When David Waud heard a submersible on its way down to survey the wreckage of the Titanic had gone missing Sunday, he knew it could be only one vessel.
“I knew it had to be the Titan,” said Waud, who ventured into the depths of the Atlantic aboard the Titan on an expedition led by the company OceanGate, in 2021.
“My first guess was that something had happened to the pressure hull, the pressure chamber and that it had imploded,” Waud said.
His fears were realized Thursday morning, when the U.S. Coast Guard said the submersible had imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board. Waud knew two of the men who died.
In the days since the submersible first went missing, Waud said he has read of newly uncovered allegations suggesting there had been significant warnings made about safety during the Titan’s development.
An engineering report in 2018 said the craft needed more testing and that passengers might be endangered when it reached “extreme depths,” according to a lawsuit filed that year in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
Had Waud known about the report in 2021, he most likely wouldn’t have made the voyage.
“I don’t think I would have gone on the trip,” Waud said. “But I was completely confident when I did go.”
Waud said the tragic, sudden ending was merciful in a way, given that those on board had a limited supply of oxygen and it took days for crews to locate the submersible.
“That’s much better than sitting for four, or five or six days and suffocating,” Waud said.
Titan lost contact with its support ship Sunday as it descended into a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean to the wreck of the Titanic, setting off an international search and rescue effort. There was hope that the crew would be found before they ran out of breathable air Thursday morning.
The five people on board were pilot Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate; British adventurer Hamish Harding; Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, a father and son from a prominent Pakistani family; and French undersea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Waud, an underwater filmmaker from Lake Forest, said he had long wanted to visit the wreckage of the Titanic, which sank in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912, and feature it in a movie. He spent years trying to get down to the ship, and was finally able to get a seat on the Titan in August 2021.
“I knew when I went down on it that if anything went wrong there was very little chance of us being saved,” Waud said. But he credited Rush and Nargeolet with helping him feel completely safe during his voyage. Rush was also the pilot on Waud’s journey.
“They were always doing video presentations, they were talking at meals about their experiences, they were both very optimistic and very confident in what they were doing, or they wouldn’t be going down 12,500 feet in a submersible as often as they did,” Waud said.
Despite the recent negative news he’s read surrounding OceanGate, Waud said he considers Rush a visionary for his efforts in teaching people about oceans.
“I still consider Stockton to be a hero in many ways with the vision he had to make it possible to take people down, not just to the Titanic, but [to] many other areas of the ocean that are very, very deep,” Waud said.
Pam Waud, David’s wife, said the days-long search for the Titan was difficult on her husband.
“It’s been a little rough, more so on my husband, because he was the one who was on the Titan. He was with Rush and [Nargeolet] so he’s much more affected by it than I am,” she said. “He’s anxious.”
The couple had been checking the news about every 30 minutes for the last few days, but Pam told the Sun-Times on Thursday morning they felt there was no hope left.
“Not at this point. It’s just a very sad situation,” she said.
The film that her husband was in the process of putting together on the Titanic uses much of the footage he captured on his trip aboard the Titan.
That project is now on hold, Pam Waud said.
“He’s decided he may not produce it because of this tragedy,” she said.
He planned to hold private showings of the film to raise money for various charities that he supports.
“I’m glad he’s not on the current one,” she said of the ill fated trip. “When he did go, I was nervous, but I also knew it was something he really wanted to do and was trying to produce a movie on this subject ... I wasn’t going to hold him back.”
Pam Waud wasn’t interested in joining her husband. “No. I’m claustrophobic enough to know,” she said.
OceanGate has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.
That year, as the Titan submersible was being transported on a flatbed across the country, it made a stop outside a Lake Forest community center. David Waud spread the word that Rush would show people the inside of the vessel and make a presentation with Nargeolet.
About 250 people showed up. No one took them up on a $250,000 ride to the seafloor to see the Titanic.
Pam Waud said her husband didn’t pay that sum.
“My husband didn’t pay that. He was grandfathered in for a much, much lower rate,” she said.
For his role in getting people to attend the presentation, Rush promised Waud another trip in 2022, this time for free.
“But he decided he didn’t need to go because he’d been once, and it’s a risk every time you go, obviously. And he didn’t have the time to do it, also,” his wife said.
Contributing: Associated Press
