Titan’s Last Trip

It was Titan’s last trip. The OceanGate submersible imploded ninety minutes into its 12,500 foot descent to the wreckage of the Titanic which rests at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, three- hundred seventy miles off the coast of Newfoundland. All five people aboard died instantly including OceanGate founder and CEO, Stockton Rush British billionaire, Hamish Harding, one of Pakistan’s richest men, Suleman Dawood and his son, Shahzada, and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet. Millions around the world were shocked by the tragedy but not a large number of deep sea submersible experts, who had warned Rush repeatedly that Titan was a disaster waiting to happen.

 

 

Stockton Rush

Richard Stockton Rush III was a direct descendant of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a famous Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.[1] As a child, Stockton Rush dreamt of becoming an astronaut and being the first person on Mars. He was fascinated by aviation and aquatics, learned to scuba dive at twelve and earned a commercial pilot’s license at eighteen. After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton, Rush worked as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas in Seattle, earned  an MBA at UC Berkely, and became a successful venture capitalist and entrepreneur. During the 2000s Rush tinkered with various shallow water submersibles. In 2009, he founded OceanGate in Everett, Washington to provide crewed submersibles for deep sea tourism, industry, research and exploration. The company bought the all-steel Cyclops 1 in 2015, which was rated to a depth of 1,500 feet. But Rush hankered to go much deeper and built Cyclops 2, later renamed Titan, in 2018.

 

The Titan

"Titan is one-of-a-kind. It is the only human-occupied pressure hull made of carbon fiber designed under a Space Act Agreement with NASA to withstand the immense pressures in the deep ocean.”[2] –OceanGate

 

“June 13, 2023—North Atlantic—Fate cleared up the weather, blew off the fog, and calmed the waves, as the submersible and its five passengers dived through the surface waters and fell into another world. They entered the deep ocean’s uppermost layer, known as the twilight zone, passing creatures glimmering with bioluminescence, tiny fish with enormous teeth. Then they entered the midnight zone, where larger creatures ghost by like alien moons. Two miles down, they entered the abyssal zone—so named because it’s the literal abyss.” - Susan Casey

 

Titan was 22.0 ft × 9.2 ft × 8.2 ft and weighed 21,000 pounds. It moved at up to 3 m.p.h. using two horizontal and two vertical electric thrusters connected to a game controller, which Rush said enabled “anybody to drive.” Titan carried a maximum of five people who sat cross- legged on the floor. There was enough oxygen to last for ninety-six hours. Rush bought the interior LED lights himself at Camping World.

 

 

 

Breaking The Rules

Deep-sea vehicles have always been made of steel and titanium for maximum strength under pressure. How these metals perform and fail under pressure has been exhaustively researched, studied, and tested.

Carbon fiber is lighter, stronger,and better than steel or titanium in many applications, but not deep sea submersibles. As explained by Will Kohnen, Chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee, carbon fiber “is great under tension (stretching) but not compression (squeezing). You can use a rope to pull a car. But try pushing a car with that rope.”[3]

 

Rush admitted that colleagues and experts warned him repeatedly not to build a deep sea submersible out of carbon fiber, but he did it anyway. In his view, in order to innovate you must be willing to “break the rules.” Regulators, and the old guard, exaggerated risks and overengineered everything to an “obscene degree.” Carbon fiber is as strong as steel or titanium but much lighter and more buoyant, which saves money on ballast.[4]  The editor-in-chief of Travel Weekly, Arnie Weissmann, claims that Rush told him days before the fatal expedition that he bought the carbon fiber “at a big discount” because “it was past its shelf life use in planes.”[5] When Weissman asked whether he had any concerns about that, Rush replied, “no it is perfectly fine. Having all these certifications for airplanes is one thing, but the carbon fiber was perfectly sound.”[6]

 

Tour The Titanic

“Explore the world’s most famous shipwreck. You can follow in Jacques Cousteau’s footsteps and become an underwater explorer. This is your chance to step outside of everyday life and discover something truly extraordinary. Explore the earth’s last frontier. Be amazed by the bizarre creatures of the deep sea become one of the few to see the Titanic wreck site with your own eyes.” —OceanGate

RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner which hit an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, on her first voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. The ship snapped in two pieces which fell to the silty bottom of the North Atlantic at a depth of 12,500 feet or 3,800 meters. In 1985 the wreckage and debris field were located by a remote controlled submersible operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Since then a few hundred people, scientists and wealthy adventurers, have taken the plunge in submersibles to study, survey and map the site.[7] Every one of these expeditions used “classed” steel and titanium submersibles designed, manufactured, and certified to exacting standards and there had never been a fatal accident until Titan in 2023.

From the beginning, Rush figured tours to the Titanic would be a profitable niche market. When asked why, he said: “people are so enthralled with Titanic. I read an article that said there are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet. And that’s ‘Coca-Cola,’ ‘God,’ and ‘Titanic.’”

 

Jay Bloom, who came within a whisker of taking Titan’s last trip, has publicly discussed Rush’s personality and sales pitch. While trying to persuade Bloom to sign up with his son for the next trip to Titanic, Rush gave assurances that riding in Titan was safer than flying in a helicopter, scuba diving, or crossing the street. Bloom describes Rush as “a good guy, great heart, really believed in what he was doing and saying. But he did not want to hear anything that conflicted with his world view, andhe would just dismiss it.”[8] As shown in text messages, Rush continued to press, but Bloom balked, blaming his twenty year old son’s fear of giant squids and whales.

In a published interview with People, Sean Bloom recalls the conversation with his father differently, and says it had nothing to do with fear of giant squids and whales:

“the whole reason my dad did not go was because I told him, ‘dude this submarine cannot survive going that deep in the ocean.’ I was worried because I didn’t think the submarine could withstand that kind of pressure and it wasn’t meant to go that far.”[9]

 

 

Snap, Crackle, Pop

“The state-of-the-art vessel, designed and engineered by Ocean Gate Inc. in collaboration with experts from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington, made its subsea debut in 2018. Through the innovative use of modern materials, Titan is lighter, more spacious, and more comfortable than any other deep-diving submersible exploring the ocean today.” - OceanGate

Karl Stanley, a submersible expert, and friend of Rush, heard Titan’s carbon fiber hull cracking during a dive to 3,760 meters in the Bahamas in April 2019.[10] He emailed Rush the next day:

“What we heard...sounded like a flaw/ defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged. From the intensity of the sounds, the fact that they never totally stopped at depth, and the fact that there were sounds at about 300 feet that indicated a relaxing of stored energy (which) would indicate that there is an area of the hull that is breaking down (and) getting spongy.”[11]

Stanley recommended that Rush cancel the planned dives to the Titanic and conduct fifty test dives before carrying people again. OceanGate recommended that Stanley mind his own business but developed and touted “a real-time acoustic monitoring system,” which it claimed allowed the crew to continuously assess the health of the hull during the dive.

In 2021, OceanGate filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia[12], a document describing the acoustic hull monitoring system as “an unparalleled safety feature.” The company claimed that Titan had completed more than fifty test dives and completed detailed engineering and development work under a company- issued $5 million contract to the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL-UW).

However, the executive director of APL- UW told CNN that “the Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the Titan submersible used in the RMS TITANIC expedition.”[13] A UW spokesperson later clarified that the Laboratory signed a $5 million collaborative research agreement with OceanGate, but only $650,000 worth of work was completed before the two organizations parted ways:

“The collaboration resulted in a steel- hulled vessel, named the Cyclops 1, that can travel to 500 meters depth, which is far shallower than the depths that OceanGate’s TITAN submersible traveled to. As stated earlier, the Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the TITAN submersible used in the RMS TITANIC expedition.”

The spokesperson added that OceanGate used tanks at the UW School of Oceanography on a contract basis for nine tests between 2016 and 2022 but no university researchers were involved. “UW personnel did not provide any verification or validation of any OceanGate equipment as a result of those tests.”[14]

Titan had two titanium hemispheres or end caps joined to a carbon fiber wound cylinder.

 

The Whistleblower

From May 2015 to January 2018, David Lochridge worked for OceanGate as chief submersible pilot and director of marine operations which made him responsible for crew and client safety during all surface and underwater operations.

"A Scotsman who had spent three decades as a submersible pilot and an engineer— first in the Royal Navy, then as a private contractor, Lochridge had worked all over the world: on offshore wind farms in the North Sea; on subsea-cables installations in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans; on manned submarine trials with the Swedish Navy; on submarine-rescue operations for the navies of Britain and Singapore.”[15]

Lochridge took submersible safety and his job duties seriously. He expressed the same concerns that others had about Titan’s carbon fiber hull but no one listened. On January 18, 2018, he gave Stockton Rush a “Quality Control Inspection Report,” which criticized Titan’s design and construction and lack of adequate testing, inspection, and certification.[16] In the report, Lochridge said that, if corrective action was not taken immediately, he would not approve dives scheduled for the Bahamas.

Rush and others met with Lockridge the next day to discuss his concerns. During the meeting, Lochridge: “refused to accept the veracity of information provided by the company’s lead engineer and repeatedly stated he did not approve of OceanGate’s research and development plans, insisting for example, that the company obtain a scan of the hull of Titan’s experimental vessel prototype to detect potential flaws rather than relying on acoustic monitoring despite assurances from OceanGate’s engineer that the acoustic monitoring and incremental testing protocols were, in fact, better suited to detect vessel safety issues, if any.”[17]

Lochridge was terminated and given ten minutes to clean out his desk. On June 26, 2018, the company filed a lawsuit against Lochridge in Snohomish County Superior Court alleging breach of contract, fraud, and wrongful disclosure of trade secrets.[18] The complaint accused Lochridge of setting up his termination to collect unemployment benefits and disclosing confidential and proprietary information to the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in an effort to masquerade as a whistleblower.

The case was removed to federal court[19] and Lochridge counterclaimed for retaliatory discharge in violation of public policy.[20] More disturbing facts were revealed including that Titan’s acrylic viewport was rated safe to 1,300 meters, not 4,000 meters as advertised by OceanGate, because the experimental design fell outside the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (“PVHO”) standards published by the International Conference on Advanced Materials Science and Engineering (AMSE). Furthermore, a one-third scale model of Titan imploded during testing, and Lochridge observed cracks in Titan’s hull and its carbon fiber end samples.

No depositions were taken and no motions were filed. The Lochridge case settled out of court on undisclosed terms in November 2018. Shortly thereafter, OceanGate announced it was testing Titan in the Everett marina and would soon begin shallow-water trials in Puget Sound.[21]

 

 

The MOTHER of All

Release Agreements

"You will ride in an experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death. When diving below the ocean surface this vessel will be subject to extreme pressure, and any failure of the vessel while I am aboard could cause severe injury or death”.

TMZ.com scooped the world by being first to publish OceanGate’s release of liability agreement which everyone had to sign before stepping onto Titan or its support ship, the MV Polar Prince. Naturally, I was curious to know its contents including whether it had a choice of law and forum clause as Titan was designed and built in Washington, registered in the Bahamas, but operated in international waters. In the next issue, we take a deep dive into express assumption of risk,[22] the enforceability of release of liability agreements, and whether it really is better in the Bahamas.

 

 

 

Nigel Malden is an attorney in Tacoma and can be reached at nm@nigelmaldenlaw.com. The author with Kate Winslet in a rowboat on Puget Sound last summer.

 

 

 

 

[1] The life and times of Dr. Benjamin Rush are chronicled by the same author in Law and Med- icine in Revolutionary America—Dissecting the Rush v Cobbett Trial. Pierce County Lawyer, Vol. 28, Sept/Oct 2018.

[2] NASA admits it had a contract with OceanGate at one time but denies it had anything to do with the design, manufacture, testing or operation of Titan or any expedition to Titanic.

[3] Rush admitted that colleagues and experts warned him repeatedly not to build a deep sea submersible out of carbon fiber, but he did it anyway. In his view, in order to innovate you must be willing to “break the rules.” Regulators, and the old guard, exaggerated risks and overengineered everything to an “obscene degree.” Carbon fiber is as strong as steel or titanium but much lighter and more buoyant, which saves money on ballast.

[4] The editor-in-chief of Travel Weekly, Arnie Weissmann, claims that Rush told him days before the fatal expedition

[5] Rogers, J. (July 1, 2023). I gave up my seat on Titanic sub. TCI Magazine.

[6] Id.

[7] James Cameron, director of the 1997 blockbuster, Titanic, has visited the wreck site thirteen times.

[8] Young, S. (June 26, 2023). Titan family tragedy averted due to son’s warnings about safety of sub. People.

[9] Young, S. (June 26, 2023). Titan family tragedy avert- ed due to son’s warnings about safety of sub. People.

[10] Mann, J. (Jun 24, 2023). A friend said he warned Stockton Rush about defects on the Titan in 2019. CNN Business Insider; see also Casey, S. (August 17, 2023) f.n.3 infra.

[11] Id.

[12] The federal court in Virginia oversees the explora- tion or removal of artifacts from the Titanic wreckage.

[13] Tebor, Celina. (June 21, 2023). University of Wash- ington was not involved in design, engineering or testing of Titan submersible. CNN; Podsada, J. (June 22, 2023). Boeing, UW and NASA deny design partnerships with OceanGate. Everett Herald. Charalambous. P. (June 22, 2023). OceanGate exaggerated details of industry partnerships behind lost Titan submersible. ABC News Online.

[14] Id.

[15] Casey, S. (August 17, 2023). The Titan submersible disaster was years in the making, new details reveal. Vanity Fair.

[16] Id.

[17] Plaintiff’s complaint filed in OceanGate, Inc. v. Lochridge, Snohomish County Superior Court, Cause # 18-2-05651-31.

[18] Id.

[19] No. 2:18-cv-01083 RAJ

[20] See Martin v. Gonzaga Univ., 191 Wn.2d 712 (2018); Gardner v. Loomis Armored Inc., 128 Wash. 2d 931 (1996); Wilmot v. Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., 118 Wn.2d 468 (1991).

[21] Taub, Ben. (July 1, 2023). The Titan submersible was an accident waiting to happen. The New Yorker. Puget Sound extends from Deception Pass in the north to Olympia in the south. Its average depth is 450 feet and its maximum depth, off Jefferson Point between Indianola and Kingston, is 930 feet. Wikipedia.

[22] In Washington, a person expressly assumes a risk of harm if that person knows of the specific risk involved, understands its nature, and voluntarily consents to accept the risk by agreeing in advance to relieve the defendant of a duty of care owed to the person in relation to the specific risk. See WPI 13.04.