Filmmaker and deep-sea explorer James Cameron said that the deadly implosion of the Titan submarine prompted new maritime safety rules a century ago, just as the Titanic disaster set in motion a century ago. said it should encourage restrictions on ships carrying passengers into deep water.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who has directed a blockbuster film about shipwrecks and has visited the site 33 times, told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday that the rules should cover tourist boats, not scientific or solo missions. said. He stressed that the deepwater exploration community has a flawless safety record spanning half a century.
“To date there have been no fatalities, no accidents, no fatalities, no implosion,” he said. “This is, in a way, an extreme outlier of data points that proves the law. And the rule is we’re safe for half a century.”
Cameron made the comments as he stood in front of the 8-metre lime-green experimental submarine he piloted out to sea. deepest part of the sea The Deepsea Challenger is in Ottawa for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society exhibition. summer exhibitiontitled “Pressure: Into the Abyss of James Cameron”.
In the wake of the Titanic accident, international safety treaties have been enacted to manage merchant ships even today, and merchant ships are required to prepare appropriate lifeboats and make voyage plans to avoid dangers such as icebergs. said Prime Minister Cameron.
Canada’s director general said it was difficult to decide who would lead the new regulation because no single government or authority controls the high seas, where many dive voyages take place. Potentially every government in which submarines operate would need to enact their own rules.
previous criticism
Prime Minister Cameron said Oceangate and its chief executive, Stockton Rush, who was among those killed in the Titan blast last month, have called on experts to ask third-party maritime safety agencies to certify the ship. was criticized for ignoring Rush dismissed the process as stifling innovation.
The director’s own Deepsea Challenger was also not certified, but Cameron was alone in a small room. He also condemned Oceangate’s use of carbon fiber hulls and said pressure-resistant hulls should be made of materials such as steel, titanium, ceramics and acrylic.
He and his Australian team spent seven years designing a 26,000-pound cylindrical submersible made of a special material called syntactic foam that can withstand intense pressure underwater.
“For seven years, I was very concerned about implosion risks and other hazards,” Cameron said. “We did test after test, scenario after scenario.”
Cameron conducted 10- to 12-hour simulated dives in a large freezer, where the team “threw blunders” including simulated shooting and battery disasters. All done, he said, he entered the ship with great confidence.
Cameron was joined by his mentor, a Canadian ocean explorer and doctor, on Tuesday. Joe McInnis, highlighting the filmmaker’s long-standing roots in the deep-sea exploration community. When 14-year-old Cameron wrote to McInnis about the submarine in 1968, a lifelong friendship was formed between the two.
The director lamented the death of legendary submarine pilot Paul-Henri Narjolet in last month’s Titan implosion. Cameron said the two had a friendly match to see who dived the most.
“It’s a mental shock. It’s like a gut punch,” he said. “You don’t expect implosion to happen because you don’t expect it to happen because you spend all your time on implosion and you spend all your time doing finite element analysis and computer simulation and everything else to prevent it. .”
