‘It’s Titanic replay all over. Oceangate promoters failed to heed warnings’, Titanic director, James Cameron

Multi-award winning Hollywood film director, James Cameron, who directed the 1997 movie Titanic, has revealed that the company in charge of the failed Submersible expedition, OceanGate, was warned of an impending disaster, but failed to heed it.

On Thursday, June 22 the US Navy said that the navy had detected “an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion” shortly after the Titan lost contact with the surface.

The official said the information had been relayed to the US Coast Guard team which used it to narrow the radius of the search area. Later on Thursday it was revealed by the US coast Guard that everyone on board the submersible was dead as the vessel imploded.

Cameron who himself is a deep sea explorer and has completed 33 dives to the wreck of the Titanic, said he was on a ship on Sunday when the sub went missing, and did not hear about it until Monday.

When he learned that the sub had lost both its navigation and communication at the same time, he said he immediately suspected a disaster.

“I felt in my bones what had happened. For the sub’s electronics to fail and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously – sub’s gone,” he told the BBC.

The Avatar director went on:

“I immediately got on the phone to some of my contacts in the deep submersible community. Within about an hour I had the following facts. They were on descent. They were at 3500 metres, heading for the bottom at 3800 metres.

“Their comms were lost, and navigation was lost – and I said instantly, you can’t lose comms and navigation together without an extreme catastrophic event or high, highly energetic catastrophic event. And the first thing that popped to mind was an implosion.”

He said the past week had “felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff”.

“I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. That’s exactly where they found it,” he continued.

He added that once a remotely controlled underwater vehicle was deployed on Thursday, searchers had “found it within hours, probably within minutes”.

Cameron also suggested that there was a “terrible irony” in the loss of Titan and its crew, likening it to the loss of the Titanic itself back in 1912.

“We now have another wreck that is based on unfortunately the same principles of not heeding warnings,” he said.

“OceanGate were warned.” he added

He said the company had people working internally who quit but he did not specify why.

He said people within the deep submergence community, not including himself directly, had written a letter to OceanGate saying they believed, in his words, “you are going on a path to catastrophe”.

A letter sent to OceanGate by the Marine Technology Society (MTS) in March 2018 and obtained by the New York Times stated “the current ‘experimental’ approach adopted by OceanGate… could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic)”.

Separately, US court documents show a former employee of OceanGate warned of potential safety problems with the vessel as far back as 2018.