The OceanGate incident is coming to a head much like the Titanic itself: slow, painful, and tragic. On Thursday afternoon, OceanGate and the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that debris found around the Titanic wreck appears to be from the company’s Titan submersible “consistent with a catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.” This means that the five crew members of the Titan are presumed to be dead.
Details about the journey and about the submersible are still to come to light—and it doesn’t look good.
The vessel—which had its maiden voyage in 2021—is largely experimental. It’s unlicensed, which means no regulatory body inspected it to ensure its safety. It also lacks basic emergency features like a location beacon to send its coordinates in case of disaster, or even a navigation system that other deep-sea submersibles have. Instead, OceanGate relied on a control room onboard an expedition ship on the surface to help maneuver the Titan around the ocean.
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As the efforts to find out what happened to the Titan continue, it’s clear that this saga will result in a reckoning in the private submersible industry—one that will hopefully result in more rigorous safety standards and better-built vessels to prevent potential tragedies from re-occurring.
As of now, we’re starting to learn that what made OceanGate’s expeditions cost-effective and easy to execute were also factors that increased the risk and dangers to passengers.
“These types of vehicles are built and deployed by very specialized, highly-knowledgeable people,” David Strachan, a senior analyst at naval warfare firm Strikepod Systems, told The Daily Beast. “You're talking about the complexities in a hostile environment that the deep sea is.”
It seems as though OceanGate might have attempted to skirt many of these complexities in favor of saving money. The first—and perhaps most glaring—example comes from the way that the Titan was designed. Deep-sea submersibles like the DSV Alvin that discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1986 are typically made of solid metal hulls like steel or titanium. However, OceanGate used a mix of carbon fiber and titanium.
Though lightweight and durable, submersibles aren’t traditionally made of carbon fiber because it simply isn’t as strong as metal. Despite this, the company used the material extensively for the Titan and even leveraged it as a marketing point on its website. “Titan is the world’s only carbon-fiber submersible capable of diving five people to 4,000 meters,” the site reads.
Strachan explained that both crewed and remote-controlled submersibles typically use a material called syntactic foam, which is known for being incredibly durable yet pliable at the extreme pressures of the deep sea. However, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told Composites World in 2017 that he opted instead to use carbon fiber because it was more cost-effective.
OceanGate's decision to rely on a mix of carbon fiber and titanium for their vessel raised a few eyebrows and concerns—notably from the company’s own director of marine operations, David Lochridge.
Lochridge was fired and sued by the company after he brought up numerous safety issues regarding the design of the Titan and its hull in particular. “Given the prevalent flaws in the previously tested [one-third] scale model, and the visible flaws in the carbon end samples for the Titan, Lochridge again stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths,” his countersuit said.
It’s still unclear whether or not this design choice ultimately doomed the Titan. However, it certainly didn't help that the company seemed to forgo a safety and quality assessment by the Det Norske Veritas (DNV), an independent organization that certifies and inspects maritime vessels and is considered a standard in the industry.
This resulted in the Marine Technology Society, a society of maritime industry professionals, issuing a letter to OceanGate warning of consequences ranging “from minor to catastrophic” if the company continued with its “experimental” approach to building the submersible. “We recommend that at a minimum, you institute a prototype testing program that is reviewed and witnessed by DNV-GL,” the letter said.
Catastrophic failure at the depths in which the Titan was traveling would mean that the vessel would have experienced an “instantaneous implosion,” OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein told the BBC.
Now, we have an international team assembling to search for crew members and passengers who appear to be victims of an experimental deep-sea vessel that potentially bucked industry safety and construction standards to save money and time. While he couldn’t say for certain how much this is going to ultimately cost entities like the U.S. and Canadian coast guards, Strachan said that it was likely very, very steep.
“In a commercial context, operating an offshore vessel for oil and gas exploration, for example, can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day,” Strachan said. “And that’s in a commercial context. It can be very costly to operate an offshore vessel for a prolonged period of time, so I imagine the bill is racking up substantially.”
Strachan adds that there’s another human cost on top of that. As the world has been reminded ever since the Titan went missing, the sea is a very dangerous place. Search and rescue teams must now navigate an incredibly cold and hostile environment, risking their lives in the process just to find the submersible.
“They’re putting their lives on the line, because operating at sea is incredibly complex and dangerous,” Strachan said. “People are putting their lives on the line to help save the lives of other people.”
With the news that the debris from the Titan has been discovered, though, the world might not have to continue bearing the human cost much longer. Experts have told The Daily Beast that they believe the vessel suffered a “catastrophic failure of the hull” several thousand feet in its descent. At such pressures, the Titan would have simply imploded.
This tragedy will no doubt mark a turning point for this type of billionaire tourism and deep sea exploration as a whole. The industry must and will face a reckoning in how these submersibles are built in the future—and who exactly gets to use them. Because when the cost of these technologies goes beyond dollars and cents, it becomes too high to ignore.
