Submerged in the sadness for the loss of five people aboard the Titan submersible, and the criticism of the risky and poorly certified expedition to the wreck of the Titanic, was an extraordinary international rescue effort.
Last week saw a heartening reminder of what nations can do together, a primer in how different government agencies can cooperate both with the private sector and with each other in an all-out, no-expense-spared attempt to save lives.
In a matter of days, aircraft and a flotilla of rescue ships assembled some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, searching for a craft hardly much bigger than a minivan that had been lost somewhere in one of the most unforgiving and remote areas of the planet.
The search field in the North Atlantic had a depth of some 12,500 feet, all the way down to the cold and dark place where the Titanic has rested since it hit an iceberg in April 1912. This was far different than a typical Coast Guard rescue with watercraft on the ocean's surface, or a salvage from a few hundred feet.
The time-bound rescue effort, which captivated most of the planet, involved close cooperation between U.S. and Canadian authorities, between Navy and Coast Guards, government officials and private businesses. It involved teams and equipment from at least five countries: Canada, the U.S., Britain, France and Germany.
Search gear arrived at breakneck speed for rescue teams, including remotely operated underwater vehicles, salvage machinery capable of lifting the Titan from the ocean bed, decompression chambers and specialized health care facilities. Though distraught, family members must have felt enormous comfort and gratitude for the scale and competence of this international response, even though the chance of finding people alive was remote from the start.
There was another extraordinary aspect to this story. On Thursday it emerged that the U.S. Navy had "detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion" on the previous Sunday, a remarkable piece of detection in itself but also an indicator that the hope of finding the five men on the Titan alive was remote indeed.
Although the Navy relayed this information to the Coast Guard command, it was decided that the evidence was insufficiently definitive to call off the search and rescue operation. In other words, the sounds might not have come from the lost craft. So the rescue effort continued.
