More than a year after the Titan submersible tragedy, details continue to come to light about the way OceanGate operates, the company in charge of carrying out tourist trips with the submersible to be able to observe the remains of the Titanic.
On this occasion, it was revealed during the public hearing of the trial against the company that owns the Titan submarine, that the CEO and founder of the company, Stockton Rush, exhibited strange behavior on other trips to the remains of the Titanic.
The Chilling Warning that Could Have Prevented the OceanGate Tragedy
Read also: First Image and Audio of the Imploded OceanGate Submersible Revealed After a Year of the Tragedy
The warning made by one of the company’s engineers regarding the safety of the submersible was made known and despite this, both OceanGate executives and the CEO ignored it in order to continue selling the experience of seeing the remains of the Titanic up close; at 250 thousand dollars per person.
According to testimony at the hearing, former OceanGate COO David Lochridge was the one who recounted Rush’s strange behavior on a dive before the tragedy. He said he completely ignored the advice of the Titan’s pilot and also hit him in the head with a remote control because his way of operating the submersible was questioned.
On that occasion, Rush ended up destroying a submersible with three passengers on board, after crashing at full speed into the port side of the bow for not following the pilot’s advice. For his part, Tony Nissen, Titan’s chief engineer, said he refused to operate and travel on the submersible that crashed, because he was pressured to rush it to be ready to descend the more than 3,000 meters to where the Titanic was located.
Nissen said that he was under pressure from Rush to have the Titan leave as soon as possible, and he also recalled that in 2018, the submarine was struck by lightning that could have caused damage, a situation that he stressed by stating that the ship was not safe, but he was still forced to operate it.
BREAKING: OceanGate’s former operations director David Lochridge claims he shared concerns of potential safety problems of the Titan submersible but his warnings were ignored. Which sadly left 5 people dead. pic.twitter.com/QTT1ykDx1p
— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) September 18, 2024
This is how it has been revealed that the safety of the Titan submarine was not adequate, said by the company’s own engineers and in order to continue collecting thousands of dollars, they ignored their warnings, contrary to that, Tony Nissen was fired for having spoken about the safety of Titan. Thus, surely the tragedy where 5 passengers died when the ship imploded, could have been avoided if they had had adequate time for repairs and listened to the engineer.
This article was originally written in Spanish by Lizbeth Garcia in CC News.