Cameron Henderson
21 September 2024 5:00pm
Stockton Rush styled himself as a cross between an Ernest Shackleton style explorer and an Elon Musk-esq business visionary.
But at the hearings into the tragedy which saw the Titan submersible owned by Rush’s OceanGate company implode on the way to the wreck of the Titanic last year, a very different figure emerged.
The inquiry in Charleston, South Carolina, opened on Monday and heard from a host of former OceanGate employees who issued scathing rebukes of Rush, the company’s CEO and founder, accusing him of “arrogance” and claiming he ignored expert advice, flaunted regulations and put profit ahead of safety in his determination to reach the wreck of the ocean liner.
The submersible lost contact with its mothership about two hours into its descent to the Titanic, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in June last year triggering an international rescue effort that ultimately recovered no survivors.
The five people killed in the disaster were Rush, Hamish Harding, a British explorer, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French diver, and Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani businessman, and his 19-year-old son Suleman.
Since its fateful dive, the Titan and its creator have come under close scrutiny in the undersea exploration community, in part because of the vessel’s unconventional design and Rush’s decision to forgo standard independent checks.
“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” said David Lochridge, the company’s former marine operations director, who claimed he repeatedly raised the alarm but was ignored. “There was very little in the way of science.”
Mr Lochridge was made an operations director at OceanGate in January 2016 after moving his family from their native Scotland. In hotly anticipated testimony, he said that he was not directly involved with the design or construction of the Titan’s original hull, but that Rush still had him inspect a prototype of the vessel as it was nearing completion in early 2018.
‘He liked to do things on the cheap’
What he found was “an abomination of a sub,” he told the hearing, adding that he later learned that many components were “reused” in the second version of the Titan hull that was involved in the disaster.
“Stockton liked to do things on the cheap,” Mr Lochridge testified.
Referencing a 2018 report in which he raised safety issues about OceanGate operations, Mr Lochridge said he had “no confidence whatsoever” in the way Titan was built.
He said leadership dismissed his concerns “on every single occasion”, adding that “all the standardised rules and regulations” were bypassed as the company scrambled to “push” for a launch so they could “start making profit”.
“It was inevitable something was going to happen. It was just a [question of] when,” he said.
Mr Lochridge’s concerns about the speed of production and related safety issues were echoed by OceanGate’s former engineering director, Tony Nissen, who kicked off Monday’s hearing.
Mr Nissen told investigators he worked on a prototype of the hull several years before the Titanic expedition and felt pressured to get the vessel ready to dive.
Damning testimony from the prototype pilot
However, when asked to pilot the prototype submersible, Mr Nissen said he told Rush: “‘I’m not getting in it.”
Of particular concern was the design of the submersible’s hull, which was made out of carbon fibre rather than titanium or steel.
An hour and 45 minutes into its 13,000ft descent, the Titan lost contact with its mothership, the Polar Prince, with intense ocean pressure thought to have triggered a massive implosion that caused the craft to collapse in on itself.
Footage of the moment the submersible’s wreckage was found, released publicly for the first time this week, shows the Titan’s cracked tail cone on the sea floor surrounded by fragments of debris and a knot of wires.
The hull needed to be built to withstand underwater pressure of around 6,000 pounds per square inch at the Atlantic seabed – roughly 400 times the pressure at the ocean’s surface.
Asked by Rush to assemble a quality inspection report of the Titan in 2018, US court documents show Mr Lochridge raised major concerns about the choice of material, warning that it would deteriorate with every dive.
Mr Nissen said the submersible was struck by lightning the same year, leaving a crack in the hull which he didn’t believe was salvageable. As a result, he refused to sign off on a planned expedition for the following year, which he said led to him being sacked.
Giving testimony on Friday, Antonella Wilby, a former OceanGate operations and engineering tech contractor, said a customer reported hearing a “loud bang” during a 2022 dive that was “as loud as an explosion”, with the company’s engineers later discovering the Titan’s carbon fibre hull had moved.
Ms Wilby said she wanted to go to the board of directors following the incident but was warned against doing so by a colleague who said she could be sued for speaking out.
Staff sacked after voicing concerns
Mr Lochridge claimed he too was sacked, in January 2018, after voicing his concerns about the vessel’s hull, for which he was labelled “anti-project”.
In a 2018 counterclaim lawsuit against OceanGate, he warned that the Titan’s carbon shell wasn’t properly tested to ensure it could descend to the depth of the Titanic.
He said in court papers that after he complained that passengers’ lives would be at risk, he was given “10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk”.
Mr Lochridge told the hearing that OceanGate was struggling internally and attempted to drum up business by convincing wealthy people to pay tens of thousands of dollars to go on deep-sea dives in its submersibles. Each passenger on the fatal voyage paid $250,000 for a seat on the vessel.
However, he claimed that the company’s sunny online presence was used to distract from the vessels’ many design flaws. “It was all smoke and mirrors,” he said. “All the social media that you see about all these past expeditions, they always had issues.”
The Titan was dogged with problems in the years before its final fatal expedition, with officials noting that during three dives to the Titanic in 2021 and 2022, the submersible experienced 118 equipment malfunctions.
This included an incident in the days before the vessel’s final voyage when its platform malfunctioned, leaving one crew member hanging upside-down.
The company’s former scientific director Dr Steven Ross told the inquiry: “The rest of the passengers tumbled about. I ended up standing on the rear bulkhead. One passenger was hanging upside down.”
Did weather play a role?
While offering a historical look at the Titan, officials noted it was never subject to third-party testing and had been left exposed to weather and other elements while in storage.
“Everything that came in had anomalies or deficiencies in the product itself,” said Mr Lochridge, adding that all the parts of the final vessel were repurposed from prototypes, with the exception of the carbon fibre hull.
Underlying the myriad issues with the craft uncovered by the public hearings, the witnesses described a company culture, presided over by Rush, in which safety concerns were shrugged off in the pursuit of accomplishing feats no other deep-sea exploration company had achieved because they were considered too risky.
“It’s total disregard for safety, not just for himself, but everybody else,” Mr Lochridge said. “He didn’t care.”
In response to a letter from fellow deep-sea explorer Rob McCallum warning Rush that he was exhibiting the same hubris of those who said of the Titanic: “she is unsinkable”, he responded by claiming that regulation would stifle innovation.
He said OceanGate’s “engineering focused, innovative approach… flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation”
Mr Lochridge told the inquiry Rush was “very impatient” and decided to carry out all engineering of the Titan in-house, despite having “no experience building submersibles”, and refused to work with experts at the University of Washington.
He added that there was a high turnover of staff and said that the company’s engineering team was made up of “children that were coming in straight out of university. Some hadn’t even been to university yet”.
“They think they could do this on their own without proper engineering support,” he said.
Multiple former associates of Rush accused him of having a volatile temperament, with Mr Lochridge claiming he would “fly off the handle”.
Mr Nissen said Rush could be difficult to work for and was often very concerned with costs and project schedules, among other issues.
He added that he tried to keep his clashes with Rush, including about its carbon-fibre hull, “behind closed doors”, but said that “most people would eventually just back down to Stockton”.
Mr Lochridge said his relationship with Rush broke down in the summer of 2016 after he “embarrassed” his former boss following a heated confrontation during an exploration mission aboard a Titan predecessor to the wreck of a different vessel – the Andrea Doria.
Rush ‘assaulted’ colleague with PlayStation controller
During the expedition to the ocean liner, which sank off the coast of Massachusetts in 1956, Mr Lochridge claimed he was assaulted by Rush after the CEO rammed the submersible into the side of the wreck at full speed, temporarily trapping the vessel underneath.
Mr Lochridge claimed that Rush initially refused to hand over the PlayStation controller, used to steer the vessel, to him before throwing it at the side of his head. The operations director said he then picked up the controller and steered the submersible to safety.
Despite the alleged challenges of the mission, Rush did an interview afterwards in which he claimed the submersible’s technology “worked beautifully” and said the voyage heralded a new age of deep-sea exploration.
“We’re going to take mankind to the bottom of the ocean,” Rush said, “and discover things that no one can even imagine”.
OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after Titan’s implosion. However, the disaster has raised questions about the role of regulation in deep-sea exploration.
Asked why the company did not make any effort to comply with certification or regulatory standards for the vessel, Mr Nissen said the company’s founder did not show any interest.
“I wouldn’t say there was no effort,” he said. “There was no desire by Stockton to go do it.”
The family of French diver Nargeolet, who died in the fatal Titan disaster, is suing OceanGate in a wrongful death lawsuit worth more than $50,000,000.
Accusing the submarine operator of gross negligence, the lawsuit claimed the waiver and release “failed to disclose many key, relevant risk factors, […] regarding the design and operation of Titan or the materials used in its construction.” In particular, it mentioned the submarine’s carbon fibre hull, which was reportedly “not properly tested for integrity”.
Addressing the inherent risks involved in taking part in the voyage, OceanGate’s former mission specialist Fred Hagen told the inquiry on Friday that getting into the Titan submersible and going to see the Titanic wreckage “wasn’t supposed to be safe.”
“It was supposed to be a thrilling adventure,” he said. “Anyone that wanted to go was either delusional if they didn’t think that it was dangerous, or they were embracing the risk.”
Mr Lochridge told the hearing he felt the tragedy could have been prevented if a federal safety agency of the United States had investigated his complaint.
“I believe that if OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s] had attempted to investigate the seriousness of the concerns I raised on multiple occasions, this tragedy may have been prevented,” he said.
“As a seafarer, I feel deeply disappointed by the system that is meant to protect not only seafarers but the general public as well.”
The inquiry continues.
The post The multi-millionaire whose desperation to reach the bottom of the ocean doomed the Titan submersible appeared first on The Telegraph.
