The company behind the Titan submersible, which imploded in the Atlantic Ocean while diving to the wreck of the Titanic, had “flawed” safety practices and “leveraged intimidation tactics,” a new report has found.
OceanGate Chief Executive Stockton Rush, who perished aboard the sub along with four others, was also found by investigators to have demonstrated “negligence that contributed to the deaths.”
The findings, which come as part of a complex two-year investigation carried out by the US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, included witness testimonies from experts, previous passengers, and former employees, as well as an in-depth analysis of the recovered wreckage.
Ultimately, the Coast Guard labeled the events of June 18, 2023, a “preventable tragedy.”
It was deemed the primary cause of the catastrophic incident, 90 minutes into the dive, stemmed from a “failure to follow established engineering protocols for safety, testing, and maintenance of their submersible,” claiming the lives of Rush, co-pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and passengers Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman.
All died instantly under nearly 5,000 pounds per square inch of water pressure.
The scathing 335-page report lays near-total blame on OceanGate, citing its disregard for “established engineering protocols,” per the BBC, and its use of regulatory loopholes to sidestep scrutiny.
It “leveraged intimidation tactics, allowances for scientific operations, and the company’s favorable reputation to evade regulatory scrutiny,” the report said, adding, “By strategically creating and exploiting regulatory confusion and oversight challenges, OceanGate was ultimately able to operate Titan completely outside of the established deep-sea protocols.”
The report also blamed the implosion on the firm’s negligence towards “fundamental engineering principles,” a lack of research into the sub’s life expectancy, over-reliance on certain systems and its materials, which hand’t been used on such vessels before.
Rush, meanwhile, is accused of instilling a false sense of security by championing the indestructibility of the sub, and were he still alive, could have been criminally liable.
There are also claims of insufficient training for pilots, which aimed to be completed in a day, while Rush’s work across various roles at the company, “enabled him to set operational safety parameters and then make all final decisions for Titan operations without adequate input or checks and balance.”
The report’s discussion with former employees also led to the revelation that OceanGate had come under financial pressure. One ex-staffer said: “The company was economically very stressed and as a result, [they] were making decisions that compromised safety,” while another said they were at one time asked to temporarily go without salaries with the promise they would be compensated at a later date.
Now, the family of British-Pakistani father and son Shahzada and Suleman has called on the loss of their loved ones to be the spark for a new tack. “We believe that accountability and regulatory change must follow such a catastrophic failure,” they said in a statement, adding they wanted “meaningful reform, rigorous safety standards, and effective oversight.”
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