One year after the tragedy, Sidonie Nargeolet, the daughter of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the French explorer known as ‘Mr. Titanic’, has spoken out about the silence from OceanGate, the company behind the ill-fated dive.
Titan sub victim’s daughter claims OceanGate hasn’t contacted her since the ill-fated disaster
In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, Sidonie, wearing a T-shirt with a deep-sea diver on it, shared that she has not received any condolences or apologies from OceanGate since the accident that claimed the lives of her father and 4 others.
She described this silence as “astonishing”.
Sidonie shared that during the 4-day search, she still had a small hope that her father was still alive. However, that hope was destroyed when she heard the news about the “catastrophic implosion”.
She was very sad and cried for 10 minutes after receiving this news.
Although Paul-Henri passed away while doing the work he loved, Sidonie is deeply saddened by the lack of any condolences or apologies from OceanGate.
The company was forced to shut down just weeks after the disaster after 61-year-old CEO Stockton Rush and 3 others were killed.
Sidonie hopes that her father’s death will not be in vain, and she wants the deep-sea exploration industry to learn from this incident to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
The world waited anxiously as the search and rescue mission began for the sub, which only had 96 hours of oxygen left.
On June 22, the US Coast Guard found debris on the ocean floor that showed the Titan had imploded on the same day it dived.
In the 1990s, he left his navy job to explore and retrieve relics from the Titanic. He was able to recover the first objects from the site, and he returned some to the owners.
In total, he took 5,500 objects, which led to criticism from other explorers, but he was “obsessed” with honoring the memory of those who died.
Ms. Nargeolet said she went sailing with her father in the Mediterranean before he went on his final dive.
Her family joked that it was a bit like the Titanic, but she didn’t think it was funny at the time, though she does now.
In June 2024, an Ohio billionaire provided $20 million to sponsor an expedition to the Titanic wreckage site.
This came after the tragic implosion of the Titan submersible operated by OceanGate, which resulted in the deaths of all 5 people on board, including CEO Stockton Rush.
The billionaire, Larry Connor, partnered with Patrick Lahey, co-founder of Triton Submarines, to develop a two-person submersible called the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer.
This sub can dive over 12,400 feet to the Titanic wreck site. The goal is to demonstrate that deep-sea exploration can be done safely and provide awe-inspiring experiences.
The Titan submersible’s implosion had raised concerns from some deep-sea experts about OceanGate’s safety practices in the past.
Connor and Lahey want to address these concerns and prove that deep-ocean exploration can be carried out without incident.