Last living survivor of deepest sea rescue in history has ‘horrible feeling’ about missing Titanic sub
The last living survivor of the deepest successful sea rescue in history fears the worst for the five passengers aboard the small submersible that vanished while visiting the Titanic wreck over the weekend.
Roger Mallinson, who in 1973 was rescued alongside his diving partner after spending 84 hours trapped 1,575 feet underwater off the coast of Ireland in a 6-foot-wide sub, said the fact that there has been zero communication from the missing vessel was an ominous sign.
“That is horrendous. I can’t understand why they haven’t transmitted some signal of some sort,” Mallinson, 85, told Sky News.
“I have a horrible feeling that something might be seriously wrong.”
“I would have thought a hammer on a bit of the hull somewhere would be a good transmitter, and it would carry.”
His comments come as the US and Canadian coast guards are scrambling to rescue the passengers of the OceanGate Expeditions submersible that fell out of contact with the surface while visiting the wreck of the Titanic, which sits 12,000 feet down on the seabed off the coast of Newfoundland.
If the crew are still alive, officials said as of Tuesday they had about 40 hours of oxygen remaining.
Fifty years ago, Mallinson and the late Roger Chapman — then 35 and 28 years old — were laying trans-Atlantic telephone wire 150 miles off the coast of Cork, Ireland, in a small submersible named Pisces III when the machine room hatch was accidentally wrenched open by the surface ship they were tethered to.
More than a ton of water began pouring into the self-contained rear portion of the sub, and after dangling from the surface ship for a few moments, their tether line snapped and they plummeted to the sea floor at about 40 mph.
“It was very frightening — like a Stuka dive bomber with screaming motors and the pressure gauges spinning around,” he told the BBC in 2013.
“It was about 30 seconds until we hit. We turned the depth gauge off at 500 feet as it could have burst, and got cushions and curled ourselves up to try and prevent injuries. We managed to find some white cloth to put in our mouths so we didn’t bite our tongues off, too.”
The pair reached the surface by telephone to relay that they’d survived the impact, but with their oxygen supply dwindling by the minute, they hunkered down and began to preserve everything that had.
Tourist submersible exploring Titanic wreckage disappears in Atlantic Ocean
What we know
A submersible on a pricey tourist expedition to the Titanic shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean has vanished with likely only four days’ worth of oxygen. The US Coast Guard said the small submarine began its journey underwater with five passengers Sunday morning, and the Canadian research vessel that it was working with lost contact with the crew about an hour and 45 minutes into the dive.
It was later found that a top-secret team with the US Navy detected the implosion of the Titan submersible on Sunday, but did not stop search efforts due because the evidence was “not definitive” and a decision was made to “make every effort to save the lives on board.”
Who was on board?
The family of world explorer Hamish Harding confirmed on Facebook that he was among the five traveling in the missing submarine. Harding, a British businessman who previously paid for a space ride aboard the Blue Origin rocket last year, shared a photo of himself on Sunday signing a banner for OceanGate’s latest voyage to the shipwreck.
Also onboard were Pakistani energy and tech mogul Shanzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman, 19; famed French diver and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush.
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- Titanic tourist Hamish Harding’s family slams OceanGate for delay in reporting missing sub
- Coast Guard knew Titan sub imploded Sunday, but continued search anyway — here’s why
What’s next?
“We’re doing everything we can do to locate the submersible and rescue those on board,” Rear Adm. John Mauger told reporters. “In terms of the hours, we understood that was 96 hours of emergency capability from the operator.
Coast Guard officials said they are currently focusing all their efforts on locating the sub first before deploying any vessel capable of reaching as far below as 12,500 feet where the Titanic wreck is located.
Mauger, first district commander and leader of the search-and-rescue mission, said the US was coordinating with Canada on the operation.
The debris recovered from the US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible search site early Thursday included “a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible.”
After search efforts to recover the stranded passengers proved futile, and bits of debris from the submersible were found, it was decided that the sub imploded, which correlated with an anomaly picked up by the US Navy in the same area.
The Coast Guard later reported that all 5 passengers were confirmed dead, and rescue efforts were halted.
To reduce their oxygen usage, they stopped talking and tried to lie as still as they could, and refrained from eating the single sandwich and can of lemonade they had for sustenance.
“We hardly spoke, just grabbing each other’s hand and giving it a squeeze to show we were all right,” Mallinson told the BBC.
“We allowed the CO2 to build up a bit to conserve oxygen — we had egg timers to keep track of every 40 minutes, but we’d wait a bit longer. It made us a bit lethargic and drowsy.”
On the surface, rescue crews were met with a succession of technical problems as they rolled out a rescue operation.
Three submersibles were brought in to assist but two were put out of commission following electrical faults on one and a water ingress on the other.
Three days after the accident, the remaining rescue submersible was able to attach a specially designed hook and tow rope to the Pisces III and hoist it to the surface.
Once there, it took another 30 minutes for the cabin hatch to be pried open.
“We had 72 hours of life support when we started the dive so we managed to eke out a further 12.5 hours. When we looked in the cylinder, we had 12 minutes of oxygen left,” Chapman told the BBC.
Mallinson told Sky News that one of the most important parts of their survival was his and Chapman’s ability to take care of each other throughout the ordeal.
“We looked after each other, and I think that was a major, major life-saver,” he told Sky News.
On Sunday, the OceanGate Expeditions surface crews lost contact with their submersible, Titan, an hour and 45 minutes into its expedition to the seafloor to visit the Titanic.
As crews continue their search efforts, experts have speculated the vessel could have experienced a fire onboard, that it may have become trapped within the Titanic wreckage, that structural failures in the hull may have led to an implosion, or that it may have experienced a power failure and is trapped on the seafloor.
