Few years ago, OceanGate Expeditions faced several warnings of potentials for ‘catastrophic’ problems as it prepared for its ‘hallmark’ mission of taking wealthy passengers to tour the Titanic’s wreckage, a media report revealed.
It was January 2018, when OceanGate’s director of marine operations, David Lochridge filed a lawsuit after the company fired him for sparking “serious safety concerns about the design of the untested experimental model of Titan, the company’s submersible.”
According to The New York Times, David Lochridge was working on a report around that time, ultimately producing a document in which he said the craft needed more testing and stressed “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths.”
In the documents, Lochridge reported learning that the viewport that lets passengers see outside the craft was only certified to work in depths of up to 1,300 meters, although OceanGate was planning to take tourists to nearly 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface.
The lawsuit document also pointed out that “OceanGate refused to pay the cost of a viewport that meets the targeted depth (4,000 meters) to the company building the submersible.”
“The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design,” lawyers for Lochridge wrote in a court filing.
Instead of looking into Lochridge’s concerns, or fixing the submersible, the company fired and sued him for violating an agreement of not sharing confidential information outside the company.
OceanGate has said in court records that “he was not an engineer, that he refused to accept information from the company’s engineering team and that acoustic monitoring of the hull’s strength was better than the kind of testing that Mr. Lochridge felt was necessary.”
Two months later, OceanGate faced similarly dire calls from more than three dozen people — industry leaders, deep-sea explorers and oceanographers — who warned in a letter to its chief executive, Stockton Rush, that the company’s “experimental” approach and its decision to forgo a traditional assessment could lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems with the Titanic mission, which might have heavy consequences that affect every person in this industry.
“While this may demand additional time and expense, it is our unanimous view that this validation process by a third-party is a critical component in the safeguards that protect all submersible occupants,” the signatories wrote.
Rush responded that “the industry standards were stifling innovation. Titan craft was so innovative, it could take years to get it certified by the usual assessment agencies.”
Rush is one of five people onboard of the submersible.
Rescue teams from Canada, France, and the U.S. have been racing to find the submersible, which disappeared near the wreck of the Titanic, nearly 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface, in the north Atlantic.
In February, a couple in Florida sued Rush, saying that his company refused to refund them the $105,000 that they each paid to visit the Titanic on the Titan in 2018. The trip was postponed several times, according to the suit, in part because the company said it needed to run more tests on the Titan. The couple claimed that Rush reneged on his promise of giving them a refund and that the company instead demanded that they participate in a July 2021 voyage to the wreckage.
In a court filing last year, OceanGate referenced some technical issues with the Titan during the 2021 trip.
“On the first dive to the Titanic, the submersible encountered a battery issue and had to be manually attached to its lifting platform,” the company’s legal and operational adviser, David Concannon, wrote in the document. The submersible sustained ‘modest’ damage to its exterior, he wrote, leading OceanGate to cancel the mission so it could make repairs.
Still, Concannon wrote in the filing, 28 people were able to visit the Titanic wreckage on the Titan last year.
