Over in Facebook, some people in my timeline have taken slight offense about some of the memes I posted about this event. I can have a bit of a dark sense of humor and they should not be surprised about it. But the deaths of these people were a tragedy that could have been avoided and I believe J.Kb. may post something about it from the engineering standpoint, so I won’t go into it other than to say the designers tried to reinvent the wheel and came up with paper picnic plates. The info that has come out so far indicates that the submersible was built around the principles of social politics rather than the laws of physics.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the submersible, said in a statement that all five people in the vessel, including CEO and pilot Stockton Rush, “have sadly been lost.”
The others on board were two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” OceanGate said in a statement. “We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.”
5 people on Titanic submersible killed after implosion, Coast Guard says (wpbf.com)
This is absolute PR bullshit, sorry. This was nothing more than a very expensive carnival ride that went catastrophically bad because the simple tenets of safety and preventive maintenance were not followed. And I bet the passengers were assured (and believed) that the sub was super-duper-safe even though they signed paperwork stating they knew they could die. Emotion for having a “cool” experience overrode due diligence and as the saying goes, you pay your monies, you take your chances.
And that is my opinion.
Carry on.
I am in full agreement Sir.. if you gonna be dumb, you better be tuff…or in the words of Bill Cosby- “how long can you tread water?”..
Right … What’s a cubit?
The release reminded me of the “She’s so brave…!” gushing that takes place on social media. Yeah, these – with the possible exception of the Titanic expert (who, one would think, if anyone should have known better) – are not explorers in the usual sense, but more akin to the current crop of “space tourists” with a different vector.
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I don’t have a problem with what any of these folks chose to do with their money; it’s theirs. And the company lied, as I understand it, about the risk profile as well, so there’s that. But, yeah. The release read to me like part of starting to position themselves for lawsuit defense.
W/ all the reports of the safety measures ignored, those disclaimers aren’t going to be worth used toilet paper. Between the coming lawsuits and whatever fines/fees are imposed for the rescue effort, that company and estate are going to take a hit.
That paperwork… so many things have stupid disclaimers nowadays, nobody takes them seriously. It’s like everything in California having a Prop. 65 label on it: when everything has a mandatory “may cause cancer” label, regardless of the magnitude of the risk, people start ignoring the labels.
I read in one piece that the sub didn’t have a window and that the viewing was on a screen.
If that is true, then it was pointless to travel that deep to watch TV.
It had a little window at one end… rated for considerably less than the depth at which it was used. Another corner cut.
@Eric Wilner: Thanks. I just saw a photo in the Journal and saw thevwindow.