Two years after Titan disaster, OceanGate advisor reflects on how Stockton Rush swerved ‘every single rule'

Independent

a day ago

Before the traumatic OceanGate explosion that killed five people, submersibles expert Rob McCallum warned its CEO, Stockton Rush, of the dangerous risks.
Now, two years on from the incident that killed Rush and his fellow adventurers, and in the wake of an appearance in the new Netflix documentary Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, McCallum reveals what he views as the operation's failures.
"I have become increasingly amazed and maddened as the levels and many layers of incompetence and deception within OceanGate are exposed,' he told The Independent.
'The epic failure of OceanGate has done great harm to the reputation of legitimate and professional organizations, and set back progress many years,' he said.
McCallum, founder, expedition leader, and divemaster of Eyos expeditions, a company which does similar work with submersibles, said there were plenty of 'little individual warning signs' ahead of the monumental failure of the Titan sub on June 18, 2023.
The Titan, for example, was never certified or classed.
The experimental submersible vanished on June 18, 2023, while on a tour of the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic Ocean. On board were Rush, 61, British explorer Hamish Harding, 58, veteran French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
The Titan imploded around 90 minutes into a descent, killing all five on board.
Last month, a video showing the moment Wendy Rush first hears the sound of the implosion while watching on from the sub's support ship was released.
"What was that bang?" she asks.
The eerie video has been used as evidence in a wider ongoing investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation, which has spent the last two years looking into the sub's cataclysmic failure.
The final report, which McCallum suspects will be damning, is in its final stages according to the Coast Guard, who told The Independent the Marine Board of Investigation is 'pressing to release it by the end of the month.'
McCallum believes Rush is going to be the one held responsible and he expects the report will reveal 'a concerted effort by a businessman to work around every single rule in the book to start a business and to make money.'
He says that a decade before the tragedy, between 2009-16, OceanGate frequently sought his advice.
'They used to come down and talk to us about how you could establish a business, how you could buy a submarine, how you would maintain a submarine, and where you could find crew. They used to come and talk to us about getting themselves set up.'
But Rush's timeline for the deployment of the Titan sub kept being pushed back.
The sub's chief pilot, Dave Lochridge, was fired in 2018, days after submitting his report about the inefficiency of OceanGate's hull design and the company's testing methods. He was then sued by the company for breach of contract and revealing company secrets. He countersued for wrongful dismissal.
'There were always excuses,' McCallum said. 'But the net result is that the timeline kept shifting. He [Rush] would say 'we're going out there in 2020, wait, 2021. No, we're definitely going in 2022, then 2023'.'
The divemaster said that his advisory services ceased 'as soon as they decided they were going to build an unclassed sub.'
One of the biggest criticisms of OceanGate was the Titan's use of a carbon fibre hull, which is widely believed to be unsuitable for deep-sea diving. Typically, the main raw material used to construct modern submarines is steel.
'Senior staff and board members read Lochridge's report and knew that their chief of staff was telling them that this thing is a death trap,' McCallum said.
'People had read that report and still carried on, and are complicit in what happened next,' he said.
The new documentary on the tragedy, released Wednesday, will 'illustrate where the blame lies, and who should be held accountable,' he said.
McCallum stressed that the OceanGate disaster does not represent the submersibles industry as a whole.
'Professionally built submersibles have a perfect safety record that stretches back over 50 years,' he said. 'OceanGate has demonstrated the folly of experimental 'DIY' vehicles, and I expect there will now be incoming legislation to prevent others from building sub-standard vehicles.'