Titan tour operator ‘leveraged intimidation tactics' to evade scrutiny
The chief executive of tour operator OceanGate Expeditions, Stockton Rush, and French national Paul-Henri Nargeolet, were also killed in the incident.
On Tuesday, the US Coast Guard published a 335-page report in which identified eight 'primary causal factors' that led to the fatal implosion.
British adventurer Hamish Harding was one of five people on board the vessel when it imploded (Dirty Dozen Productions/PA)
The report said OceanGate had a 'toxic workplace environment' and used the 'looming threat of being fired' to prevent staff from coming forward with safety concerns.
It added that analysis revealed a 'disturbing pattern of misrepresentation and reckless disregard for safety'.
The report criticised OceanGate's design and testing processes and the continued use of the Titan submersible despite 'a series of incidents that compromised the integrity of the hull and other critical components'.
The tour operator's former director of engineering was reported by the US Coast Guard to have said the first hull used on the Titan submersible was akin to a 'high school project'.
According to the report, a contractor hired by OceanGate in 2022 voiced 'numerous safety concerns' to a company director, before being told: 'You have a bad attitude, you don't have an explorer mindset, you know, we're innovative and we're cowboys, and a lot of people can't handle that.'
Authored by lead investigator Thomas Whalen and marine board chairman Jason Neubauer, it read: 'For several years preceding the incident, OceanGate leveraged intimidation tactics, allowances for scientific operations, and the company's favourable reputation to evade regulatory scrutiny.
'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, which had historically contributed to a strong safety record for commercial submersibles.
'The lack of both third-party oversight and experienced OceanGate employees on staff during their 2023 Titan operations allowed OceanGate's chief executive officer to completely ignore vital inspections, data analyses, and preventative maintenance procedures, culminating in a catastrophic event.'
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The lying, or obfuscation, about immigration has included withholding crime figures from us. Until recently we were un-aware that foreign nationals living in the UK were 70 per cent more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes. Meanwhile Algerians were 18 times more likely to be convicted of theft. The proportion of the under-18 prison population which is of black heritage is 30 per cent, compared with 5.5 per cent of under-18s in the general population. These figures are all comparatively new to us and they have been released for the simple reason that the dominant paradigm, the guff we've been fed for decades – that multiculturalism is terrific and immigrants commit no more crime than do the locals – is increasingly rejected as being not merely untrue, but absurd. The only comeback you will hear from the left on the issue of, say, young black offenders is that if they constitute 30 per cent of the under-18 prison population, then the majority of underage crime must be committed by white youths. This is what I call the Dave Allen argument, and it has been deployed over and over again in the case of the Pakistani rape gangs, despite what we might agree are its obvious flaws. So we have been lied to about crime rates among immigrants, or simply not told. But we have also been lied to about how many immigrants are here, how many will continue to flood in and what benefit they will be to society. It is quite common for the left to insist that an influx of 900,000 or so every year will not have any impact upon our crumbling infrastructure – housing, schools, the NHS and so on – despite the epic denial of reality that this involves. More recently, however, the truth has begun to leak out. While we are continually told that immigration boosts the economy, a report last year from the Office for Budget Responsibility showed that a low-skilled migrant costs the British taxpayer an average of £150,000 by the time he or she has reached pensionable age, and £500,000 if they make it to 80. This is the first time we have been given such information, and my suggestion is that in future the OBR breaks it down by individual ethnicity. Meanwhile, at the beginning of this year it was estimated that by 2063 white British people will be a minority in their own country. For decades anti-immigrant groups and right-wing politicians have warned of this and their claims were laughed off as ludicrous. Nope, not ludicrous: the truth. And of course any time conscientious politicians raised the issue of mass immigration, the liberal authorities wheeled out the great wicker man of Enoch and set it on fire, while denouncing all those who questioned the avidity with which this country yearned for suicide as 'racist' and 'far-right'. The slightly better news is that the public no longer buys this rubbish. For a long while, attitudes towards immigration among the general public seemed to soften, the consequence of being kept in the dark, being lied to and not wanting to seem 'racist' to the nice researchers. Not any more. The latest YouGov poll shows that a whopping 45 per cent of Brits are in favour of admitting precisely zero new migrants and wish for large numbers to be persuaded somehow to leave the country. That would have been an unthinkable proportion even ten years ago. Meanwhile, only a small minority believe that immigration has been mostly good for the country, and three-quarters oppose greater numbers still coming here. The lesson from this is that the centre cannot hold, that the disinformation no longer works – and that people are angry. Here, as in continental Europe, the indigenous populations have roused a little from their enforced slumber. A shame, really, that it's too late.
