James Cameron Criticizes U.S. Coast Guard Over 'False Hope' Rescue Effort

By Stephen Andrew

James Cameron recently came under fire over some critical comments about the OceanGate company, following the news that officials believe the Titan submersible imploded at the time it lost contact with a support boat. Now the award-winning Titanic director has turned his ire toward the U.S. Coast Guard. Chiding the government agency of carrying out a "false hope" rescue effort, Cameron told CNN host Anderson Cooper that he'd been certain days of implosion prior to the announcement from the Coast Guard. 

"The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion," he said, "a shock wave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the (mother) ship uses to track where the sub is." Notably, Cameron has made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage site, and has even designed his own 24-foot submersible known as the DeepSea Challenger. He explained that after speaking with others in the submersible community he "got confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise that was consistent with an implosion event."

The seasoned underwater explored added, "That seemed to me enough confirmation that I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades, and I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday." Cameron said that he was "hoping against hope" that his assessment was not correct, but felt like he knew "in my bones that I wasn't (wrong)." He added, "I couldn't think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch, and did not surface."

Shortly after the news of the Titan crew's fate was reported, Cameron spoke with ABC News and stated that many people in the "deep submergence engineering community" were "very concerned" about OceanGate's Titan submersible. "A number of the top players 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," he said. 

"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself," Cameron continued, "where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result.

"For us, it's a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded," he contined. 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."

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