From the NY Times. The picture below the excerpt is the wreckage, shown at the inquiry.
Titan Submersible Company Neglected Safety Concerns, Ex-Employees Say
The company operating the Titan submersible, which imploded in the ocean last year, killing five people on board, was plagued with equipment problems in the years before the disaster, and had fired an engineering director who would not approve a deepwater expedition, according to testimony at a Coast Guard hearing on Monday.
The Titan had experienced dozens of problems during previous expeditions, including 70 equipment issues in 2021 and 48 more in 2022, investigators revealed on Monday, the first day of two weeks of testimony on what went wrong during the submersible’s ill-fated June 2023 trip to view the Titanic shipwreck on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
For part of the winter before the fatal accident, the investigators said, the Titan was stored in bitterly cold temperatures outside a facility in Newfoundland, with no protection from the elements.
Then, less than four weeks before the fatal mission, the craft was tested and then found “partially sunk” two days later, following a night of high seas and fog.
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The first witness was Tony Nissen, a former engineering director at OceanGate, the underwater exploration company that operated the submersible. He was visibly shaken after seeing the Coast Guard’s initial presentation on the long series of problems that plagued the Titan in the months and years before the voyage, and called the problems “disturbing.”
Mr. Nissen said he was fired in 2019 after he refused to approve an expedition to the Titanic wreckage that year because he deemed the Titan’s hull to be unsafe. OceanGate, he said, lied about the problems, and instead blamed the cancellation of that mission on problems with a support ship.
“It wasn’t true,” he said. “We didn’t have a hull.”
He described an earlier instance, in April of 2018, when the Titan was apparently struck by lightning while in the Bahamas for testing. He told the chief executive of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, who later died in the implosion, that there was a good chance that the strike had compromised the Titan’s hull. Mr. Nissen said Mr. Rush refused to believe him, insisting, “It’ll be OK.”
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