“Titanic” director James Cameron is speaking out after the search for the missing OceanGate Titan submersible came to a devastating end Thursday.
Cameron, 68, found the tragic story of the sub eerily similar to what happened to the doomed ship Titanic in 1912.
“Well, I’ve been down there many times,” Cameron said in a news interview on Thursday. “I’ve made 33 dives and I’ve actually calculated that I’ve spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day.”
Cameron noted that he is a submersible designer himself and even created a sub that was capable of traveling to the deepest parts of the ocean, which is three times deeper than the location of the Titanic, according to the director.
He dove to the Mariana Trench in a 24-foot submersible called the Deepsea Challenger in March 2012.
Cameron noted that “many people in the community were very concerned about this sub.” He said “a number of the top players” in the community “even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers.”
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result,” Cameron told the outlet.
“And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site, with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think is just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal,” he concluded.
The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed Thursday that a debris field is the missing Titanic tourist submersible that was carrying five passengers. All five on board are presumed dead.
Inside the vessel were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush; British businessman turned adventurer Hamish Harding; father-and-son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, who are members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families; and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a former French navy officer and leading Titanic expert.
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