Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet — one of five passengers aboard the doomed Titan submersible — reportedly lived in a small Dutchess County town in New York.
Lovingly nicknamed “Mr. Titanic,” Nargeolet moved from Kent, Conn., to Holmes, a hamlet in Pawling, in January 2022, Mid-Hudson News.com reported.
Holmes, with a population of 3,600, is about 70 miles north of New York City.
The 77-year-old trailblazer was aboard the first-ever vessel to travel to the RMS Titanic wreckage in 1987, which lies some 12,500 feet below the North Atlantic Ocean surface.
The Titanic — hailed as “unsinkable’ before it dropped to the bottom of the ocean in 1912 — lost more than 1,500 passengers after ramming into an iceberg 450 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
The former French Navy commander had taken more than three dozen trips to the Titanic wreck before boarding the ill-fated OceanGate Expeditions Titan submersible.
He and four others — Sulaiman Dawood, 19; his business tycoon father Shahzada, 48; British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, and OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, 61 — were on the Titan June 18 en route to the historic site.
The travelers were sealed into the sub by 17 bolts that could only have been opened from the outside, and were estimated to have had 96 hours of oxygen reserves.
Experts figure the sub was just shy of 10,000 feet below the ocean surface — roughly an hour and 45 minutes into its expedition — when communications were lost.
Reports of recurring “underwater noises” characterized as both “banging” and “tapping” sparked hope, but were later deemed unrelated to the missing crew.
The US Coast Guard announced Thursday it found an array of debris on the ocean floor, — about 1,600 feet from the bow of the sunken Titanic — indicating the submersible suffered a “catastrophic implosion in which experts believe the victims died nearly instantly.
Officials have said they plan to examine the sub’s voice recordings and data from its mothership in the hope of learning more about what happened.
Investigators are still probing whether the case warrants a criminal investigation.