Deadly Titanic dive: damning investigation report
On the way to the Titanic, the carbon fiber submersible Titan imploded in the summer of 2023. An investigation does not look kindly on the operators.
Oceangate's diving ship Titan
(Image: Oceangate)
“The company was economically very stressed, and as a result, (they) were making decisions that compromised safety.” This is how the current investigation report by the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) quotes a former employee of the US company Oceangate on page 237. It built the Titan submersible. During a sightseeing trip to the wreck of the Titanic on June 18, 2023, Titan imploded, killing all five people on board instantly.
The disaster, which also claimed the life of company boss Stockton Rush, was avoidable, as the 300-page report makes clear. It leaves no good hair on the company's management. More diplomatically formulated are the findings on the shortcomings of the authorities and legislators who allowed Oceangate to act irresponsibly.
“At a certain point, safety is just a waste.” This is how a lawsuit filed by the family of one of the victims quotes Oceangate's co-founder and boss, Stockton Rush. He himself is one of the five victims.
Whistleblower ignored
The case of the Director of Marine Operations for Oceangate, who worked at the company from 2016 to 2018, is an example of the lack of safety culture. He repeatedly drew attention to safety problems within the company, which was met with hostility from management. On January 18, 2018, he issued a Quality Inspection Control Report for the first carbon fibre hull of the submersible (then called Cyclops II). The inspection was negative on more than two dozen points, with only nine issues resolved.
This did not go down well with company boss Stockton Rush. He and other managers asked the plant manager for a meeting the very next day, which was recorded. The now published transcript shows that Stockton knew that the material purchased cheaply by Boeing as expired goods was of poor quality. Right at the beginning of the more than two-hour conversation, Stockton is quoted as saying: “I'm not going to waste money letting Boeing test this piece of crap. I know it's crap… At the end of the day, I have to dive with it.”
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Stockton confirms the statement in principle but not the specific phrase “piece of shit” and says that an acoustic warning system would warn of problems in good time. A long, heated discussion about safety deficiencies ensues, which the management largely brushes aside. A few days later, the plant manager is fired. Yet a US federal law called the Seaman's Protection Act expressly prohibits such revenge against employees in the marine industry who point out safety issues.
Revenge suit works
The fired plant manager alerts the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which attempts to forward the whistleblower report to the US Coast Guard by email. But this message never gets through. OSHA itself does not have enough employees, so there is a considerable backlog of unprocessed whistleblower reports.
In revenge for the report, Oceangate sues its former plant manager for alleged violations of intellectual property law. This alarms the responsible OSHA employee because such suppression lawsuits (SLAP) are firstly a bad sign and secondly illegal in most US states. But the lawsuit works: After almost eleven months without any progress in the official investigation, the plant manager withdraws his complaint because he and his wife can no longer bear the psychological pressure. The complaint is never investigated, neither by OSHA nor by the Coast Guard.
The carbon fibre hull that failed at the time is later so badly damaged that Oceangate manufactures a new one. This becomes a death trap, even for company boss Rush himself.
