Greater Cleveland experts weigh in on search for missing submersible

Experts in Cleveland weighed in on the desperate search for the missing Titan submersible Thursday, just before U.S. Coast Guard authorities announced they had found what they believed were parts of the vessel. The five people who were on board were presumed dead.

David VanZandt had been watching the search for the submersible closely. Decades of exploring the Lake Erie has taught him that no matter what kind of work you’re involved in, if it’s underwater the effort required “just goes up by orders of magnitude of how difficult it is to do it.”

“That’s a tremendous amount of pressure down there to expose anything to,” VanZandt said of the incident.

His company, Cleveland Underwater Explorers, has discovered up to 40 shipwrecks, often using robotic operated vehicles or ROV’s like the one that discovered what authorities believe are debris from the vessel.

“This is a small version of it. You know they come in industrial sizes,” he said pointing to a small ROV in his garage.

It’s similar, but he’ll be the first to tell you it’s far from the tragic situation that unfolded hundreds of miles offshore in the Atlantic.

“It takes a lot of expertise and a lot more hardware than we got to go down and do that,” he said. “You look at it from a logistical point of view and it’s just a herculean effort to do it.”