'Titanic' director James Cameron says he knew 'in my bones' that the Titan submersible had imploded and was hoping 'I was wrong': 'It certainly wasn't a surprise'
- The "Titanic" director James Cameron said he knew days ago that the Titan submersible had imploded.
- Debris from the missing tourist vessel was discovered Thursday after an intense four-day search.
The "Titanic" director James Cameron said he knew days ago "in my bones" that the Titan submersible had imploded.
The submersible, which was owned by the private-diving company OceanGate, was carrying five people to see the Titanic shipwreck at around 13,000 feet under the surface when it lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday afternoon.
Debris from the missing sub was discovered Thursday after an intense four-day search. The US Coast Guard said the debris was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber."
Shortly after news of the found debris broke, Cameron told the CNN host Anderson Cooper on Thursday that he knew what the outcome of the crisis would be as early as "Monday morning."
Cameron said he let his "inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades" and "encouraged everybody to raise a glass" after he received "confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise consistent with an implosion event."
"The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion," he told Cooper. "A shock-wave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is. So I was thinking of implosion then. That's Monday morning."
Cameron added that the outcome of the crisis "wasn't a surprise."
"I watched over the ensuing days this whole sort of everybody running around with their hair on fire search, knowing full well that it was futile – hoping against hope that I was wrong but knowing in my bones that I wasn't," he said.
"I just feel terrible for the families that had to go through all of these false hopes that kept getting dangled, you know, as it played out."
In a separate interview with ABC News on Thursday, Cameron also said that many in the deep-sea-diving community, including himself, "were very concerned" with OceanGate.
Experts, including OceanGate's director of marine operations, raised concerns about the safety of the vessel years before Sunday's expedition.
"A number of the top players in the deep-submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that needed to be certified and so on," Cameron said.
"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result," he added.
"It's a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded — to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that's going around all around the world. I think it's just astonishing, it's really quite surreal."