A reckless enterprise bordering on criminal stupidity, the story of the Titan’s crushing demise as it descended to the ocean floor is one with many historical echoes. The Report of Investigation (ROI) by the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation into the events of June 2023 that led to the deaths of five people on their deep sea journey to see the Titanic did not hold too many surprises. Jason Neubauer, Titan MBI chair, made some bland remarks that the investigation lasting two years had “identified multiple contributing factors that led to this tragedy, providing valuable lessons learned to prevent a future occurrence.”
The 335-page report centred on the implosion of OceanGate’s Titan submersible that took place on June 18, 2023 as it descended towards the remains of the Titanic. The occasion had been hauntingly if cruelly appropriate: a doomed crew paying a visit to a passenger vessel lauded before its April 1912 demise as unsinkable. The Marine Board found that the loss of the Titan with its crew, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, was due to “the loss of structural integrity of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull. This loss of structural integrity caused the sudden catastrophic implosion of the hull.”
The board was distinctly unimpressed by OceanGate’s safety practices, noting that the main causal factor behind the implosion of the submersible lay in the company’s “failure to follow established engineering protocols for safety, testing, and maintenance”.
A number of other causal factors are noted. The design and testing processes for Titan were inadequate in addressing those engineering principles vital in “constructing a hull to the precision necessary for the intended operations in an inherently hazardous environment”. No analysis was done on the expected life cycle of the submersible’s hull. The Titan remained in the company’s service despite suffering “a series of incidents that compromised the integrity of the hull and other critical components […] without properly assessing or inspecting the hull”. These incidents were never properly investigated in terms of their effects. The hull’s carbon fibre design and construction “introduced flaws that weakened [its] overall structural integrity”.
The conduct of OceanGate prior to the fatal event entailed the leveraging of “intimidation tactics, allowances for scientific operations, and the company’s favorable reputation to evade regulatory scrutiny.” This created a sense of “regulatory confusion and oversight challenges” that OceanGate exploited, placing the Titan “completely outside […] established deep-sea protocols, which had historically contributed to a strong safety record for commercial submersibles.”
The company emerges as something of a rogue outfit of the sea, deceptive, dissimulating and unreliable. The very fact that the hull was made from carbon fibre instead of titanium or steel was daringly quixotic. But this adventurism was compounded by the eventual exclusion of the initial designer of the prototype, the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). OceanGate’s own engineers were deemed competent enough to shoulder the burden, and despite claiming he would do so, Rush never ensured a certification of the design by any Coast Guard-authorised body.
OceanGate fell into some bad habits. It took to, for instance, misrepresenting paying passengers in the Titanic expeditions as “mission specialists” and “integral members of the Titan’s expedition team, including participation in scientific tasks.” This was often not the case – the mission specialists in question were the equivalent of cash cows, whose funds went into the firm’s operating account with no guarantee of a refund in the event of an aborted mission.
The firm’s operations were also noted for suffering from “severe financial instability, high employee turnover, and a lack of professionally qualified staff”. This served to critically undermine “its ability to maintain safety and operational integrity.” The firing of senior staff and threatened firing of employees and contractors fostered a reluctance to voice any safety concerns. All the time, the Rush had been insisting that the Titan was “indestructible due to unconfirmed safety margins and alleged conformance with advanced engineering principles”. (It hardly helped that he was also playing the role of safety officer and lead engineer.) This deceived both the passengers and the regulators.
The investigation also noted the absence of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation into a complaint by company whistleblower David Lochridge in 2018 and poor communication and coordination between that body and the US Coast Guard on Seaman’s Protection Act protocols. These served as “a missed opportunity for potential early government intervention ahead” of the planned testing of the hull.
The Marine Board report makes 14 safety recommendations and two administrative recommendations. The USCG, it is recommended, should “pursue an expansion of federal requirements to ensure proper regulatory oversight of submersibles that perform oceanographic research operations”. Submersibles should cease being designated as Oceanographic Research Vessels. The Coast Guard should also establish an industry working group to spruce up the Navigation and Vessel Inspection Circular for submersibles and evaluate its current subsea search and rescue capabilities.
The Coast Guard was also encouraged to introduce a new regulation requiring submersibles manufactured, owned or operated by a US entity or any submersible operating in US navigable waters carrying any occupant other than the owner to be built in accordance to USCG standards.
To a watchful bureaucrat, these recommendations make sense. But to a fiendish adventurer like Rush, filled with self-belief that the innovatively designed and built Titan would be able to triumph in the sea, regulations will always be seen as the hindrances of the unimaginative. His words after a tempestuous meeting with Lochridge and other OceanGate employees are telling in their deluding folly: “I’ve going to be around. I understand this kind of risk, and I’m going into it with eyes open, and I think this is one of the safest things I will ever do.”
The post The Titan Submersible Investigation Report first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.