“Titanic” director James Cameron compared the OceanGate submersible implosion to the original Titanic disaster in an interview Thursday.
Cameron, 68, noted the hubris involved in both cases.
“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 told ABC News. “It’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded.”
Cameron himself has explored the Titanic wreckage an estimated 33 times, and his 1997 Oscar-winning film thrust the shipwreck back into the public limelight.
When not making box office behemoths, Cameron also enjoys deep sea exploration. He visited the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench, in 2012.
“Many people in the community were very concerned about [the OceanGate] sub,” Cameron told ABC News. “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.”
The OceanGate submersible in question, the Titan, was also reportedly the subject of a 2018 lawsuit. The company’s marine operations director at the time, David Lochridge, claimed the company fired him after he pointed out safety issues with the vehicle.
“The viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters,” Lochridge’s complaint read.
The Titanic wreck lies at a depth of about 3,800 meters below sea level. Authorities believe the Titan submersible implosion was caused by the crushing external pressure of the deep ocean.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a secret Navy oceanic sound detection system recorded the Titan implosion shortly after it lost contact about an hour and 45 minutes after it dipped beneath the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the five people who died in the implosion was French explorer Paul-Henri “PH” Nargeolet, who Cameron described as a friend.
“It’s a very small community,” he told ABC News. “I’ve known PH for 25 years, and for him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process.”