A Titanic Disparity in How the World Responds to Maritime Disasters

A Titanic Disparity in How the World Responds to Maritime Disasters By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Titan and Adriana are two vessels recently lost at sea, four days and 4,000 miles apart. The five men who lost their lives on the Titan have been getting wall-to-wall coverage in the media worldwide. Meanwhile, the estimated 700 who died when the Adriana sank off the coast of Greece, mostly women and children, have been essentially forgotten. Passengers on the Titan were wealthy; two were billionaires. Each had paid $250,000 for an adventure of a lifetime, a deepsea dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” passenger liner that sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg. Those crammed onto the ramshackle Adriana fishing boat were seeking not adventure but refuge from war, poverty, climate change or any of the many other life-threatening crises that force people to flee their homes with little more than the clothes on their back. They paid human traffickers to ferry them from Libya to Europe. Perhaps the most notable difference between these two disasters was how the world responded to them. Governments immediately spent millions mounting a search and rescue operation to find the Titan, submerged somewhere in the north Atlantic, deep below an area twice the size of Connecticut. Media outlets provided continuous coverage, with one launching a countdown clock predicting when the submersible’s oxygen would run out. The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy and the Canadian government sent planes and boats to the search area. France and Canada each deployed deep sea robots. People around the world watched and waited breathlessly. Meanwhile, in Greece, officials knew the exact location of the overcrowded, disabled Adriana. Shocking details are now emerging of its sinking on June 14th. First-hand accounts, reported in El Pais, suggest the Greek Coast Guard could have saved the doomed vessel’s 400-750 passengers, but opted not to.