Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) laid blame Thursday on the U.S. Coast Guard after the armed forces branch said it had found pieces of the lost Titan submersible on the ocean floor. Things might have turned out differently, he said, if leadership “had just acted sooner.”
Crenshaw made the comments shortly after the Coast Guard said Thursday that a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) discovered a debris field “consistent with the catastrophic loss of its pressure chamber.” The Wall Street Journal later reported that the Navy had registered sounds consistent with an explosion or implosion shortly after contact with the Titan was lost Sunday, but a Navy official later said it would have been “irresponsible” to assume then that the Titan passengers and pilot had died.
But the Republican lawmaker claimed the international search effort appeared to be a case of “epic failure in leadership,” possibly stretching into the White House and upper echelons of the Coast Guard and Navy.
“I have been hearing a lot of concerning things from people, the civilian side who are involved in this,” Crenshaw said Thursday in a statement to reporters. “You know, we’ve got to look into it, see what’s true and what isn’t. … What appears to be the case is epic failure in leadership. Where exactly that leadership failure is, I don’t know. Is it the White House, Coast Guard, Navy? I’m not sure.”
The discovery ended an international race against the clock in hopes of recovering the lost vessel before its oxygen supply ran out. The Titan lost contact with its parent ship on Sunday, about two hours after its launch with five men on board to visit the wreckage of the Titanic, about 2½ miles deep on the floor of the Northern Atlantic.
Crenshaw told Fox News later Thursday that he was concerned with the timeline of the rescue effort, particularly amid reports of a tapping noise picked up by search-and-rescue crews. The congressman said a Magellan submarine and specialized remote-operated vehicle should have been deployed to the region immediately to help find the vessel more quickly.
“Now, it’s important to note, that if you had just deployed those assets, they would have arrived on scene by Wednesday morning at the latest,” he said. “They finally deploy that ROV, the only thing capable of actually going to that depth and seeing what’s down there, this morning. It deploys down there and the wreckage was exactly where they thought it would be.”
“So where’s the failure here? The failure is to not put all your options on the table,” he added.
Crenshaw went on to question if the Coast Guard had been operating on the assumption from the Navy that the vessel had imploded rather than it purely being a rescue.
“It begs the question: Could this have been resolved differently if leadership had just acted sooner and actually put options on the table instead of just assuming, well, it doesn’t matter because they’re dead?” he said.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned the Titan, released a statement Thursday calling those on board, including the company’s chief executive, “true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure.”
“Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time,” the company said. OceanGate said Thursday it would not be issuing any other comments on the incident.