Titanic director James Cameron has spoken publicly for the first time about the tragedy surrounding the Titanic sub disaster which was confirmed on Thursday to have suffered a "catastrophic implosion" resulting in the death of the five aboard.
Cameron, who has built his own submersible which journeyed down to the Challenger Deep which has a depth of 10,902–10,929 metres, condemned the apparent lack of safety on the OceanGate Titan vessel which went missing on Sunday.
While speaking to ABC News the 68-year-old Canadian director of The Abyss, Terminator and Avatar drew comparisons to the 1912 Titanic disaster.
Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter
He said: "I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field."
"For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal."
He added: "People in the community were very concerned about this sub.
"A number of the top players in the in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified."
Cameron had made his own visits to the Titanic wreckage and used some of the footage for his 1997 blockbuster starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. His own sub the Deepsea Challenger went to the Mariana Trench Challenger Deep for 2014 Nat Geo documentary.
On June 19, Cameron wrote on Facebook: "No matter what you may read in the coming hours, all that is truly known at this time is that communications with the submersible have been lost and that is unusual enough to warrant the most serious consideration. I am most concerned about the souls aboard, whose identities have not yet been made public."
Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.
