My Titanic survivor great-grandma was traumatized for life by memory of victims’ screams – tourism to grave is offensive
A RELATIVE of two Titanic survivors says the infamous disaster of 1912 scarred her family for life – and the shipwreck should be treated like a mass gravesite and not a rich tourist-thrillseeker’s playground.
Shelley Binder, whose great-grandmother and great-uncle were among 712 survivors of the Titanic’s doomed maiden voyage, spoke with The U.S. Sun ahead of the anniversary of the OceanGate submersible disaster.
On June 18, 2023, a submersible operated by OceanGate imploded above the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic, killing all five people on board, including the company’s CEO, Stockton Rush.
The sub – named Titan – was missing for more than four days before remnants of the vessel were found 1,600ft away from the Titanic’s bow on June 22.
The deep-sea catastrophe gripped the world and rocked the private submersible industry.
OceanGate has since ceased operations but others have come forward pledging to pick up where Rush left off.
Leading the charge is billionaire real estate Tycoon Larry Connor who announced late last month that he and Triton Submarines co-founder Patrick Lahey are planning to plunge more than 12,400ft to the Titanic site in a $20 million two-person submersible.
The pair are setting out to prove the dive can be conducted without disaster when proper safety measures are put in place.
Similarly, OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein told The U.S. Sun that Rush’s death has not dampened his intrepid ambitions but instead inspired him to redouble his efforts with more high-risk missions – including deep ocean and space exploration.
Where the Titanic is concerned, Shelley Binder has questioned the need to disturb the site any further.
Her ancestors, Leah and Phillip Aks, made a remarkable escape from the stricken ship’s sinking in April 1912 but 1496 other men, women, and children were not so lucky – freezing to death or drowning in the mercilessly cold North Atlantic waters.
After safely arriving in the US, Binder says her great-grandmother had a nervous breakdown and was in and out of the hospital for almost a year, traumatized by the horrors she’d witnessed.
She would continue to be plagued by that trauma right up until her death in 1967, confessing to her son she still had nightmares about the sounds of hundreds of people screaming and freezing to death in the waters around her.
“In 1960, my great-grandmother was at a party with my father, and it was very noisy, and she pulled him aside and said, ‘Can you go out on the porch and talk to me for a little while’, and he did,” shared Binder.
“And she was visibly upset, and she told him, ‘I can’t get the sound of people crying out, screaming, and dying in the water out of my head.’
“She told him, ‘The sounds of 1496 people dying and shrieking in agony, there was nothing I could do about it. And when I hear all the noise in that party, it takes me back there.'”
‘AN ABOMINATION’
The sinking of the Titanic lives on in infamy as one of history’s most deadly maritime disasters.
Its wreck was missing for more than 70 years until underwater archeologist Robert Ballard discovered it 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in 1985.
When the remarkable discovery was made, Binder says her uncle urged explorers to “leave the ship alone.”
She said that both her great-uncle and great-grandmother would’ve strongly opposed commercial dives to the Titanic site – as do countless families of victims who died.
“There are so many people that see the wreck as a grave site and they’re truly offended by it, this idea of commercial tourism […] they believe it’s an abomination,” Binder said.
“I think my great-grandmother would’ve been offended by it too, this idea of rich people or a bunch of billionaires going down and seeing where a majority of poorer people died trying to immigrate to the United States.
“The majority of the people aboard that ship were in third class, my great-grandmother and great-uncle among them. They survived but they had to fight for their lives to get out of third class and to safety.
“I think my great-grandmother would be thinking, ‘How rude. What are you thinking? How is that appropriate?'”
Binder expressed a similar belief speaking in the immediate wake of the OceanGate disaster in 2023, calling Titanic tourism “tacky and obnoxious.”
Today, she believes Oceangate should serve as a warning sign, and anyone seeking to splash hundreds of thousands to further disturb the wreck clearly has more money than sense.
“For generations, people who have the money are going to spend it doing things to prove their machismo and appease their sense of adventure, but does that mean they should?” asked Binder.
“Fundamentally, I think one could say these people have more dollars than sense.
“And the idea of tourism to a wreck where 1,496 people lost their lives in a truly horrific disaster of epic proportions is offensive.
“What happened aboard that ship was extremely traumatic and harrowing for my great-grandmother and great-uncle.
“This was a devastating and landmark moment in their lives, and it had long-lasting repercussions for my entire family.”
TITAN DISASTER
OceanGate’s Titan submersible lost communications with its mothership an hour and 45 minutes into its descent on June 18, 2023, after suffering a catastrophic implosion.
All five passengers aboard the vessel were confirmed dead: OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush; British Billionaire Hamish Harding; the legendary French diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet; British-based Pakistani tycoon Shahzada Dawood, and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood.
OceanGate had only been providing tours of the Titanic site for two years, charging guests up to $250,000 per person to catch a haunting first-hand glimpse of the so-called “unsinkable ship”.
Its prized Titan vessel was billed by the company as the new frontier of deep-sea exploration and designed with the help of engineers from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
However, concerns about the safety of the carbon fiber vessel were raised as early as 2018, and the sub was only certified to dive to 4250ft – far short of the depths of the ocean floor where the Titanic lies.
Rush was posthumously censured for skirting safety practices and balking at third-party classification and certification.
Like the Titan sub before it, after its unveiling, the Titanic was also considered to be a high-tech marvel and was billed as the safest ship ever built.
Shelley Binder’s great-grandmother, Leah, was 18 years old when she boarded the ship in Southampton, UK, on April 10, 1912.
With only her 10-month-old son Phillip for company, Leah was heading to America to meet up with her husband, Sam Aks, where they hoped to establish a better life.
OceanGate Disaster: A Timeline
FIVE people were killed when OceanGate's Titan submersible suffered a catastrophic implosion in June 2023. Here's how the tragic incident unfolded in real time:
June 18:
8:00am – The Titan begins its descent from the Canadian research vessel the Polar Prince to the Titanic wreck in a journey that was expected to take two hours
9:45am – Communications between the submersible and the surface vessel are lost an hour and 45 minutes into the trip
3:00pm – The Titan fails to return to the surface as scheduled
5:40pm – The US Coast Guard receives a report about a missing submersible 900 nautical miles east of Cape Cod and a search is launched
June 19:
Planes and ships from the US and Canada descend on the area, with some dropping sonar buoys that can monitor to a depth of almost 4,000 meters to help find the vessel
The first 24 hours of the search come up empty
June 20:
10:00am – France joins the search effort, sending the state-of-the-art deep-sea diving vessel the Atalante toward the site
During the second day of searching, sounds are detected by a Canadian Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft, which is equipped with gear to trace submarines. Reports emerge that banging sounds at 30-minute intervals have been detected
Speculation mounts that the passengers trapped inside may have been banging on the side of the Titan to alert searchers to their location
June 21:
US Coast Guard, US Navy, Canadian Coast Guard, and OceanGate Expeditions establish a unified command to oversee the search
6:00am – US Coast Guard confirms the existence of underwater noises but the origin was unclear. A remotely operated vehicle was sent to the area but again proved fruitless
1:00pm – Officials say no more underwater noises were detected. The scale of the search by this time was more than two times the size of Connecticut
Later that evening, the Atalante arrived to join the search
June 22:
6:00am – The approximate deadline for when the air in the submersible was expected to run out passed
11:00am – A Canadian navy ship carrying a medical team specializing in dive medicine arrives on the scene
11:48am – The Coast Guard says a debris field was discovered by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) near the Titanic site. It was later confirmed the debris was 1,600ft from the Titanic’s hull
4:00pm – Officials announce the five crew members aboard the Titan were likely killed by a “catastrophic implosion”. Rear Adm John Mauger, the First Coast Guard District commander, said an ROV discovered the tail cone of the Titan sub and the debris is “consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber”
June 25:
The Coast Guard announces its Marine Board of Investigation will lead a probe into the loss of the Titan to prevent similar occurrences in the future
June 28:
Pieces of the Titan are brought back to shore. Officials also announced human remains were “carefully recovered” at the site and would be subject to a “formal analysis”
July 2:
OceanGate officially shuts down, announcing on its website that all operations have ceased immediately
Sam left the UK for the US three months earlier on the Cymric, but Leah stayed behind because her family insisted that she had to wait for the Titanic, believing the ship to be unsinkable.
She bought a ticket for the Titanic’s maiden voyage in third-class passage, but within four days disaster would strike: the Titanic crashed into an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and began to sink.
Somewhere within the frantic melee that erupted that evening, Binder’s great-grandmother became separated from her son.
Eventually, she was able to traverse a “human ladder”, Binder said, and climb onto a rescue vessel named the Carpathia, believing the whole time her young son was dead.
By some miracle, Phillip survived. He had also been placed onto the Capathia with another woman who was looking after him.
Leah was reunited with baby Phillip in the vessel’s hospital ward within days.
Despite their miraculous survival, the trauma would weigh heavy on Leah for the rest of her life, Binder said.
“She was devastated, and this was before they even knew what PTSD or shell shock was.
“She couldn’t get any help, and for the first 11 months afterward she was in and out of the hospital.
“This was a horrible way for a family matriarch to start a new life in a new country.
“There were my first relatives that came here, and this is how it all started, with a woman who was so devastated and couldn’t get the help she needed because it didn’t exist.”