The pressure is on.
An Ohio billionaire plans to take a deep-sea submersible to the depths of the Titanic in an effort to prove the shipping industry is safer following last year’s sinking of the Ocean Gate.
Dayton real estate investor Larry Conner said he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey plan to dive more than 12,400 feet to the wreck site in a two-man submersible.
“I want to show the world that the ocean is very powerful, but if handled in the right way, it can also be amazing, fun and life-changing,” Connor said. The Wall Street Journal.
Lahey is designing a $20 million ship, called the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer, which Connor said will be capable of making repeated voyages.
“Patrick has been thinking about this and designing it for over 10 years, but we didn’t have the materials or the technology,” Connor said. “We couldn’t have built this submarine five years ago.”
The pair said they wanted to prove the voyage could be done without disaster, despite the explosion of their Titan submersible in June that killed all five crew members, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.
The Titan was en route to the Titanic when suddenly, on June 18th, a “catastrophic explosion” occurred.
A few days after the tragedy, Connor called Lahey and urged him to build a better submarine.
“[He said]What we need to do is build a submarine that can dive. [Titanic-level depths] “You have to launch safely, repeatedly, to show the world that you can do it, and that Titan was an incredible machine,” Lahey told the paper.
Connor did not say when the voyage would take place.
Lahey is among several critics of the deep-sea exploration industry who have criticized OceanGate for its questionable safety standards and called Rush’s approach “deeply predatory.”
Industry experts and whistle-blower employees have long raised concerns about the ship’s safety, in part because Ocean Gate chose not to get it certified by credible safety organizations such as American Bureau of Shipping or Europe’s Det Norske Veritas.
Rush, billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Narjolet, Pakistani businesswoman Shahzada Daud and her 19-year-old son Suleiman were killed instantly when the Titan imploded under the pressure of the Atlantic Ocean.
