The Belfast built Titanic still claims lives. The curse of the Titanic which sunk on April 15th 1912 has claimed five more lives on or about June 20th 2023. The United States Coast Guard confirmed on Thursday that the five occupants on board the Titan submersible were lost due to a “catastrophic” failure of the craft, after the undersea tourism company OceanGate’s submarine went missing on a voyage to the wreck of the Titanic. A U.S. Coastguard spokesman said it believes the passengers have “sadly been lost” following a harrowing days-long search. The following statement from OceanGate in response to the tragic news said “We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzda Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.”
A Harrowing Search
Many millions of taxpayer dollars (from several countries) were spent attempting to locate and rescue the occupants of the daredevil tour vessel. It is suspected that the Titan imploded under pressure. The question remains, why didn’t the search begin at the Titanic wreck site and work its way outward? That approach should have saved countless man hours of fruitless searching and needless cost and led to the discovery of the Titan’s wreckage no later than Tuesday.
The Titanic
The RMS Titanic that the Titan was trying to reach at the bottom of the North Atlantic was a Belfast built passenger liner, and the short lived pride of the White Star Line. It sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on the 15th of April 1912 after striking an iceberg during its maiden voyage on its way from Cobh in route to New York. 1,500 of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew on board, many of them Irish died in the tragedy, making it the deadliest sinking of an ocean going liner or cruise ship in peacetime. The disaster provided foundational material for the Titanic disaster film. Now five more lives have been lost because of the hapless Titanic, truly an accursed ship.