By Gabriella Borter
(Reuters) – Around the world, the story of the missing Titanic submersible and the race against time of its salvage operation has enthralled onlookers.
People were glued to their TV screens, enthralled by maritime experts detailing the obstacles to rescue efforts in a vast expanse of sea. They stared at their phones, bracing themselves for alerts about the fate of a ship’s crew. marine explorers and billionaires who disappeared this week after diving to the depths of the ocean to see the century-old wreck.
Erin Geary, a 27-year-old research assistant in Atlanta, Georgia, described feeling sad, anxious and mystified as she watched the Titan submersible rescue unfold. She said she and her father got caught up imagining what survival tactics the five passengers might resort to.
Geary grew up a fan of the 1997 movie “Titanic” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which cemented the story of the ill-fated ship in the modern popular imagination.
Views of the Titanic movie’s Wikipedia page jumped on Wednesday, according to data from movie review site FlixPatrol.
“Some people think the Titanic is somehow cursed, so why would you deliberately put yourself in that position?” she says.
The submersible saga recalls equally harrowing, high-stakes rescues, like the 2010 recovery of more than 30 trapped miners in Chile and the miraculous recovery of a Thai boys’ soccer team from a flooded cave system. in 2018. Both incidents became topics. popular documentaries.
This week there were over 2 million searches on Google for “missing submarine”.
Comments on social media sites on Wednesday ranged from despair at the fate of the Titan’s occupants to disbelief that anyone would embark on a risky mission in a small, cramped vessel.
Those on board the ship include British billionaire and adventurer Hamish Harding, 58, Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, with his son Suleman, 19, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet , 77, and Stockton Rush, 61, founder and CEO of OceanGate.
Some people have expressed frustration that the tourist trip has received such a costly rescue operation, while larger boat tragedies with lesser passengers, such as the deadly wreckage of a fishing boat carrying hundreds of migrant passengers near Greece last week, did not elicit the same public outcry. .
In Boston, near the Coast Guard base that provided public updates on the search, paralegal Jenna Roat said Wednesday she was enthralled by the rescue efforts with family and friends.
His wish for a miracle was fading as Thursday morning approached, when experts estimated the Titan would run out of oxygen.
“There’s not much hope,” she said.
(Reporting by Gabriella Borter; Additional reporting by Tim McLaughlin; Editing by Sandra Maler)