OceanGate took 8 hours to alert Coast Guard after losing contact with Titanic submersible: Report

As the US Coast Guard admits that it doesn’t know if it will be able to rescue the five people aboard the Titan, a submersible that went missing on Sunday en route to the Titanic wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean, it is being reported that Ocean Expeditions, which owns the submersible took eight hours to alert the Coast Guard about the fact that it had lost all contact with the vessel.

Titan, which is what the submersible is called, dove into the depths of the ocean at 8 am on Sunday morning, around 400 miles southeast of Newfoundland, close to where the famous Titanic’s wreckage lay. At 9:45 am, which is an hour and 45 minutes into the expedition, its mother ship, Polar Prince reportedly lost all contact with Titan.

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However, the U.S. Coast Guard learned about the vessel’s missing status at 5:40 pm, which is eight hours later. The Canadian Coast Guard was alerted after the United States, at 9:13 pm on Sunday night. The reason behind the decision to delay alerting the coast guards of both countries is unclear at the moment.

Since then, a massive search and rescue operation has been launched for the missing submersible as marine officials race against time to save the five onboard – British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani millionaire Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, French Navy pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

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The US Coast Guard has said that the crew in the submersible has only 40 hours of oxygen left to survive. On Tuesday afternoon, US Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick confirmed at a press conference that they still have not caught any sign of OceanGate Expedition’s missing Titan submersible. It is now officially missing for two days.

US Coast Guard Captain Jamie Frederick confirmed at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon that there is still no sign of OceanGate Expedition’s missing Titan submersible, which has now been missing for more than two days.