Titan sub tragedy: US Coast Guard hearings reveal new insights

The Coast Guard has posted videos of Titan wreckage two miles beneath the water’s surface, as well as a detailed log of communications between the craft and its mother ship, scores of documents, and the recorded testimony of more than two dozen witnesses, including former employees of the sub’s maker, OceanGate.

The emerging evidence has provided answers or tentative answers to six questions that have haunted the unique tragedy.

Had OceanGate employees sounded any alarms?

Many, it turns out. David Lochridge, a former director of marine operations at OceanGate, testified that the company’s ethos centered on making money. OceanGate charged adventurers up to US$250,000 (RM1.02mil) to see the wreckage of the Titanic up close, but offered little by way of serious engineering for safe products. “It was all smoke and mirrors,” Lochridge said of the company’s operations. He said he was fired in 2018 after raising safety concerns.

Tony Nissen, a former engineering director at the company, said he had told Stockton Rush, an OceanGate founder, in 2019 that the craft was “not working like we thought it would.” As a result, the engineer kept the submersible from making a dive to the Titanic ruins that year. Then he was fired.

Phil Brooks, who became the company’s engineering leader in 2021, said OceanGate’s financial woes contributed to his decision to leave the company just months before the Titan and its crew were lost. “The company was economically very stressed,” he testified. As a result, he added, safety was “being compromised”.

What did the recovery teams find?

Four days after the Titan went missing, the controllers of a tethered robot were scanning the muddy seabed when a tangle of debris – including the submersible’s rear dome and part of its shattered fiber hull – came into view.

“This video,” the Coast Guard wrote, “led to conclusive evidence of the catastrophic loss of the Titan and the death of all five members aboard.”

The search teams proceeded to map out an enormous debris field, measuring about 1,000 feet long and 450 feet wide. Its great size indicated that Titan’s implosion – a swift collapse caused by the deep ocean’s crushing pressure – led to an extraordinarily explosive rebound.

An eerie second video showed the submersible’s tail cone sitting on the seabed intact. Unlike the hollow main hull, the tail’s interior space was open to seawater and thus did not implode.

The hearing’s opening report said presumed human remains were taken to a military base that “positively identified DNA profiles for the five victims”.

Did the voyagers understand the risks of the trip?

Yes and no. OceanGate’s four-page liability waiver pulled no punches. The word “death” appeared nine times, “injury” 10 times and “risk” 17 times. The disclaimer warned of “pain, suffering, illness, disfigurement, temporary or permanent disability (including paralysis), economic or emotional loss, and death”.

“I knew the risk that I was taking, and still decided to go,” Renata Rojas, an experienced scuba diver who traveled in the Titan in 2022 to see the Titanic, testified at the hearing.

But other witnesses said the public at large did not understand the significance of Titan’s lack of safety certification, which made it unique among deep submersibles. Thousands of other vessels, subs and offshore rigs have received such accreditation from marine groups that set industry standards, including proven ways to withstand the ocean’s pressures.

Did the voyagers realise anything had gone wrong?

No, according to the hearing’s initial report and subsequent testimony. The report said crew members sent “no transmissions which indicated trouble or any emergency”. That contradicted what turned out to be a fake communications log that circulated online last year and told of a heart-pounding crisis in which the five voyagers struggled in vain to return to the surface.

News and social media outlets had also quoted top experts who argued that the Titan’s last-minute drop of weights indicated that the crew members knew they were in mortal danger. That claim also appears in the US$50mil lawsuit brought in August against OceanGate by the family of Paul-Henri Nargeolet, one of the five victims.

Tym Catterson, a former contractor for OceanGate, testified that he was certain the two dropped weights, totaling just 70 pounds out of hundreds that Titan carried, had been jettisoned to achieve neutral buoyancy – that is, the ability to float effortlessly underwater, not sinking or rising. He said that state of weightlessness helped the craft to better control its movements as it neared the seabed, not to begin an emergency rush to the surface.

Catterson added that the deep voyagers “had no idea” they faced an imminent implosion. “Nobody was suffering in there,” he said.

Why did Titan implode?

That’s the hardest question, and it probably won’t be fully answered until the Coast Guard makes its official accident report public, which may not happen until next year.

Critics had long faulted Titan’s design as a maverick approach that featured many departures from proven submersible designs. Whereas other submersibles typically held just three passengers, Titan’s pill-shaped fiber hull held five, a financial advantage for OceanGate.

Catterson offered an accident scenario. The ocean’s crushing pressures, he said, could have forced Titan’s hull to bend ever so slightly in the middle, causing its ends to pull back from the metallic end domes and weaken the glue joint with each dive. Eventually, he said, the mounting stresses gave way to the implosion.

Donald Kramer, a materials engineer with the National Transportation Safety Board, testified to a different problem. He said the carbon fiber hull had many imperfections, including pores, voids and wrinkles that weakened the protective structure.

What impact could the hearings have?

In a news conference the day before the hearings started, Jason Neubauer, the lead investigator, called the proceedings a critical step to understand what contributed to the tragedy and, more important, “the actions needed to prevent a similar occurrence.”

The first-of-its-kind disaster has forced a global rethinking of how to safely explore the deep ocean. It may lead to regulatory reform, such as the mandatory institution of safety certification for deep submersibles. – The New York Times