told myself all my life it’s probably not too late, though time may be running out on that. But I dont think that kid would have been eager to get sealed up in a can that had less maneuvering control than those underwater mini-subs in “Thunderball”.
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Many eyes are gawking at the OceanGate Titan’s disappearance the way rubberneckers try to get a peep of some gore as they slow down past a wreck on the Mass Pike. There’s a backlash on social media: everything from “they deserve to die, those rich bitches” to “why are we the taxpayers ponying up to save these billionaires’ butts?” Many posts are answered with calls for compassion, but there’s a lot of pile-on comments too. It seems that the plight of these one-percenters has hit a nerve.
One reply to a hopeful post was, “forget it, they’re toast already. They’re not coming back.” Today, the day their oxygen runs out per the calculations of the rescue teams, that seems most likely the case. The mission will pivot “from rescue to recovery”, as I once heard it said about a mining accident where lack of breathable air was a factor.
Walking the dog this morning, I could not help but imagine what it must be like, sitting on the bottom of the ocean as darkness descends when the batteries exhaust their charge and there’s no more light available. The thought is as terrifying as anything to me, especially when I think about the cold that must have set in as well. One can elaborate about the conditions. I don’t think it’s just or unjust what happened to those voyagers. They made a decision to put themselves at risk with full knowledge of the consequences should something go terribly wrong. I belive that, if their hull remained intact, they died slowly and terribly. My theory — maybe my prayer — is that the hull imploded and they died instantly but mercifully.
As of this writing: “A remote-operated vehicle discovered debris in the search area, but it was not clear whether it was connected to a submersible that disappeared on Sunday during a dive to the Titanic wreckage. The Coast Guard said it would provide an update at 3 p.m. Eastern.”
Coda: the 3 p.m. update revealed that debris from the Titan was found 200 meters away from the bow of the Titanic on the flat sea floor. This is far enough from the wreck that it implies that the Titan did not disintegrate due to damage from contact with the Titanic wreckage. The rear admiral who took questions repeatedly used the term “catastrophic implosion”. One can speculate that the carbon shell disintegrated under pressure; in any case, there was no prolonged life-support drama, and the crew perished instantaneously. May they rest in peace.
