So, yes. Many people felt that a catastrophe was brewing with the Titan, but at the same time everybody’s hands were tied.
On the Titan’s second deep test dive in April 2019—an attempt to reach 4,000 meters in the Bahamas—the sub protested with such bloodcurdling cracking and gunshot noises that its descent was halted at 3,760 meters. Rush was the pilot, and he had taken three passengers on this highly risky plunge. One of them was Karl Stanley, a seasoned submersible pilot who would later describe the noises as “the hull yelling at you.” Stanley was no stranger to risk: He’d built his own experimental unclassed sub and operated it in Honduras. But even he was so rattled by the dive that he wrote several emails to Rush urging him to postpone the Titan’s commercial debut, less than two months away.
The carbon fiber was breaking down, Stanley believed: “I think that hull has a defect near that flange that will only get worse. The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not.” He advised Rush to step back and conduct 50 unmanned test dives before any other humans got into the sub. True to form, Rush dismissed the advice—“One experiential data point is not sufficient to determine the integrity of the hull”—telling Stanley to “keep your opinions to yourself.”
“I remember him saying at one point to me that one of the reasons why he had me on that dive was he expected that I would be able to keep my mouth shut about anything that was of a sensitive nature,” Stanley told me in a phone interview.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t think he wanted everybody knowing about the cracking sounds.”
Shortly after that, Rush did make an accommodation to reality. He sent out a press release heralding the Titan’s “History Making Deep-Sea Dive to 3,760 Meters with Four Crew Members,” and then a month later canceled the 2019 Titanic expedition. (He had previously scrubbed the 2018 expedition, claiming that the Titan had been hit by lightning.) Now, Rush was off to build a new hull.
Surely, people in the submersible world thought, Rush would come to his senses. Surely he wouldn’t actually go through with this?
But he did. 2020 was a write-off because of COVID. In 2021, Rush took his first group of “mission specialists” to the Titanic—and with him now, as part of his team, was Nargeolet.
It’s not that Nargeolet’s friends didn’t try to stop him. “Oh, we…we all tried,” Lahey said. “I tried so hard to tell him not to go out there. I fucking begged him, ‘Don’t go out there, man.’ ”
It’s that Nargeolet knew everything they were saying was true and wanted to go anyway. “Maybe it’s better if I’m out there,” Lahey recalls Nargeolet saying. “I can help them from doing something stupid or people getting hurt.” In the implosion’s aftermath, the French newspaper Le Figaro would report that Nargeolet had told his family that he was wary of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull and its oversized viewport, assessing them as potential weak spots. “He was a little skeptical about this new technology, but also intrigued by the idea of piloting something new,” a colleague of Nargeolet’s, marine archaeologist Michel L’Hour, explained to the paper. “It was difficult for him to consider a mission on the Titanic without participating in it himself.”
Now the reports are emerging about the plague of problems on OceanGate’s 2021 and 2022 Titanic expeditions; more dives scrubbed or aborted than completed—for an assortment of reasons from major to minor. A communications system that never much worked. Battery problems, electrical problems, sonar problems, navigation problems. A thruster installed backward. Ballast weights that wouldn’t release. (On one dive, Rush instructed the Titan’s occupants to rock the sub back and forth at abyssal depths in an attempt to dislodge the sewer pipes he used to achieve negative buoyancy.) Getting all the way down to the seafloor and then fumbling around for hours trying to find the wreck. (“I mean, how do you not find a 50,000 ton ship?” Lahey asked me, incredulous, in July 2022.)
One group had been trapped inside the sub for 27 hours, stuck on the balky launch and recovery platform. Other “mission specialists” were sealed inside the sub for up to five hours before it launched, sweltering in sauna-like conditions. Arthur Loibl, a German businessman who dove in 2021, told the Associated Press it was a “kamikaze operation.”
Fair is fair: Some people did get to see the Titanic and live to tell about it. Plenty more left disappointed, having spent an extremely expensive week in their branded OceanGate clothing doing chores on an industrial ship. (OceanGate’s Titanic expedition 2023 promotional video, now removed from the internet, showed “mission specialists” wiping down ballast pipes and cleaning the sub.) And even when Rush offered them 300-foot consolation dives in the harbor, on a number of occasions those were also canceled or aborted.
Sadly, those problems now seem quaint.
When the world learned of the Titan’s disappearance on June 18, no one I know in deep-sea circles believed that it was simply lost, floating somewhere, unseen because—the mind reels—it didn’t have an emergency beacon. No one believed that its passengers were slowly running out of oxygen. If the sub were entangled amid the Titanic wreck, that wouldn’t explain why its tracking and communications signals had vanished simultaneously at 3,347 meters. “The fear was collapse,” Lahey said bluntly. “The fear was always pressure hull failure with that craft.”
But the families didn’t know, and the public didn’t know, and it would be ghastly not to hope for some slim chance of survival, some possible miracle. But which was better to hope for? That they perished in an implosion at supersonic speed—or that they were alive with hardly a chance of being found, left to suffocate for four days in a sub that had all the comforts of an MRI machine?
“When I found out that they were bolted in…” Kerby told me, his voice anguished. “They couldn’t even evacuate and fire a flare. You know, there’s a really good reason for those [hatch] towers. It gives everyone a chance to make it out.”
“The lack of the hatch in the OceanGate design was a serious deviation from any and all submersible design safety guidelines that exist today,” Kohnen wrote in an email, seconding Kerby. “All subs need to have hatches.”
No knowledge of the tragedy was preparation enough for watching television coverage of the Titan’s entrails being craned off the recovery ship Horizon Arctic. Eight-inch-thick titanium bonding rings, bent. Snarls of cables, mangled debris, sheared metal, torn exterior panels: They seemed to have been wrenched from Grendel’s claws in some mythical undersea battle. But no, it was simply math. A cold equation showing what the pressure of 6,000 psi does to an object unprepared to meet it.
One person involved in the recovery effort who wishes to remain anonymous told me that the wreckage itself was proof that no one aboard the sub had suffered: “From what I saw of all the remaining bits and pieces, it was so violent and so fast.”
“What did the carbon fiber look like?” I asked.
“There was no piece I saw anywhere that had its original five-inch thickness,” he said. “Just shards and bits…. It was truly catastrophic. It was shredded.”
Now, back on land, he was still processing what he’d seen. “I think people don’t actually understand just how forceful the ocean is. They think of the ocean as going to the beach and sticking their toes in the sand and watching waves come in and stuff like that,” he reflected. “They haven’t a clue.”
“Is there any possible reason the Titan could have imploded other than its design and construction were unsuitable for diving to 4,000 meters?” I asked Jarl Stromer, the manager of class and regulatory compliance for Triton Submarines. Stromer, who has worked in the industry since 1987, began his career as a senior engineer at the American Bureau of Shipping. He’s an expert on the rules, codes, and standards for every type of manned sub—the nuts and bolts of undersea safety.
“No,” he replied flatly. “OceanGate bears full responsibility for the design, fabrication, testing, inspection, operation, maintenance, catastrophic failure of the Titan submersible and the deaths of all five people on board.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the beginning, OceanGate’s mission had seemed so promising: “Founded in Everett, Washington in 2009, the company provides manned submersible services to reach ocean depths previously unavailable to most individuals and organizations.” But there’s a vast chasm between intention and execution—and pieces of the Titan now lie at the bottom of it.
After the tragedy OceanGate went dark, suspending its operations. Its website and social media channels were suddenly gone, its promotional videos deleted. Emails sent to the company received this reply: “Thank you for reaching out. OceanGate is unable to provide any additional information at this time.” Phone calls were greeted with a disconnection notice.
Only one person familiar with OceanGate’s thinking would speak to me on the record: Guillermo Söhnlein, who cofounded the company with Rush. And Söhnlein left that post in 2013. “So I don’t have any direct knowledge or experience with the development of the Titan. I’ve never dived in Titan. I’ve never been on the Titanic expedition,” he told me. “All I know is, I know Stockton, and I know the founding of OceanGate, and I know how we operated for the first few years.”
Susan Casey
Source link
