American and Canadian Coast Guard teams are engaged in a race against time to locate an underwater vessel with five people on board after it went missing during a dive to the Titanic’s wreck in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The 6.5 meter rig, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, began the dive towards the wreck early on Sunday and contact with the rig was lost less than two hours later.
British billionaire Hamish Harding is one of the passengers on board. He had previously posted on social media about his excitement about the expedition.
“It is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available resources to make sure we can locate the vessel and rescue the people on board,” John Mauger of the US Coast Guard told reporters said.
Time is a critical factor, with an estimated 70 hours of remaining oxygen on the vessel.
OceanGate Expeditions said on its website that a diving expedition to the site of the Titanic wreck is “currently underway”.
The company uses a submarine named Titan for its dives to a maximum depth of 4,000 meters.
OceanGate Expeditions said in a statement that the focus is now on the crew members in the submarine and their families.
Harding, a 58-year-old pilot, space tourist and chairman of Dubai-based Action Aviation, said on his Instagram account on Sunday that he was “proud to finally announce” that he had joined the OceanGate expedition.
Action Aviation posted an entry on Twitter on Sunday that “the submarine has been successfully deployed and Hamish is currently diving” along with photos of Harding and other crew members.
The Titanic struck an iceberg during its maiden voyage from England to New York in 1912 and sank with 2,224 passengers and crew on board. More than 1,500 people died in the tragedy.
The wreck was found in 1985 and lies in two large pieces about 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, about 13,000 feet underwater.
