TIG Post

Tag: OceanGate

  • OceanGate terminates ‘all exploration and commercial operations’ after Titan sub explosion

    OceanGate terminates ‘all exploration and commercial operations’ after Titan sub explosion

    The company that was the owner of the tragic Titan submarine has suspended its business operations, according to a statement on its website.

    After the sub sank last month while en route to the Titanic’s submerged remains off the coast of Canada, OceanGate said that it had “suspended all exploration and commercial operations.”

    Hamish Harding, a British citizen, and Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, a father and son, were also killed, making a total of five people on board.

    CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, Stockton Rush, and the submersible’s pilot, French national Paul-Henri Nargeolet also died in the incident.

    The US-company based in Washington announced the development via a banner on the homepage of its website.

    OceanGate was founded in 2009 and offered tourists the chance to travel on submersibles into the depths of the ocean to see shipwrecks and underwater canyons up close.

    Following the Titan tragedy, there has been widespread criticism of the unsafe nature of the sub.

    Authorities are also investigating the cause of its collapse, which has raised concerns about the regulation surrounding such deep-sea voyages.

    The vessel was first reported missing on June 18 and then four days later the US Coast Guard confirmed it had been destroyed by a ‘catastrophic implosion’.

    Presumed human remains were recovered from the wreckage, as well as the debris of the sub itself, last week.

    Former OceanGate employee David Lochridge had previously told a colleague he was worried Mr Rush would get himself and others killed.

    Mr Lochridge, formerly OceanGate’s director of marine operations who worked at the company until 2018, was fired after raising concerns about the safety of the ill-fated Titan for much of its building process.

    Those warnings were allegedly delivered from the factory floor but were constantly dismissed, it is claimed.

    It has now emerged that Lochridge emailed project associate Rob McCallum – who also left OceanGate over safety concerns – shortly after he was fired in 2018.

    In a series of messages he said he was worried CEO Stockton Rush would end up dead on the submersible.

    The New Yorker claims Lochridge said in an email: ‘I don’t want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.

    The engineer reportedly continued: ‘I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen.’

    ‘There’s no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing.’

  • Ex-finance director of OceanGate ‘resigned’ after being asked by CEO to manage Titan sub

    Ex-finance director of OceanGate ‘resigned’ after being asked by CEO to manage Titan sub

    Former OceanGate finance director claims she left the company after CEO Stockton Rush requested her to take over the Titan submersible’s controls.

    After the former chief pilot David Lochridge was let go in 2018 for raising safety concerns, the unidentified woman claimed she was unable to trust Mr. Rush.

    The Titan submarine owned by OceanGate collapsed last month while travelling to the Titanic’s underwater remains off the Canadian coast.

    All five people on board were killed, including Mr Rush.

    She told the New Yorker: ‘It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting.

    ‘I could not work for Stockton. I did not trust him.’

    She said as soon as she was able to secure a new job she quit the company, which sends sends submersibles down to the wreckage of the Titanic for paying passengers to look at.

    She also claimed several of the engineers were in their late teens and early 20s – and at one point were only being paid $15 an hour.

    Undated handout photo issued by American Photo Archive of the OceanGate Expeditions submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. Rescue teams are continuing the search for the submersible tourist vessel which went missing during a voyage to the Titanic shipwreck with British billionaire Hamish Harding among the five people aboard. Issue date: Tuesday June 20, 2023. PA Photo. The five-person OceanGate Expeditions vessel reported overdue on Sunday evening about 435 miles south of St John's, Newfoundland. See PA story SEA Titanic. Photo credit should read: American Photo Archive/Alamy/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.
    The woman, who has a background in accounting, claims she was asked to take over the controls of the doomed submersible (Picture: PA)

    Lochridge, who is a former Royal Navy marine engineer an ship’s diver, was fired after he demanded more safety checks, including ‘testing to improve its integrity’.

    But the company argued it would take years and be ‘anathema to rapid innovation’.

    In 2019, OceanGate said seeking classification for the Titan submersible would not ‘ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea’.

    Classification involved an independent organisation being called in to ensure vessels meet industry-wide technical standards.

    OceanGate also claimed Lochridge ‘desired to be fired’ and had shared out confidential information and wiped a company hard drive.

    He had moved from the UK to Washington to work on the development of the doomed Titan submersible.

    OceanGate has since said it has ‘suspended all exploration and commercial operations’.

    All five people on board were killed, including UK citizens Hamish Harding and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood.

    CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, Stockton Rush, and the submersible’s pilot, French national Paul-Henri Nargeolet also died in the incident.

  • Emails show that Titan sub CEO was warned about safety of submersible but he ignored

    Emails show that Titan sub CEO was warned about safety of submersible but he ignored

    Warnings over the safety of OceanGate’s Titan submersible were repeatedly dismissed by the CEO of the company, email exchanges with a leading deep sea exploration specialist show.

    In messages seen by the BBC, Rob McCallum told OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush that he was potentially putting his clients at risk and urged him to stop using the sub until it had been certified by an independent agency.

    Mr Rush responded that he was “tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation”.

    The tense exchange ended after OceanGate’s lawyers threatened legal action, Mr McCallum said.

    “I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic,” he wrote to the OceanGate boss in March 2018. “In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: ‘She is unsinkable’”.

    In the messages, Mr Rush, who was among five passengers who died when the Titan experienced what officials believe was a “catastrophic implosion” on Sunday, expresses frustration with the criticism of Titan’s safety measures.

    “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often,” he wrote. “I take this as a serious personal insult.”

    Mr McCallum told the BBC that he repeatedly urged the company to seek certification for the Titan before using it for commercial tours. The vessel was never certified or classed.

    “Until a sub is classed, tested and proven it should not be used for commercial deep dive operations,” he wrote in one email.

    “I implore you to take every care in your testing and sea trials and to be very, very conservative,” he added. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”

    In his response a few days later, Mr Rush defended his business and his credentials.

    He said OceanGate’s “engineering focused, innovative approach… flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation”.

    Throughout the exchange, Mr Rush defended his qualifications and questioned the existing framework around deep sea expeditions.

    He said “industry players” were trying to stop “new entrants from entering their small existing market”.

    “I am well qualified to understand the risks and issues associated with subsea exploration in a new vehicle,” he wrote.

    Mr McCallum then responded in stark terms, writing: “It will be sea trials that determine whether the vehicle can handle what you intend to do with it so again; take care and keep safe.”

    “There is a lot more riding on this than Titan and the Titanic,” he said.

    Mr Rush founded OceanGate in 2009 and the company offered customers a chance to experience deep sea travel, including to the wreck of the Titanic, on board Titan for a price of $250,000 (£195,600).

    The company has not commented on the email exchange.

    Experts have questioned the safety of Titan and how private sector deep-sea expeditions are regulated. Concerns have been raised over the Titan’s experimental design and the carbon fibre material used to build it.

    Mr McCallum was among more than three dozen industry leaders and experts who signed a 2018 letter to Mr Rush that warned OceanGate’s approach could lead to “catastrophic” problems.

    “The industry has been trying for several years to get Stockton Rush to halt his programme for two reasons,” Mr McCallum, a specialist who runs his own ocean expedition company, told the BBC on Friday.

    “One is that carbon fibre is not an acceptable material,” he said. “The other is that this was the only submersible in the world doing commercial work that was unclassed. It was not certified by an independent agency.”

    Subs can be certified or “classed” by marine organisations – for example by the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) or DNV (a global accreditation organisation based in Norway) or Lloyd’s Register.

    This essentially means that the vehicle must meet certain standards on aspects including stability, strength, safety and performance. But this process is not mandatory.

    In a blog post in 2019, the company said the way it had been designed fell outside of the accepted system – but it “does not mean that OceanGate does not meet standards where they apply.”

    “Stockton fancied himself as somewhat of a maverick entrepreneur,” Mr McCallum said. “He liked to think outside the box, didn’t like to be penned in by rules. But there are rules – and then there are sound engineering principles and the laws of physics.”

    Mr McCallum maintains that nobody should have travelled in the Titan sub.

    “If you steer away from sound engineering principles, which are all based on hard won experience, there is a price to pay, and it’s a terrible price,” he said. “So it should never be allowed to happen again. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen this time.”