Nonsense. There’s a phrase in media that goes “Dog bites man is not a story. Man bites dog is.” Migrants dying was a story the first time. It was a story the first time it was a huge figure. It’s not a story anymore. Five rich assholes going after the Titanic? Man bites dog.
And who’s to blame for this truism? The media? Or the people who tune in for the story of Man Bites Dog and tune out of Dog Bites Man for the 1,000th time?
Let’s stop calling these guys “Explorers” They’re not exploring anything any more than the climbers in the queue at the top of Everest are “Exploring”. They’re engineers, sure, but not explorers. We’re not exactly learning new things about the deep ocean by diving the Titanic. ROVs can do the job safer and better if you want real exploration.
Did we have this much coverage of migrants dying in large numbers the first time? I do not remember multiple days of front page stories exploring every aspect of the situation of migrants dying in large numbers the first time.
I just saw this from another sub CEO guy - there’s some pretty specific information here (and note the date):
Clearly the company knew exactly what happened, making their response not just a nightmarish charade, but a pretty perverse one as well - demanding the US government intervene (or else specific government workers would be held liable for the deaths… that they knew already happened).
Check out the above tweet, though - people in this channel were telling the public what happened, and either being ignored or attacked as liars.
A single destructive test would have been a good idea but even in that case they wouldn’t have known what kind of damage could be happening internally from repeated pressure cycles. The internal layers of the composite very well may have been experiencing delamination that could only have been detected with expensive, thorough, and repeated non-destructive testing methods such as ultrasonic or X-ray. And even then I wouldn’t have much confidence that all flaws could be detected.
According to reports the Director of Marine Operations for the company was fired in 2018 when he insisted that they do non-destructive testing at least once so there’s no way they were going to do it frequently.
On the morning of Sept 2, 2019, the last day of PAX Seattle, I briefly caught news of a boat accident off the coast of Santa Cruz Island. Around 6pm I finally checked my social media after a full day of the convention. That’s when I was told three friends were on the MV Conception. I remembered one of my friends telling me a few weeks prior at a party how she was looking forward to the trip.
It was still search & rescue at that moment, but my operational brain immediately knew the score. A full day of good visibility had passed; I knew their fate was locked. Sure, you always hope your wrong until confirmation, but I knew at that moment they were gone. It wasn’t till the next morning that the announcement came.
You can not say anything to anyone else about that before the announcement. Choosing to let the authorities on the ground go though the process is on the very outside chance your information and conclusions are wrong. Going forward would only deeply complicate the search & rescue efforts, especially if you’re wrong. Like engineering safety, even if you’re 99% sure of something, you don’t deploy if you can wait to be 99.9999% sure. You don’t want to destroy the hope prematurely, but that silent knowing eats at you.
So no, I don’t see this as some shady cabal withholding information.
Yeah. It was obvious from the start there weren’t going to be survivors.
The reasons this got the attention it did were the lack of bodies, that slim hope for a miracle, and the passengers voluntarily got on such a sub. The migrant disaster would need an even less likely miracle, and they didn’t really have much of a choice to board or not; no one expects anything positive to come out of that news, and everyone sadly knows why they were there.
The rescue operation has to operate on a movie principle: off screen deaths with no bodies means they might still be alive. Until they have bodies, definitive un-survivable wreckage, or exhaust all possible survival time frames, they have to operate as though there could be survivors.
The disparity in media response to these lost 5 people vs. the 700 lost souls of the Adriana, which sank off the coast of Greece, is upsetting.
I’d say four rich assholes and a teen who got unwillingly dragged along.
Innovation got impeded.
The problem is, the company apparently had more than enough information that they knew there would be no bodies and all they’d find was a few fragments of the craft. Under the specific circumstances, they knew there was a zero percent survival chance - there was no “maybe they only got a little bit damaged” scenario. They knew the craft dropped ballast and didn’t make it to the surface, and the only reason that would happen was because it imploded and was utterly destroyed. They knew any search would be a formality - but they didn’t act that way. The press went along in part because they weren’t being given the available information.
Fixed that for you.
Oops, wrong thread!
“Prolonged Nightmarish Charade” - Title of my sex tape.
My wife called them a group of rich, silly-billy sight-seers who are now part of the scenery they went to see.
… and yet my TV keeps telling me it’s BIG NEWS every time somebody ganks a tube of toothpaste from Walgreens, no matter how many times it’s happened before 
That accident was a horror, and hopefully a wake-up call to the dive boat industry. I’m sorry for your loss.
Does this person think nobody has visited the Titanic? One of the people on board was on his 38th trip.
Conspiracy theorists are just amazing at ignoring any information that doesn’t fit their preconceived conclusions aren’t they?
Nothing says “move fast and break things” quite like catastrophic implosion.
hence why i used the word “novel” in my original comment.
