Titanic tourist sub goes missing sparking search

[OMyMyOHellYes]

Even if true (just conjecture on your part, of course), it doesn’t change my opinion on requiring these private ventures to have insurance to reimburse taxpayers for costs incurred due to their their ill-engineered “expedtions”.

The cost of the search/rescue/recovery, for the most part, would have already been spent ... The USN and USCG didn't go out and buy new boats or sonars or planes or hire more sailors or coasties. Those assets and resources had already been paid for. No real variable cost. So, I don't get really worked up over that. We already agreed to share those costs. Guess what? We'd all share the cost of the coverage the proposed "coverage". And taxes wouldn't come down anyway.

Some folks just want to pay higher insurance rates on everything, I guess.

Because insurance settlements aren't free money. They cost EVERYBODY.

 

[Akimbo]

Where could you draw the line? A couple of tourists renting an outboard open boat? Commercial fisherman on a multimillion dollar fishing boat (which is not a very big boat)? Crew of a huge container ship? Recreational divers on the Andrea Doria? Billionaires taking a joy ride on the Titanic?

IMO, everyone deserves the same life saving effort and is a shared expense for the common good.

 

[tridacna]

Regardless, that is money that could be used for much better purposes than playing cleanup for a poorly thought-out private venture like this. These operations should be required have insurance or to reimburse the assets expended by any country that they needed to drag in to help.

Who is going to write a policy for that folly? It would take an actuary about as much time as the “explorers” had when their toy imploded to turn down that risk.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Some people, and I've worked for a few of them, consider themselves Mazters of the Universe(R) and nobody else can conceptualize - or do - anything better than them. Becasue they're the smartest guys in the room.

I would guess, if I had to.

Well that, and also there aren't a lot of options - I believe the list of DSVs that can reach the Titanic is Alvin, Sea Cliff (if it's still operational; I haven't seen an update since 2005), Nautile, Mir 1 (out of service), Mir 2 (out of service), Konsul, Rus, Shinkai 6500, three or four Chinese submersibles, Deespea Challenger, and Limiting Factor. Of those, none carry more than two passengers (with Deepsea Challenger being a single-occupant craft and Limiting Factor only carrying one observer) and only those last two are privately owned and not controlled by a government agency, military, or oceanographic institute. I believe the Mir submersibles and Nautile were the only ones that were ever "hired out" for private endeavors on the Titanic wreck.

The other issue Rush was trying to get around is that a submersible built around a steel or titanium sphere is heavy, thus requiring a large mothership with an A-frame capable of lifting it. Titan came in at about half the weight of the Mir submersibles, which allowed OceanGate to launch it from a small submerging barge carried or towed by a considerably smaller mothership.

 

[broncobowsher]

How many lost solo around the world trips get cut short with a broken mast from a rouge wave and they are picked up by the coat guard? Didn't make the news. If the hunt, and now recovery, of a sub was the only thing the coast guard did all year that would be pretty sad. But it is probably the only multi-day national news story that will be remembered for the whole year. That is more a deal with the press than it is any agency.

When world affairs are slow enough that the big news is the hunt for a lost tourist sub. Nice day in the world. The economy crashing, Russia invading, and what ever else is bad in the world can just take a back seat to a couple of tourists that are in trouble.

 

[Jared0425]

Well that, and also there aren't a lot of options - I believe the list of DSVs that can reach the Titanic is Alvin, Sea Cliff (if it's still operational; I haven't seen an update since 2005), Nautile, Mir 1 (out of service), Mir 2 (out of service), Konsul, Rus, Shinkai 6500, three or four Chinese submersibles, Deespea Challenger, and Limiting Factor. Of those, none carry more than two passengers (with Deepsea Challenger being a single-occupant craft and Limiting Factor only carrying one observer) and only those last two are privately owned and not controlled by a government agency, military, or oceanographic institute. I believe the Mir submersibles and Nautile were the only ones that were ever "hired out" for private endeavors on the Titanic wreck.

Sea Cliff has been sitting partially dismantled at a Navy warehouse since 2011. I can't link any articles to it, but I know people who work at the warehouse (they store stuff from the Iowa's and other obsolete platforms) who told me she's just sitting there.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Sea Cliff has been sitting partially dismantled at a Navy warehouse since 2011. I can't link any articles to it, but I know people who work at the warehouse (they store stuff from the Iowa's and other obsolete platforms) who told me she's just sitting there.

That's what I thought - supposedly Sea Cliff was transferred to WHOI in 1998 and then returned to USN active service (but still operating out of WHOI) in 2002; the last photo I'd seen from Navsource.org was from 2005 of Sea Cliff in a shed at WHOI looking a bit rough around the edges.

Submarine Photo Index

 

[Jared0425]

That's what I thought - supposedly Sea Cliff was transferred to WHOI in 1998 and then returned to USN active service (but still operating out of WHOI) in 2002; the last photo I'd seen from Navsource.org was from 2005 of Sea Cliff in a shed at WHOI looking a bit rough around the edges.

Submarine Photo Index

I was led to believe that she was in something far bigger. I think she is on ice because of Alvin being kept alive and we don't have another DSV if we lose Alvin.

 

[BRT]

The cost associated with the rescue mission has been reported to be around $1,200,000, and will likely climb a little higher than that. The US military budget in 2022 is $766,000,000,000.

If you graphed these on the same scale, and gave 1 pixel to the rescue mission, it would take 247 iphone 11 Pro Maxes to graph the military budget. I think calling it peanuts is pretty fair

It doesn't matter what they say it is. All the assets were already purchased and all the personnel were already going to be paid. Additional costs would only have been fuel and maintenance.

 

[Brett Hatch]

It doesn't matter what they say it is. All the assets were already purchased and all the personnel were already going to be paid. Additional costs would only have been fuel and maintenance.

Agreed, the cost would be mostly consumables, as you say. And maybe some stuff like overtime wages, or reimbursing the commercial operations which helped out. Anyway, that's not a number I came up with, that's the Post reporting on a defense budget expert's opinion. It would not surprise me if when all is said and done, that number grows or shrinks a bit, especially if a large investigation follows.

The point I'm making is that being mad about the cost of the rescue operation, is just not the right thing to be mad about. The military and the coast guard are very expensive. If we sat down as a society and decided that rescue operations shouldn't be done, yeah, we would all save a couple dollars on our taxes. But we wouldn't be making an improvement -- having these resources ready to deploy as emergencies arise is worth the cost. Akimbo hit the nail on the head a few posts up when he said this:

IMO, everyone deserves the same life saving effort and is a shared expense for the common good.