TORONTO – About 40 hours of oxygen is left in the lost Titanic tourist submersible, which disappeared Sunday on an expedition to explore the famed shipwreck, the US coast guard said yesterday.
Coast Guard members provided an update to search efforts to find the submersible and answered questions from reporters.
“There’s about 40 hours of breathable air left based on that initial report,” Anadolu Agency reported Captain Jamie Frederick from the First Coast Guard district response department said.
“The search efforts have focused on both surface with C-130 aircraft searching by sight and with radar and subsurface with P3 aircraft. We’re able to drop in monitor sonar buoys, today, those search efforts have not yielded any results,” he said.
The search teams are working in an area that is 900 miles (1,448km) east of Cape Cod, 400 miles south of St. John’s, Canada, and it takes time and coordination to bring assets to bear, which makes it an incredibly complex operation, he said.
Regarding search and rescue operations, the US Navy is “on standby should they be needed,” according to the White House.
The Navy has “some deep water capabilities that the Coast Guard wouldn’t necessarily have,” it also reported National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said in a news briefing.
Authorities in the US and Canada are racing against the clock to locate the vessel that was carrying people to see the Titanic wreckage site in the North Atlantic Ocean.
When it went missing, the submersible had 96 hours of additional oxygen available.
Five people are on board, including Hamish Harding, a British billionaire explorer, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a renowned French diver. – Bernama, June 21, 2023
