James Cameron compares OceanGate submersible implosion to Titanic disaster
James Cameron has compared the OceanGate submersible's implosion to the Titanic disaster.
On Thursday, it was confirmed that all five men onboard OceanGate's Titan submersible had died due to a "catastrophic implosion" during a tourist expedition to see the Titanic shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean.
Cameron, who directed the 1997 movie Titanic and has dived to the shipwreck site 33 times, weighed in on the disaster during an interview with ABC News on Thursday.
"People in the community were very concerned about this sub. A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified," he told the outlet.
"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result," he continued. "For us, it's a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that's going on all around the world, I think it's just astonishing. It's really quite surreal."
Cameron, who is highly experienced in deep-sea exploration, also paid tribute to Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the French diver who died in the Titan implosion.
"PH, the French legendary submersible dive pilot, was a friend of mine," he said. "You know, it's a very small community. I've known PH for 25 years, and for him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process."
Alongside Nargeolet, Pakistani-British businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush died in the implosion.
