OceanGate's former director of marine operations accused the company's CEO of risking his life and others in a "quest to boost his ego", while raising concerns about the company's submersibles to a colleague years ago.
The former employee, David Lochridge, had sent an email to another ex-associate of OceanGate in 2018, expressing his fears about Stockton Rush and the project, according to The New Yorker magazine.
OceanGate sued Lochridge that year, and he filed a counterclaim alleging that he was wrongfully fired for raising questions about testing and safety.
According to The New Yorker, Lochridge wrote in an email: "I don’t want to be seen as a tattletale but I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.
"I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen."
The email was sent to Rob McCallum, who was reportedly asked to work with Rush on the development process that eventually led to the Titan.
He disassociated himself from the project after he learned the company didn't want its submersible to be classed by a certification agency, according to the New Yorker.
Missed warnings?
Lochridge wrote an engineering report in 2018 that said the craft under development needed more testing and that passengers might be endangered when it reached "extreme depths," according to a lawsuit filed that year in US District Court in Seattle.
OceanGate sued Lochridge that year, accusing him of breaching a non-disclosure agreement, and he filed a counterclaim alleging that he was wrongfully fired for raising questions about testing and safety.
The case settled on undisclosed terms several months after it was filed.
Some family members of the 5 passengers on board are calling for an investigation. (Source: 1News)
Lochridge's concerns primarily focused on the company's decision to rely on sensitive acoustic monitoring — cracking or popping sounds made by the hull under pressure — to detect flaws, rather than a scan of the hull.
Lochridge said the company told him no equipment existed that could perform such a test on the nearly 13cm thick carbon-fibre hull.
"This was problematic because this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail — often milliseconds before an implosion — and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull," Lochridge's counterclaim said.
Further, the craft was designed to reach depths of 4000m, where the Titanic rested.
But, according to Lochridge, the passenger viewport was only certified for depths of up to 1300m, and OceanGate would not pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport certified for 4000m.
The dramatic four-day search for the missing submersible has ended with a tragic conclusion. (Source: 1News)
OceanGate's choices would "subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible," the counterclaim said.
However, the company said in its complaint that Lochridge "is not an engineer and was not hired or asked to perform engineering services on the Titan."
He was fired after refusing to accept assurances from OceanGate's lead engineer that the acoustic monitoring and testing protocol was, in fact, better suited to detect any flaws than a scan would be, the complaint said.
Also in 2018, warnings came from the Marine Technology Society, which describes itself as “a professional group of ocean engineers, technologists, policy-makers, and educators.”
In a letter to Stockton Rush, OceanGate's chief executive, the society said it was critical that the company submit its prototype to tests overseen by an expert third party before launching in order to safeguard passengers. Rush had refused to do so.
The letter, reported by the New York Times, said society members were worried that "the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry."
In a 2019 interview with Smithsonian magazine, Rush complained that the industry’s approach was stifling innovation.
"There hasn't been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years," he said.
"It’s obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations."
Additional reporting by the Associated Press
SHARE ME