“I’m breathing air…unlimited air. I so much take this air for granted.”
This is the first thought that came to my mind, waking up at 2:54 AM…today, Thursday June 22.
I had been praying for the five people on board the Ocean Gate TITAN, a small submersible that went missing four days ago as it descended into the abyssal depths of the North Atlantic to view the famous wreck of the Titanic.
Something went terribly wrong and it lost communication with the surface. The crew was not even able to vector their last location which means they can be anywhere within a block of ocean 7,600 miles wide, 7,600 miles long and up to 13,000 feet deep.
According to BBC News, the sub’s breathing air supply is expected to run out Thursday, June 22, at around 6 a.m. ET.
That’s just three hours from when I’m writing this.
But rescuers are not giving up and classifying all their present activities as “100% still a rescue operation.”
I believe them. And I don’t believe that the sub’s air will run out this morning, either. The five people onboard are cold, unfed for four days now and most probably lethargic.
They’re not jumping around inside that sub. They are barely moving. They are weak, supine, cold, their breathing is shallow and they’re not talking a whole lot.
Even though lacking the metabolical adaptation to fully hibernate like bears, these five men nevertheless are certainly consuming only a small fraction of their normal oxygen intake right now. Their slower metabolism should also make them expel less carbon dioxide—whereas you and I can gulp in as much as air as we like.
I don’t care if they pull these men out of that sub limp as rags, as long as they’re alive and responsive. And I’d give them at least a couple more days of breathing to go. Two more days of hope.
If a rescue craft can hook a cable to that sub once they find it, powerful electric winches aboard surface ships could reel them up in just a matter of minutes.
They can pull that sub up faster than air bubbles can rise. They don’t have to worry about the men suffering from the “bends” or having to decompress when they surface. All this time they’re in “zero feet above sea level” atmosphere inside that pressurized minisub.
The Titan’s last destination of purpose was the wreck of the Titanic, whose exact location is now known. The minisub was last known moving TOWARDS the Titanic’s coordinates, not away from it. It was descending to the wreck, so its movement is more vertical than horizontal it cannot undershoot or overshoot the Titanic’s location by too much. Lastly, all factors of tide and underwater current can be precisely factored in because there is a minute-by-minute record of the local weather and sea conditions of all the past days since the minisub disappeared.
I believe that in the end it will be pure human logical deduction that will figure out where that sub is, and not some computer crunching dry numbers and data in its artificial “brain.”
One of the sub’s passengers is an experienced French deep sea diver who can instruct his companions on how to control their breathing to help conserve their meager air.
That entire youth football theme that were trapped in a small air pocket in an underground river cave in northern Thailand in July 2018 were given up for dead hours after it was estimated that they would have suffocated already. And yet, they were found and eventually rescued after EIGHTEEN DAYS.
These five people will be rescued. That’s what I choose to continue to believe. Still.*
About the Author
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”
About Images: Some of the images used in the articles are from the posts in Atty. Joel Rodriguez Dizon’s Facebook account, and/or Facebook groups and pages he manages or/and member of.