Titanic victims' families slam 'disgusting' tourism shipwreck tourism industry

The descendants of people who died aboard the Titanic have criticised the burgeoning tourism industry growing around the shipwreck, after the saga involving the missing OceanGate submarine reached its conclusion yesterday.

John Locascio, 69, whose uncles died in the tragedy, said it was “disgusting” that OceanGate has been capitalising on visits to the site, adding: “What do you want to look at, you want to ogle?”

“They died a horribly tragic death. Just leave the bodies resting,” said Locascio, whose uncles, Alberto and Sebastiano Peracchio, were working as young waiters on the ship when it hit an iceberg and sank.

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“I would want [the tours] to stop, to be perfectly honest. There’s no sense of it. You’re going down to see a grave. Would you want to dig up your uncles or aunts to see the box?,” he told the Daily Beast.

On 22 June, fragments of OceanGate’s Titan submarine were found by search and rescue teams, bringing to a close a saga that had reached fever pitch since the vessel went missing on Sunday.

Tributes flowed in for the five men killed on board the sub in what US officials said was a “catastrophic implosion”. The victims were Hamish Harding, 58, Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman Dawood, 19, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, and Stockton Rush, 61.

However, relatives of the 1,496 victims of the disaster in 1912 said the wreck should be treated like an underwater “graveyard”, not a “Disneyland” for thrill-seekers.

Mark Petteruti said his grandmother survived the Titanic disaster aged 24 but suffered lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder. He said: “It’s such a tragedy, I can’t believe people would pay $250,000 to look at it.”

“It’s a graveyard, all those people who died with all their remains are down there … now it’s almost like Disneyland with all the people going down there to look,” said Petteruti, a shop owner from Massachusetts.

Meanwhile Brett Gladstone, whose great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather, Ida and Isidor Straus, died in the 1912 disaster, said the voyages should be better regulated.

He said: “I’m not someone who believes in bad karma, and that people who go down in submersibles are subjecting themselves to bad karma because they’re going down to see a graveyard up close with unburied people. But the act of going down there should be a regulated procedure.”

T. Sean Maher, whose great-grandfather James Kelly died on the Titanic, said the OceanGate submarine “shouldn’t have been down there in the first place.”

“It’s tremendously sad if some people may have lost their lives in that manner, but in my opinion, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” he said. “We should let those people down there lie in peace.”

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