 "The OceanGate's Titan submersible. AP")
Was the tragedy of Oceangate’s Titan submersible ‘inevitable’?
That’s what a former employee is saying at a Coast Guard hearing.
David Lochridge, the company’s former operations director, this week described the tragedy as ‘inevitable’ and just a matter of time.
The Titan imploded on June 18, 2023, killing OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush and four others on board and setting off a worldwide debate about the future of private undersea exploration.
Tony Nissen, another employee of Oceangate, also said he felt pressure to get the vessel ready and that he refused to do diving missions on the sub.
OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended operations after the implosion.
It owned the Titan and brought it on several dives to the Titanic going back to 2021.
But what are the employees saying? Was the sinking of the Titan submersible inevitable?
Let’s take a closer look:
What is he saying?
ABC quoted Lochridge as saying that Oceangate hired him in 2015 to work on the Titan.
Lochridge joined the company as a veteran engineer and submersible pilot.
He said he quickly came to feel he was being used to lend the company scientific credibility.
He said he felt the company was selling him as part of the project “for people to come up and pay money,” and that did not sit well with him.
“I was, I felt, a show pony,” he said. “I was made by the company to stand up there and do talks. It was difficult. I had to go up and do presentations. All of it.”
As per BBC, Lochridge said that since 2016, he repeatedly brought up issues with the sub – and was branded a troublemaker.
Lochridge said he was ‘phased out’ after clashing with Rush.
‘Total disregard for safety’
He also accused Rush of ‘arrogance,’ claiming he did not want to consult experts about the design.
Washington Post quoted Lochridge of saying that Rush had a “total disregard for safety, not just for himself, but everybody else,” Lochridge said. “He didn’t care.”
“The way this company was going about this project, bypassing all the standardised rules and regulations that are set in place by people with experience…they bypassed it all,” Lochridge was quoted as saying by The Independent.
“It was inevitable something was going to happen. It was just a [question of] when,” he continued.
Lochridge referenced a 2018 report in which he raised safety issues about OceanGate operations. He said with all of the safety issues he saw “there was no way I was signing off on this.”
“At the end of the day, safety comes first,” Lochridge was quoted as saying by ABC News. “Yes, you’re taking a risk going down in a submersible, but don’t take risks that are unnecessary with faulty, and I mean faulty, deficient equipment.”
He also blamed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for not taking his complaints seriously.
“I believe that if OSHA 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.”
As per ABC, Lochridge reached out to OSHA in February 2018.
Lochridge said during testimony that eight months after he filed an OSHA complaint, a caseworker told him the agency had not begun investigating it yet and there were 11 cases ahead of his.
By then, OceanGate was suing Lochridge and he had filed a countersuit.
About 10 months after he filed the complaint, he decided to walk away. The case was closed and both lawsuits were dropped.
“I gave them nothing, they gave me nothing,” he said of OceanGate.
OSHA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
‘Liked to do things on the cheap’
Earlier in the day, Lochridge said he frequently clashed with the company’s co-founder and felt the company was committed only to making money.
ABC quoted Lochridge as saying that Rush “liked to do things on the cheap.”
He explained this as “the desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as we could to start making profit."
“There was a big push to get this done,” he added. “A lot of steps along the way were missed.”
Lochridge was one of the most anticipated witnesses to appear before a commission.
His testimony echoed that of other former employees Monday, one of whom described OceanGate head Stockton Rush as volatile and difficult to work with.
“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” Lochridge said. “There was very little in the way of science.”
Lochridge’s testimony began a day after other witnesses painted a picture of a troubled company that was impatient to get its unconventionally designed craft into the water. The accident set off a worldwide debate about the future of private undersea exploration.
‘I knew it would fail’
Asked whether he had confidence in the way the Titan was being built, he said: “No confidence whatsoever.”
ABC quoted Lochridge as claiming that Rush wanted to do manned safety tests of the prototype.
“I knew that hull would fail,” Lochridge said. “It’s an absolute mess.”
The New York Post quoted Lochridge as saying that hull was made from carbon fibre and was just five inches thick
Lochridge added that hulls are usually made from titanium and that this one was weakening with every dive.
The submersible was left exposed to the elements while in storage for seven months in 2022 and 2023, and the hull was also never reviewed by any third parties, as is standard practice, Coast Guard representatives said in their initial remarks Monday.
The absence of an independent review and the submersible’s unconventional design subjected the Titan to scrutiny in the undersea exploration community.
Employee turnover was very high at the time, said Lochridge, and leadership dismissed his concerns because they were more focused on “bad engineering decisions” and a desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as possible and start making money.
‘It screams like a mother’
He eventually was fired after raising the safety concerns, he said.
The Independent quoted Lochridge as saying he was invited a boardroom meeting after raising concerns.
“That meeting turned out to be a two-hour discussion about my termination and how my disagreements with the organisation with regards to safety didn’t matter,” he told the panel.
“I didn’t want to lose my job. I wanted to do the Titanic. But to dive it safely. It was on my bucket list, too,” he said.
ABC News quoted OceanGate documents as stating that Lochridge and Ridge were at an impasse over the hull.
“The only option was the termination of your employment,” the document stated.
“It doesn’t just implode. It screams like a mother before it implodes,” Rush said about carbon fiber, according to Lochridge.
OceanGate’s former engineering director, Tony Nissen, kicked off Monday’s testimony, telling investigators he felt pressured to get the vessel ready to dive and refused to pilot it for a journey several years before Titan’s last trip. Nissen worked on a prototype hull that predated the Titanic expeditions. “‘I’m not getting in it,’” Nissen said he told Rush.
OceanGate’s former finance and human resources director, Bonnie Carl, testified Monday that Lochridge had characterised the Titan as “unsafe.”
Lochridge also noted how those who worked for Nissen were “children that were coming in, straight out of university, some of them hadn’t even been to university yet,” as per The New York Post.
Coast Guard officials noted at the start of the hearing that the submersible had not been independently reviewed, as is standard practice.
That and Titan’s unusual design subjected it to scrutiny in the undersea exploration community.
During the submersible’s final dive on June 18, 2023, the crew lost contact after an exchange of texts about the Titan’s depth and weight as it descended. The support ship Polar Prince then sent repeated messages asking if the Titan could still see the ship on its onboard display.
One of the last messages from Titan’s crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, “all good here,” according to a visual re-creation presented earlier in the hearing.
When the submersible was reported overdue, rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to an area about 700 kilometers south of St. John’s, Newfoundland. Wreckage of the Titan was subsequently found on the ocean floor about 300 meters off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said.
With inputs from agencies