Titan sub disaster was caused by weak safety and oversight, Coast Guard says

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) – The Titan submersible disaster could have been prevented, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a report Tuesday, but OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush ignored safety warnings, design flaws and crucial oversight that may have resulted in criminal charges had he survived.

Rush and four passengers were killed in June 2023 when Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic, sparking a dayslong search in the North Atlantic off Canada that grabbed international headlines. The Coast Guard convened its highest level of investigation in the aftermath, and the disaster has led to lawsuits and calls for tighter regulation of the developing private deep sea expedition industry.

The Titan was operated by OceanGate, a private company based in Washington state. The Coast Guard found the company’s safety procedures were “critically flawed” and cited “glaring disparities” between safety protocols and actual practices.

Jason Neubauer, with the Marine Board of Investigation, said that the findings will help prevent future tragedies.

“There is a need for stronger oversight and clear options for operators who are exploring new concepts outside of the existing regulatory framework,” he said in a statement.

OceanGate suspended operations in July 2023. A spokesperson for OceanGate, Christian Hammond, said the company has been wound down and was fully cooperating with the investigation, and offered condolences to the families of those who died and everyone affected.

Investigators repeatedly pointed to OceanGate’s culture of downplaying, ignoring and even falsifying key safety information to improve its reputation and evade scrutiny from regulators. OceanGate ignored “red flags” and had a “toxic workplace culture.”

“By strategically creating and exploiting regulatory confusion and oversight challenges, OceanGate was ultimately able to operate TITAN completely outside of the established deep-sea protocols,” the report found.

Numerous OceanGate employees have come forward in the two years since the implosion to support those claims. The report says firings of senior staff members and the looming threat of being fired were used to dissuade employees and contractors from expressing safety concerns.

The Marine Board concluded that Rush “exhibited negligence” which contributed to the deaths of four people. Had Rush not died in the implosion, the case would have been handed off to the U.S. Department of Justice and he may have been subject to criminal charges, the board said.

The company reclassified submersible passengers as “mission specialists” to bypass regulations on small passenger vessels and designate its subs as oceanic research vessels. Former mission specialists and OceanGate employees said their participation was “purely for a ride in the submersible, not for scientific research,” the report states.

To obtain his credentials, Rush submitted a fraudulent sea service letter signed by OceanGate’s chief operations officer to the Coast Guard’s National Maritime Center, the report said. In the letter, Rush claimed past service as a crew member on Titan and misrepresented the size of the vessel, when in fact it had never been registered or admeasured.

An experienced submersible pilot described serious safety concerns within OceanGate’s leadership over a decade before the disaster, when Rush insisted on solo piloting his “rich friends” on a dive using a company vessel that was only licensed for scientific research. The trip in 2010 caused over $10,000 in damage after a critical battery component was removed without proper documentation, reinforcing the pilot’s belief that safety was not a priority at the company, according to the Coast Guard report.

Investigators found the submersible’s design, certification, maintenance and inspection process were all inadequate. The vessel’s carbon fiber hull design and construction introduced flaws that “weakened the overall structural integrity” of its hull, the report stated.

Mounting financial pressures in 2023 led to a decision by OceanGate to store the Titan submersible outdoors over the Canadian winter, where its hull was exposed to temperature fluctuations that compromised the integrity of the vessel, the report said.

In addition to Rush, the implosion killed French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British adventurer Hamish Harding and two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.

The family of Nargeolet, a veteran French undersea explorer known as “Mr. Titanic,” filed a more than $50 million lawsuit last year that said the crew experienced “terror and mental anguish” before the disaster. The lawsuit accused OceanGate of gross negligence.

Nargeolet and Harding were members of The Explorers Club, a society of adventurers of which Rush was a friend. Richard Wiese, president of The Explorers Club, said it the club’s “responsibility is to ensure that as exploration becomes more accessible, it also becomes safer.”

Titan had been making voyages to the Titanic site since 2021. The Titan’s final dive came on June 18, 2023, a Sunday morning when the submersible would lose contact with its support vessel about two hours later. The submersible was reported overdue that afternoon, and ships, planes and equipment were rushed to the scene about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The Coast Guard-led team operated under the possibility there could be survivors for several days. Wreckage would subsequently be found on the ocean floor about 330 yards (300 meters) off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said.