Submersible on tours of the Titanic missing with 5 on board

[pleiades]

Jun 20, 2023 19:52:53 GMT greysfang said:

I've been following this story since yesterday and call me an asshole, but I can't get worked up about a bunch of bored billionaires killing themselves by diving that far down in a glorified Pringles can.

Ya, I'm an asshole, too.  Sorry, but yes it's a horrible way to go but imma save my tears for miners stuck half a mile below the surface rather than billionaires choosing to board a MacGyvered chip can to the depths where the psi reaches 6000.

I did read they've found a debris area within the search area but they have no idea from what. 

[brookie]

Per the BBC (copied from Facebook):
Dive expert David Mearns told the BBC the president of the Explorers Club - which is connected to the diving community - says the debris includes "a landing frame and a rear cover from the submersible".

The US Coast Guard earlier said a "debris field" had been found.

It is now being analyzed.

The debris was located by a remote-controlled underwater search vehicle (ROV) near the wreck of the Titanic.

A US Coast Guard news conference is scheduled for 1500 EST (1900 GMT) on Thursday afternoon.

[trixie]

Watching a news conference. More debris found that is consistent with "catastrophic event" and appears to be an implosion. No survivors of course.

[sputnik]

^^^
good.
there was almost no chance they were going to be found alive anyway and i'm just glad it happened quickly.

[brookie]

Per the just-ended news conference, it imploded. Five (5) debris pieces have been located. They're surmising that it imploded before getting to the target, then it subsequently sank to the bottom. It was swift.

[tulip]

I'm really torn between shrugging it off and saying "idiots" to being horrified that this happened. I read this morning that someone else who has gone on this said the waiver you sign mentions death 3X on the first page. I know it's been said, but just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. Maybe now these people with money to burn will think twice before signing up to do something so risky. Who am I fooling... no one ever thinks it will happen to them.

[kittylady]

Jun 22, 2023 12:40:38 GMT funky said:

Oxygen is out. While I still think they are all stupid boarding this thing with all the security risks visible, I wouldn't wish a death like that to anyone.

I was talking to Bloke about this earlier and he said that he'd read that there was something like Benadryl on board to knock everyone out should they run into trouble, as a means of making oxygen supplies last longer.  Not that it matters anymore now that they've found debris.

Jun 22, 2023 20:10:38 GMT tulip said:

I'm really torn between shrugging it off and saying "idiots" to being horrified that this happened. I read this morning that someone else who has gone on this said the waiver you sign mentions death 3X on the first page. I know it's been said, but just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. Maybe now these people with money to burn will think twice before signing up to do something so risky. Who am I fooling... no one ever thinks it will happen to them.

Not just that but when the guy who created and is piloting it is on record saying that safety regulations are unnecessarily tight...  Nuh-uh! No way am I getting in a rickety tube to the bottom of the ocean made by someone who says crap like that.

[faithanne]

People still climb Everest even though it's an open graveyard and dead bodies are used as route markers FFS. And apparently it costs a shitload of cash to get up there. Fools and their money etc.

[Sarzy]

The older sister of Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood feels "absolutely heartbroken" that her brother and her 19-year-old nephew were aboard the Titan vessel.

"I feel very bad that the whole world has had to go through so much trauma, so much suspense," Azmeh Dawood said in a phone interview this afternoon, speaking from the home in Amsterdam she shares with her husband.

"I feel like I’ve been caught in a really bad film, with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you’re counting down to," she said, fighting back tears. "I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them."

Azmeh claimed that her nephew did not want to go on the submarine but agreed to take part in the expedition because it was important to his father, a lifelong Titanic obsessive. Suleman "wasn't very up for it" and "terrified," she claimed, explaining that the 19-year-old expressed his concerns to another family member.

"If you gave me a million dollars, I would not have gotten into the Titan," she said.

www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/missing-titanic-submersible-live-updates-rcna90538

Damn. 

[greysfang]

Damn, the only person I felt bad for didn't even want to be there.

[no1novice]

The Greek shipwreck was a horrific tragedy. Yet it didn’t get the attention of the Titanic story
Arwa Mahdawi
Arwa Mahdawi

Last week’s shipwreck in Greece is one of the worst tragedies there has ever been on the Mediterranean Sea. The coverage it received has been scant

ave you heard about the billionaire and multimillionaires trapped on a submersible after spending up to $250,000 each to view the wreckage of the Titanic? Of course you have. The story has been headline news in anglophone countries ever since the vessel, named the Titan, went missing. Enormous resources have been deployed to try to recover the passengers. Every tiny development has been exhaustively covered. Millions of people, myself included, have been glued to the live blogs and rolling coverage. And millions of people, myself included, are now newly minted experts on the difference between a submersible and a submarine.

It’s completely natural to be glued to the Titan story because, obviously, it’s one hell of a story. Yes, the circumstances are unfathomably awful but, also, they’re so unfathomably awful that they seem unreal. The whole thing feels like a movie – like the latest instalment of the Knives Out series. I mean, come on, there’s a billionaire called Hamish Harding involved. The company who made the submersible is called OceanGate: it’s as if it was named in preparation for a massive controversy.

The chief executive of OceanGate – a company which appears to have cut a lot of corners in its quest to build things quickly without regard to boring old safety regulations – is called Stockton Rush. The story seems almost too ludicrous to be true. It seems absurd that people paid obscene amounts of money to get into something which might as well have been called Tiny Little Death Trap.
The Guardian view on danger at sea: looking out for all those in peril
Read more

While it’s only natural to be glued to the Titan story, it’s far from the only recent maritime tragedy in recent weeks. And yet it’s absorbing a disproportionate amount of the world’s attention, empathy and resources. Last Wednesday, one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred on the Mediterranean Sea took place: a fishing boat carrying about 750 people, mainly Pakistani and Afghan migrants, capsized on its way to Italy. There were 100 children below deck in that ship. One hundred children. The exact number of fatalities is unclear: so far we know that 78 people have been confirmed dead and as many as 500 are missing. Those are heartbreaking numbers and yet hundreds of dead and missing migrants have failed to garner anywhere near the amount of attention from the US media as five rich adventurers.

I’m not saying there hasn’t been any coverage of the Greek shipwreck. Of course there has. But it pales in comparison to the attention that’s been given to the Titan’s disappearance. The rescue efforts also couldn’t be more different: a frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea.

The Greek coastguard and government officials, in response to criticism of their handling of the disaster, have said that people on board refused any help. Activists, on the other hand, have said the people on board were pleading for help more than 15 hours before it sank. In any case, is it really the job of a coastguard to look at a ship full of desperate people, full of innocent children, and decide they don’t want help? Nobody looked at the Titan and thought: ahh well, they signed a waiver saying they accepted death was a possibility, there’s no point saving them.

Again, the Greek shipwreck is one of the worst tragedies there has ever been in the Mediterranean. And that’s saying a lot, because the Mediterranean is a mass grave. Every year, tens of thousands of people flee poverty and persecution in the hope of a better life and every year hundreds of those people die in the attempt. More than 1,200 people died in the Mediterranean in 2022, and there have been about 25,000 deaths since 2014.

It’s hard to get your head around those numbers, isn’t it? It’s hard to absorb that amount of anguish. And that’s precisely the problem. If you find yourself more captivated by the story of five rich people in a submersible rather than the 750 people who sank on a fishing trawler, it’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because it’s human nature to be feel overwhelmed by suffering at scale; it’s called psychic numbing. As the saying goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

The people on that boat weren’t statistics, though. They were human beings who deserve better. They deserve better than being lumped together under the term “migrants”. A term that, the Guardian noted in a recent editorial, “disguises rather than illuminates the individuals behind the label”. They deserve the same sort of resources and attention and empathy that five rich adventurers, who put themselves in harm’s way for the fun of it, rather than because they were desperate for a better life, have had.

Here’s the thing: unless I’ve severely underestimated the number of billionaires with a death wish, I think this is the last story we’re going to see about obscenely rich people going missing in a submersible for quite a while. But I’m afraid I can almost guarantee we’re going to see plenty more stories about ships carrying migrants capsizing.

If anything good can come of these two tragedies, I hope it’s that it makes more people rethink how we value human lives. I hope it makes it uncomfortably clear that, in the eyes of the media and policymakers, one missing billionaire is seemingly more important than hundreds of missing migrants.

I hope it makes us consider the framing around the story of migrant crossings. I hope it makes more people interrogate the ways in which migrants are blamed for their deaths, blamed for seeking out better lives – and how completely different that is from the empathy afforded to millionaires seeking out underwater thrills.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist


www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/22/the-greek-shipwreck-was-a-horrific-tragedy-yet-it-didnt-get-the-attention-of-the-titanic-story

[kittylady]

And the pound shop Piers Morgan has jumped in with both feet.


DAN WOOTTON: The new Titanic disaster united the world in equal horror and admiration. But it's a new low for the hate-filled left to use the tragedy to say explorers should be taxed more to stop these pioneering adventures


Like millions across the globe, I can't shake from my mind the unimaginable terror the passengers of Titan must have been feeling in their likely last moments.

The claustrophobic anxiety and inevitably heartbreaking final conversations amid, I imagine, the staunch belief that the devastating risks they took were a necessary part of conquering our powerful planet.

For centuries, the world's greatest explorers and adventurers have put their own lives at risk over and over again to drive forward humanity.

In the weeks and months to come there is going to be more than enough time to question many of the policies, priorities and, quite frankly alarming, procedures of OceanGate and its confident chief executive Stockton Rush, who went down with his sub.

But as the distraught families of the Titan Five await news at sea of their loved ones as any serious hope fades following the announcement from the US Coast Guard that a debris field has been found in the search area, the focus must be on the very real human cost of this failed expedition.

Our thoughts should especially be with London Pakistani Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, just 19 and studying at Strathclyde University in Glasgow.

Not to mention the French navy commander Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who was part of the first human expedition to the Titanic in 1987, and successful British businessman and adventurer Hamish Harding, who, yes, happens to be a billionaire.

For the hate-filled left to politicise the traumatic events of this week, largely because of Harding's presence on the sub, to suggest explorers should be taxed more to stop these pioneering adventures altogether is a new low.

That's exactly what's happened, however, with The Guardian columnist and hard left agitator Ash Sarkar leading the charge.

Rather than keep her communist mouth shut and thinking of the devastated families for just one goddamned day, she tweeted to her 400,000 followers: 'If the super-rich can spend £250,000 on vanity jaunts 2.4 miles beneath the ocean then they're not being taxed enough.'

Not only is such a position morally repugnant, given the timing, it shows everything that is wrong with her Corbynite political philosophy that the west should stop all private innovation, with the government wasting our money on more failed state projects.

Aware of the backlash, she doubled down, adding: 'The Titanic submarine is a modern morality tale of what happens when you have too much money, and the grotesque inequality and sympathy, attention and aid for those without it.
'Migrants are ''meant'' to die at sea; billionaire's aren't.'

Those comments referencing the equally upsetting story of the migrant boat that sank off the coast of Greece, killing at least 78, had already drawn intellectually dishonest parallels between the rescue operation for the passengers on the Titan.

Ben Kentish of the increasingly leftie radio station LBC tweeted knowingly 'Desperately hope they find the submarine, but the fate of the five people on it has already received far more attention than the 78 who drowned in one tragedy off the coast of Greece last week – surely that should make us pause for thought.'Actually, no it shouldn't.

The Greek tragedy made significant news, as do all sinkings of small boats crossing the Channel or from Africa to continental Europe.

The story of the Titan is unique because, until 4.48pm this evening when the Coast Guard news came through, it remained a clear and present reality that the five crew members could be alive underwater, even though its likely depths made a rescue bid almost impossible.

But Labour councillor Freddie Bailey added to the false narrative, tweeting: 'A billionaire who is missing at sea viewing the Titanic is front page news – 300 migrants die in a boat off the coast of Greece and the British media talks about them like they aren't human.'

Sarkar, who seems to have transformed into a nautical engineer overnight, wasn't prepared to stop her tirade though, directly targeting Rush and Harding next.

'I have enormous pity for what must be a terrifying experience, and should the worst have happened, an awful way to die,' she wrote. 'I have absolutely no time for the arrogance of the endeavour, both on the part of OceanGate and the billionaires who paid for their services.'

I repeat that there is going to be more than enough time to debate the safety standards of OceanGate, but before Rush's fate has been determined this feels deeply unnecessary.

As for Harding, he was a very experienced adventurer who amassed a fortune from his successful business interests to spend on these sorts of expeditions, including being awarding the record for the longest time traversing the deepest part of the ocean on the sea floor in March 2021 and the fastest circumnavigation of the globe via the north and south poles by aircraft; how he chose to spend his money is absolutely none of Sarkar's business.

It's not just those on the left who have used the terrible situation to spout unhinged theories.

TV commentator Lin Mei speculated that the crew, if alive, should have made decisions to kill off members one by one, writing: 'That submersible had 20 days of oxygen for one person. They should have voted on keeping the boy alive… possibly the captain… no point everyone dying.'

If there's ever a moment to keep your mad theory to yourself…

As if that wasn't bad enough, the Cambridge college Harding previously attended went ahead with a submarine-themed ball on Wednesday night

The billionaire's cousin Kathleen Cosnett described the decision of Pembroke College to proceed with the 'Into the Depths' event, featuring submarine costumes and dancing to Celine Dion's Titanic movie song My Heart Will Go ON, as in 'extremely bad taste'.

'Polite courtesy has missed out on quite a few generations,' she told the Daily Telegraph.

Indeed it has.

I've been sickened by the woke left's bid to politicise this tragic mission to the Titanic and score cheap points on social media.

There must be a post-mortem into what went wrong, but the solution cannot put off other billionaires investing in future great voyages that help to enhance the world.



Daily Mail

[no]

yeah, too bad you weren't in the submarine yourself you blowhard fuck.

[greysfang]

Wootton is a cunt.

[no1novice]

Polite courtesy has missed out on quite a few generations,' she told the Daily Telegraph.

None less than Dan Wooton himself.

Is he a Johnsonite because this all smacks of a "rich person is more valuable than a poor person" when the laws of physics dgaf.

Brits are worried about paying for their homes while this idiot uses "communist" as an insult when someone points out that millionaires are not taxed fairly.