'Not Safe to Dive': Deep Sea Experts Warned for Years of OceanGate's Submersible Design
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Since the fateful disaster that killed five men aboard a tourism submersible near the wreck of the RMS Titanic last month, more details have emerged about the company’s fraught safety practices, including that other deep-sea diving experts had warned for years about the submersible’s unorthodox design.
When Stockton Rush, CEO of Oceangate Expeditions, launched his Titan submersible on June 18 to take himself and four other passengers to see the wreck of the Titanic 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, it was on board a vehicle that almost every industry expert had long refused to associate themselves with.
Some of those experts spoke with a US magazine recently, sharing their experiences with being either ignored or dismissed by Rush when they raised their concerns, or fired for pointing out problems, or threatened with litigation if they told others about the dangers they had witnessed.
'You Can't Cut Corners in the Deep'
Rob McCallum, one of the founders of EYOS Expeditions and the designer and leader of the Five Deeps Expedition to visit the five deepest sites in the world's oceans, said he had warned Rush years ago about the poor design of the Titan.
"You can’t cut corners in the deep," McCallum had told Rush. "It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics."
Rush's design for the Titan, which was initially called Cyclops II, used a number of unorthodox features that Rush touted as innovative and cost-saving. However, for many of them, including essential safety-related items, it seems that experts in the field of deep sea diving raised concerns.
The Cyclops II had been based on a previous submersible, Cyclops I, which Rush had purchased and retrofitted, adding a number of features such as converting its control systems to operate off a PlayStation 3 controller. The Cyclops I was only rated to a depth of 500 meters. For the Cyclops II (Titan), however, he only made incremental changes, such as substituting the sub's steel hull for a carbon fiber tube.
1 July 2023, 06:26 GMT
McCallum said that Rush "wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him," since McCallum had already visited the wreck of the cruise liner and was well-known around the world as an expert at diving to much greater depths. However, upon seeing the Cyclops I’s design, McCallum immediately knew there were going to be major issues.
"Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation," he told me. "And I said at the time, 'Does Sony know that it's been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.' And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub's thrusters. There were multiple points of failure." The system ran on Bluetooth, according to Rush. But, McCallum continued, "every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason - that if the signal drops out, you’re not f*cked."
During a shallow water test in a marina, Cyclops I became stranded after just such a breakdown. He mused that the sub "was a mutt." McCallum said he advised Rush to get the Cyclops II inspected and approved by a marine-certification agency before attempting to take it down to the Titanic, but after Rush categorically dismissed the idea.
"Stockton didn't like that,” McCallum said. "He didn’t like to be told that he was on the fringe." McCallum said that as news spread that Rush was offering tourist visits to the Titanic, “people would ring me, and say, 'We've always wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?' And I would tell them, 'Never get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn't do it, and you shouldn't, either.'"
Inadequate Acrylic Window
Other aspects of the Cyclops II/Titan’s design got warnings, too. The seven-inch-thick acrylic viewing port, for example, was only rated to about 1,300 meters, or about one-third of the depth of the Titanic wreck. Rush reportedly misrepresented the ability to determine if a problem was occurring with the acrylic, as well as the sub crew’s ability to react to that problem safely.
One expert on acrylics told US media that Rush had misunderstood how acrylics are rated for depth safety - a system in which the depth number doesn’t represent the safe depth to which one could dive using such a window, but rather the pressure at which the acrylic would fail. For safety, operators are only supposed to dive to one-sixth of that, which was given as its depth rating.
"It’s specifically not called a safety factor, because the acrylic is not safe" to that depth, John Ramsay, a submarine designer who built the submarines used in the Five Deeps Expedition, explained.
'Capricious' Carbon Fiber Hull
Experts also warned about the Cyclops II/Titan’s carbon fiber hull. Patrick Lahey, the CEO of Triton Submarines, told a US magazine that the reason submarines don't use carbon fiber hulls is that "it’s a capricious f*cking material, which is the last f*cking thing you want to associate with a pressure boundary."
Ramsay explained that "with titanium, there’s a purpose to a pressure test that goes beyond just seeing whether it will survive." Titanium, he said, gradually strengthens as it's repeatedly exposed to incredible stresses, but carbon fiber slowly weakens with repeated exposures.
"If you’re repeatedly nearing the threshold of the material, then there’s just no way of knowing how many cycles it will survive," he said.
After they raised their concerns with Rush, the OceanGate CEO said he took their worries as a "serious personal insult." After they informed the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about the issues, Rush threatened them with massive lawsuits until they withdrew their reports from OSHA.
At one point, Lahey’s business partner mused that "It doesn’t get more sensational than dead people in a sub on the way to Titanic."
David Lochridge, a submersible pilot with three decades of experience in submarines in both the UK Royal Navy and private industry, worked for Rush for several years and raised his safety concerns repeatedly. After Lochridge discovered fractures in the Titan’s carbon fiber hull, he pressed Rush for a detailed study of the hull for further fractures - pressure Rush resisted and ultimately fired Lochridge for.
"I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen," Lochridge wrote to McCallum, two weeks after being terminated. “There’s no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing.” Of Rush, he added, "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."
Disaster in the Deep
During the June 18 dive, the Titan disappeared from contact about 90 minutes into its two-hour descent to the Titanic wreck, which sits at 3,800 meters (12,500 feet) of depth, and a US Navy submarine detection system nearby registered a sound that could have been an implosion.
After four days of searching, wreckage from the Titan was discovered not far from the Titanic, and it was determined that the submersible had imploded due to the intense water pressure, instantly killing all five passengers on board, including Rush.
Although investigators have said returning the bodies of the dead is unlikely to be possible and that the true cause of the implosion may never be determined due to the violence of the crush, the US and Canadian governments have pushed ahead with their probe. Whether it will lead to lawsuits is unclear, especially given the complex question of legal jurisdiction.
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