Does the OceanGate company have its share of responsibility? This is the debate that agitates the Anglo-Saxon press while the tourist submarine Titan who took with him, this Sunday, June 18, five tourists by more than 3,800 meters deep in the Atlantic Ocean in order to visit the wreck of the Titanic, has still not been found. However, “noises” were picked up underwater by Canadian planes during search operations, the US Coast Guard confirmed on Wednesday. Several American media reveal serious alerts issued by experts inside and outside the company. According to court documents, an employee even filed a safety complaint, alleging potential flaws in the device and risks regarding its use in such extreme conditions, before being fired in 2018.
According to the information from american magazine The New Republic, the former “director of submarine operations”, the Scottish David Lochridge had tried to alert his employer to the fact that “the submarine was not capable of descending to such extreme depths”. He was then fired “for refusing to give the green light to manned tests of the first models of the submersible”, reports the magazine, before OceanGate sued him for having disclosed confidential information on the submersible.
In 2018, a safety complaint filed by an executive
In Davis Lochridge’s counter-complaint, seen by this media, the Scottish pilot explains that “the constant pressure cycling weakens existing defects, resulting in large tears in the carbon. Non-destructive testing was essential to detect these potentially to ensure a strong and safe product for the safety of passengers and crew”. The additional tests requested to verify potential delaminations, the porosity or the adhesion of the glue used, have always been refused by the company, in particular for financial reasons.
The passengers would also, according to the statements of David Lochridge, never been made aware of these risks. Element likely to alert them nevertheless: the machine, presented by the company as equipped with innovations too revolutionary to be compatible with the usual certification criteria, would never have been authorized with an official authority. Had there already been signs of failure before? “During its last expedition, in the summer of 2022, the submersible had already been lost for two and a half hours”, reports Le Figaro.
A submarine visits the wreck of the Titanic lost at sea
© / afp.com/Valentin RAKOVSKY, Laurence SAUBADU
A submersible designed to descend to a maximum of 1,300 meters
The same document also describes a meeting with staff at the OceanGate Washington installation, during which “several people expressed their concerns to the director of engineering.” It was at this meeting that Marine Operations Manager David Lochridge reportedly discovered that the submarine’s forward window was, according to the counter-complaint, “only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 metres, although that OceanGate intends to take passengers to depths of 4,000 meters”, the depth at which the wreck of the Titanic rests.
American screenwriter Mike Reiss, producer of the famous series “The Simpsons”, has already left three times with OceanGate Expeditions, including once in 2022 aboard the same submersible as the one that disappeared, he said on Monday on the BBC.
A totally confusing experience, because “you almost always lose communication and find yourself at the mercy of the elements and that kind of stuff”. According to him, everyone is perfectly aware of the dangers involved: “You have to sign a waiver before getting on and death is mentioned three times on page one. It’s not a coach vacation, it can go wrong”.