Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, slammed the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy for moving too slowly to find the five men who perished aboard OceanGate's Titan submersible.
Calling the rescue effort an "epic failure of leadership," Crenshaw told Fox News on Thursday night that the debris found earlier in the day was exactly where the Navy and Coast Guard were expecting it to be. The Coast Guard and Navy should have deployed deep-sea sonar-capable crafts earlier and it would have found the submersible sooner, he said.
"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," Crenshaw said.
"They finally deploy that 6K ROV, the only thing capable of actually going to that depth and seeing what's down there, [Thursday] morning. It deploys down there and the wreckage was exactly where they thought it would be," he said. "So where's the failure here? The failure is to not put all your options on the table."
Coast Guard officials said at a Thursday afternoon press conference that a Navy sonar program heard what sounded like an implosion or explosion on Sunday about the same time the Titan lost contact with the boat it was communicating with. They now believe the men all died instantly during that implosion and rescue efforts wouldn't have saved them under any circumstances.
Though they heard noises that they thought could have been banging coming from the ocean on Wednesday, they said Thursday that they were uncertain the sounds were coming from the missing vessel.
The debris found on Thursday was consistent with an implosion while it was making its descent, the officials said.
"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,'" Crenshaw said Thursday night.
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