A 'Titanic' Mistake

The submersible Titan, which was descending the Atlantic Ocean on a routine - routine? - trip to the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic, was the subject of a massive search when it disappeared this past Sunday.  While search and rescue crews went all over the area trying to locate the craft, the television news media played up the story like the TV drama such stories become, reporting on the search even when there was nothing to report, the better to pump up their ratings.  It only had four days' worth of oxygen for its five passengers.

The story now has an ending.  Debris from the Titan, owned by the OceanGate company, was found in the waters of the Atlantic after the craft experienced  what the United States Coast Guard said was a "catastrophic implosion."   

I'm sorry, but, except for the young boy who was aboard the Titan with his father, I have no sympathy for the passengers aboard this doomed vessel.  As a submersible, the Titan was not designed to remain underwater for too long.  Its designers did not equip it to spend an indefinite amount of time underwater like a regular submarine.  And OceanGate's Stockton Rush, who had the Titan built - and was one of the passengers on the craft - said he deliberately cut corners and, by his own admission, "broke a few rules" to maximize its versatility.  And the whole idea of using such a vessel to explore a shipwreck - to view the remains of an ocean liner with many of the bones of its victims still entombed in it - borders on obscenity.  Could you imagine submersibles going down to view the wreck of the British ship Lusitania, the ocean liner that sank when the Germans torpedoed her in 1915 during World War I, when the sinking of the Lusitania represents the incomprehensible evil of firing on a civilian craft?   Especially a ship with Americans, then not fighting in the First World War, no board?  Alas, such tours likely exist, but looking at the mass tomb of people who died when an iceberg hit their ship is obscene enough.  

Oh yeah, it's not like Rush and his fellow passengers didn't know the risks.  They had to sign a waiver acknowledging the possibility of dying - the word "death" is repeated thrice on the first page! - before boarding.

Hopefully this maritime disaster - which resulted from a desire to view the results of an earlier maritime disaster - will bring an end to such vulgar, elitist "necro-tourism" excursions.