Jania Ashlynn
The team behind the Titanic submersible mission that vanished over the weekend had been warned multiple times that their approach was too risky.
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This included lawsuits from ex-employees and cautionary letters from others in the industry. Despite the warnings, the company went ahead with the mission. Sadly, as we now know, the submersible has disappeared without a trace.
Prior Warnings
OceanGate Expeditions, a company that offers submersible tours, was founded in 2009 by Stockton Rush, a pilot and aerospace engineer. On Sunday morning, the company set out on a mission to explore the wreckage 12,500 feet below sea level with five passengers on board.
Unfortunately, the vessel lost contact with its surface ship that evening and has not been heard from since. The passengers are now in grave danger, as they only have 96 hours of additional oxygen left. Both the Coast Guard and Canadian authorities have launched a rescue mission to save them.
“We are exploring and mobilizing all options to bring the crew back safely,” OceanGate shared in their public statement. “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families.”
The company was warned about the safety of its equipment by one of its former employees. The ex-employee, David Lochridge, claims that he was fired by OceanGate in 2018 for raising “critical safety concerns regarding OceanGate’s experimental and untested design of the Titan” – the same vessel that is presently lost at sea.
Employee Concerns
Lochridge claims he expressed worries in a report he submitted in January 2018 and during a follow-up discussion regarding OceanGate’s decision not to perform “critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental design of the hull.”
He went on to say that he disagreed with the company’s decision to “dive the submersible without any non-destructive testing to prove its integrity, and to subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.” Lochridge was terminated shortly after.
In the following year, a group of more than 30 leaders in the industry sent a letter to Stockton expressing their concern about the Titan. The letter, which was organized by the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society, urged him to test the vessel with an outside group that was accredited. The signatories included deep-sea explorers, submersible company executives, and oceanographers. They were all in unanimous agreement that the experimental approach being taken by the company could lead to negative outcomes ranging from minor to catastrophic.
“The submersible industry had significant concerns over the strategy of building a deep sea expedition submersible without following existing classification safety guidelines,” committee chairman, Will Kohnen, shared.
