2023-06-24 01:35:56
Alexandra Ferguson
(CNN) — Last year, Stockton Rush wore a helmet and stood next to one of his submersible craft, full of enthusiasm, as he spoke to a group of students about the thrills and dangers of being a deep-sea explorer. .
“The key element of any expedition is to think: what can go wrong? What can I do to mitigate that risk?” Rush told the students via live webcast ahead of one of their trips. Despite that planning, he admitted, “something always bites you that you didn’t expect.”
Rush, CEO of OceanGate and pilot of the ill-fated Titan submersible that imploded this week on an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic, understood the dangers of his missions.
And his comments to the students seem tragically prescient.
A US Coast Guard official said Thursday authorities had begun mapping the wreckage of his ship about 500 meters from the Titanic wreck. However, since the disaster occurred in international waters, authorities are debating how an investigation would proceed, the official said. But experts agree that any investigation will undoubtedly question the design of the vessel, the materials used to build it and whether Rush and his company should have done more to prevent such a deadly outcome.
A CNN analysis of OceanGate’s marketing material, Rush’s public statements and court filings show that while the company boasted of its commitment to security measures, it rejected industry standards that would have placed greater scrutiny on its operations. and boats. The company also boasted of collaborating with reputable institutions that have since denied partnering with OceanGate on the submersible in question.
Some industry insiders said that OceanGate’s operations were known to be risky.
“This was an undertaking that was already challenging much of what we know about submersible design,” Rachel Lance, a biomedical engineer at Duke University who has studied the physiological requirements of survival underwater, told CNN Thursday. She noted that some of the submarine’s design materials “were already big red flags for people who have worked in this field.”
OceanGate declined to comment on its safety record.
OceanGate founder Stockton Rush in a 2017 image. Credit: KOMO/File
Once in a lifetime opportunity
Facing the public, OceanGate’s marketing sought to appeal to potential customers’ sense of adventure while assuring them that the adventure was safe. They featured scientists or explorers praising the company’s innovations. An eye-catching promotional video, released in 2022, begins with a voiceover boasting of an unforgettable but safe trip: “OceanGate Expeditions offers you the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a member of a crew specially trained to safely dive the remains of the Titanic.
Also featured in that video is explorer Paul Henri Nargeolet, who is among those killed this week, praising the submersible’s design.
“The submarine, to me, is very well done because it’s simple,” Nargeolet said. “Normally they have a lot of equipment and a lot of switches, and in this one you don’t have it because you work with a screen and a keyboard and it’s very easy to do it.”
That simplicity was on full display late last year when Rush invited CBS News reporter David Pogue on a trip, where Rush admitted buying off-the-shelf parts for his boat at stores like Camping World.
In online videos, Rush explained the Titan’s unconventional design, which included carbon fiber to increase the boat’s buoyancy. It had never been used on a manned submersible before,” he claimed in a video from last year.
According to the OceanGate website, the Titan also included an “unprecedented safety feature” that monitored the integrity of the vessel’s hull during each dive. A 2021 press release highlighted her “multiple redundant security systems”.
But in another interview with Pogue, Stockton seemed dismissive of security.
“At some point, security is just rubbish,” Stockton said. “If you want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Do not do anything”.
Two former Oceangate employees separately raised concerns about the Titan’s safety. David Lochridge, who worked as director of marine operations from 2016 to 2018, claimed in court filings that he had expressed apprehension about the submersible’s design and the company’s testing of its hull before he was fired.
Lochridge also questioned OceanGate’s plans to install a monitoring system on the ship to detect the start of a hull breach. His court filing argued that “this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail, often milliseconds before an implosion, and would not detect any existing failures prior to putting pressure on the hull.”
OceanGate’s court files suggest additional testing was conducted after Lochridge left the company. It’s unclear if his concerns were addressed. OceanGate terminated his employment and sued Lochridge in 2018, arguing that he shared confidential information and used the company to obtain immigration assistance and then fabricated a reason to be fired. The company’s lawsuit claimed that Lochridge is not an engineer, but a submersible pilot and diver.
Another former employee who briefly worked for the company as an operations technician during the same period as Lochridge also had concerns about the hull’s thickness and adhesion, he told CNN on condition of anonymity.
The Titan submarine prepares for its descent on June 18, 2023. Credit: Dirty Dozen Productions/AFP/Getty Images
Lance, the Duke University professor, echoed some of these concerns. He said the unconventional combinations of materials used on the Titan posed safety risks because “over the course of repeated pressurizations, they tend to weaken.”
“This is not exactly what, in my opinion, would be innovation because it is something that has already been tried and it just didn’t work,” he said.
The total number of voyages to the high seas the Titan has made is unclear, although a court filing by a company adviser in November claimed the five-person submersible had carried 28 people aboard the Titanic last year.
OceanGate also appears to have overstated its relationships with two institutions highly respected for their innovation: Boeing and the University of Washington (UW).
OceanGate’s website touted its partnership with Boeing, stating that its Titan submersible had been “designed by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration with experts” from Boeing and other entities. Similarly, OceanGate claimed in a 2021 court filing that the Titan was built with the help of the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory.
Both Boeing and the UW have denied partnering with OceanGate in the development of the Titan.
OceanGate had partnered with the UW to create a different submersible before parting ways, the university said in a statement. The company also used test tanks at the UW School of Oceanography for nine tests between 2016 and 2022, according to Victor Balta, a UW spokesman. The tanks were used on a contract basis and no university researchers were involved in those tests and “no verification or validation of any OceanGate equipment was provided by UW staff as a result of those tests,” Balta added.
OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein, who left the company in 2013 and was not involved in Titan’s development, warned Friday against jumping to conclusions about what caused the submersible’s catastrophic loss.
“Safety was always the number one priority for us, and for Stockton in particular – he was a great risk manager and I think he believed that every innovation he created, whether it was technological or within diving operations, was as much to broaden the humanity’s ability to explore the oceans to enhance the safety of those doing so,” he told Anderson Cooper on CNN This Morning.
OceanGate Expeditions faced problems making its excursions to the Titanic
To break the rules
Rush seemed to enjoy pushing the limits. Although he sometimes spoke of caution, he believed that industry standards hindered technological advances in the field of exploration and once acknowledged to a YouTuber that he had “broken some rules” to build the Titan.
His company also alarmed industry veterans by refusing to classify the Titan, a routine inspection process that would have provided an extra layer of oversight. “He’s taking a huge risk, and the risk he’s taking could affect the entire industry,” said Will Kohnen, chairman of the submarine committee for industry group Marine Technology Society, reminding CNN of concerns he conveyed to the OceanGate founder, Rush, in 2018.
If OceanGate had pursued a certification review, “some of this could have been prevented,” Kohnen told CNN on Wednesday.
Because the Titan was diving in international waters, the vessel appeared to be operating in a regulatory vacuum.
“It’s a gray area that’s coming to light,” said Sal Mercogliano, a professor at Campbell University in North Carolina and a maritime historian.
An undated photo shows the Titan during a descent. Credit: OceanGate/AFP/Getty Images/File
The Titan’s lack of credentials was noted in the legal waivers that OceanGate required its customers to sign prior to voyages. The company reportedly warned that its latest submersible “had not been approved or certified by any regulatory body” and that a dive “could cause physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death.”
Mike Reiss, who was one of Rush’s clients, said he was aware of the dangers.
“Before boarding the submarine, I signed a lengthy resignation letter detailing all the ways this voyage could kill me: suffocation, electrocution, drowning, crushing… death was mentioned three times on the first page,” he wrote. Reiss in an opinion piece for CNN. “I kissed my wife goodbye before leaving, thinking that perhaps I would never see her again.”
It is still unclear what caused the catastrophic implosion that killed Rush and his passengers. But a US Coast Guard official suggested at a news conference on Thursday that existing safety regulations would be reviewed.
“This is an incredibly difficult and dangerous environment to work in,” said Rear Admiral John Mauger. Rush had no illusions about these challenges.
“You have to take the blows,” he told students in the video broadcast live last year. “That’s the attitude we really look for in people who join us, is to (see) a problem as a challenge, not a reason to hide.”
— Gabe Cohen, Brad Lendon, Greg Wallace, Veronica Miracle, Allison Morrow, Rob Frehse, Paul Murphy, and Celina Tebor contributed reporting.
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