Carbon Chemist

Tag: submarines

  • OceanGate Faces Federal Investigation a Year After the Titan Submersible Implosion

    OceanGate Faces Federal Investigation a Year After the Titan Submersible Implosion

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    The apparent success of the leaseback arrangement might explain how Rush was able to attract what was OceanGate’s largest ever investment in 2020, at a time when the company was working on the expensive task of replacing the Titan’s first hull that had cracked during testing. The $18 million in equity funding allowed OceanGate to rebuild the Titan and move forward with its first Titanic expedition in 2021. Around this time, documents indicate that OceanGate may have had more control in the taken over ownership of Cyclops 2 LLC.

    But by 2023, OceanGate seemed to be on a much shakier financial footing. Several witnesses at the Coast Guard hearings testified to what they perceived to be OceanGate’s financial difficulties in the run up to the final Titanic expedition, including Rush foregoing his salary and occasionally loaning the company money from his personal funds.

    Demand for the $250,000 Titanic dives appeared to be tailing off. As late as May 2023, one of OceanGate’s affiliate sellers was advertising that there were still “some very limited dates and spots available at a 40% discount” for that summer’s expeditions. This has not been reported previously.

    If the federal investigation results in any criminal charges, they would proceed alongside a civil lawsuit currently in a federal court in Washington state. In that case, the family of famed Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet is seeking $50 million for his death aboard the Titan, with the lawsuit naming as defendants OceanGate, Rush’s estate, and a number of other individuals and companies connected to the ill-fated submersible. Rush’s estate recently filed a motion to dismiss the complaint against it, stating: “As Rush’s employer, OceanGate is liable for Rush’s alleged negligence.”

    Maritime lawyer Alton Hall is skeptical that Nargeolet’s family will recover anything close to the $50 million they are seeking. A 1920 law, the Death on the High Seas Act, generally limits damages to pecuniary losses, such as future earnings. One exception would be if Nargeolet and his fellow Titan passengers, who OceanGate dubbed “mission specialists,” qualified as seamen under another piece of legislation called the Jones Act. “There are literally books and books written on who is and who isn’t a Jones Act seaman,” says Hall. The passengers who died on board the Titan “are not Jones Act seamen,” he believes.

    An unknown question in these cases, and others that might be brought by the families of two billionaires who also died on the Titan, is who might face any legal consequences. The civil case against OceanGate and Rush’s estate also names as defendants OceanGate’s original director of engineering Tony Nissen, and three companies that manufactured the Titan’s hull and viewport. However, multiple witnesses at the Coast Guard hearings testified to Stockton Rush having the final say in many commercial, engineering, and operational decisions, and his company is likely all but bankrupt. In the end, there might be little to salvage from the wreckage of OceanGate.

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  • Titan Submersible Hearings Spotlight Multiple Issues With Its Carbon Fiber Hull

    Titan Submersible Hearings Spotlight Multiple Issues With Its Carbon Fiber Hull

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    Wreckage of the Titan’s innovative carbon fiber hull was found separated into three distinct layers, US National Transportation Safety Board engineer Donald Kramer has told a Coast Guard hearing into the fatal implosion of the OceanGate submersible in 2023.

    Although Kramer would not offer an opinion on what caused the hull to delaminate into separate layers, he testified to multiple problems with the hull, beginning with its manufacture in 2020.

    Using samples of carbon fiber saved from its construction, as well as dozens of pieces recovered from the seabed, the NTSB gave the most complete picture to date of the experimental nature of the Titan’s hull.

    After the Titan’s first hull was found to have a crack and delamination following deep dives in 2019, OceanGate switched manufacturers to replace it.

    The new manufacturer, Electroimpact, used a multistage process to wind and cure the five-inch-thick hull in five separate layers. Each layer would be baked at high temperature and pressure before being ground flat, having an adhesive sheet added, and another layer built on top. The idea of this multistep process was to reduce wrinkles in the final hull that the company believed had caused test models to fail short of their design depths.

    However, Kramer testified that the NTSB found several anomalies in the fresh hull samples. There was waviness in four of the five layers, and wrinkles that got progressively worse from layer to layer. The NTSB also found that some layers had porosity—gaps in the resin material—four times larger than specified in the design. It also recorded voids between the five layers.

    On Monday, Roy Thomas, a materials expert from the American Bureau of Shipping, told the hearing: “Defects such as voids, blisters on surface, and porosity can weaken carbon fiber, and under extreme hydrostatic pressure can accelerate the failure of a hull.”

    OceanGate did not make any additional test models using the new multistage process.

    The NTSB was able to recover many pieces of the carbon fiber hull from the seafloor, one still attached to one of the submersible’s titanium end domes. In a report issued simultaneously with Kramer’s testimony, the NTSB noted that there were few, if any, full-thickness hull pieces. All of the visible pieces had delaminated into three shells: the innermost of the five layers, a shell made of the second and third layers, and another with the fourth and fifth layers. Like an onion being peeled, the hull had largely separated at the adhesive joining the layers.

    Water Ship Shipwreck Vehicle Submersible OceanGate ocean floor

    Debris of the Titan submersible on the seabed after imploding, captured on film by a remotely operated vehicle.Photograph: Reuters

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  • The Titan Submersible Disaster Hearings Paint a Damning Picture

    The Titan Submersible Disaster Hearings Paint a Damning Picture

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    After they left, the Titan was rebuilt with a new hull that was never tested to industry norms nor certified by an independent third-party agency. Patrick Lahey, CEO of submersible maker Triton Submarines, said that certifying a novel hull was not only possible but essential for safety.

    “We were developing and certifying the deepest diving sub in the world at the same time they were developing this amateurish contraption,” he testified. “There was absolutely no reason they couldn’t have got it certified.”

    A History of Troubled Titanic Missions

    OceanGate’s first missions to the Titanic in 2021 were beset with problems, including the Titan’s forward titanium dome falling off after a dive, worrying readings on the acoustic monitoring system, and a thruster failing at 3,500 meters’ depth. One Coast Guard evidence slide showed 70 equipment issues requiring correction from the season’s dives. Things improved slightly the following year, with only 48 recorded issues. But these included dead batteries extending a mission from around seven to 27 hours, and the sub itself being damaged on recovery.

    One dive in 2022 ended with a mysterious loud bang and cracking noise upon surfacing. Antonella Wilby, an OceanGate engineering contractor, was so worried about this bang she considered alerting OceanGate’s board of directors. She testified that another employee warned her that she risked being sued if she did so. “Anyone should feel free to speak up about safety without fear of retribution, and that is not at all what I saw,” she said. “I was entirely dismissed.”

    On the Titan’s penultimate dive in 2023, contractor Tym Catterson admitted to failing to carry out a safety check; the Titan was left listing at a 45-degree angle for an hour, piling up those on board.

    Conflicting Views on the Carbon Fiber Hull

    There was conflicting testimony on the safety of the Titan’s unique carbon fiber hull. Dyer pointed out that carbon fiber could be a good fit for deep submersibles, and Nissen was adamant that computer modeling and the acoustic monitoring warning system meant that it could be used indefinitely. Lochridge, Catterson, and former HR director Bonnie Carl were all far more skeptical about the hull’s design and implementation. But all three acknowledged that they were not engineers.

    Next week’s appearances by Nissen’s successor, Phil Brooks, more submersible engineers, and a carbon fiber expert from Boeing should address many of these questions. In particular, testimony next Wednesday from an engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Materials Laboratory about the Titan’s wreckage may identify the physical cause of the implosion.

    Where Was the Coast Guard?

    At several points, investigators pointed out that the Titan should have been inspected by the US Coast Guard before carrying paying passengers. None of those questioned could say why it was not, despite OceanGate apparently contacting the Coast Guard on multiple occasions to provide notice of its underwater operations.

    Lochridge also testified that OSHA had told him in 2018 that it had communicated his safety complaints to the Coast Guard. At least one of the five US Coast Guard witnesses being called next week is based in the Puget Sound, near OceanGate’s headquarters, and may be able to speak to this.

    US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Lockwood, who joined OceanGate’s board in 2013, is not on the witness list. Lochridge and Carl testified that Lockwood’s role was to provide oversight and smooth interactions with the Coast Guard.

    Missing Witnesses

    Nor is Lockwood the only notable absentee from the witness box. Multiple witnesses this week testified to the key roles of OceanGate employees, including Wendy Rush, Scott Griffith, and Neil McCurdy, in making crucial business, regulatory, and operational decisions throughout OceanGate’s history and on the day of the accident. None are being called to testify. Nor have any of the hulls’ manufacturers been called. The Coast Guard has not provided a reason for this other than to deny that it is because those witnesses would have asserted their Fifth Amendment rights to refuse to answer questions.

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  • ‘I Told Him I’m Not Getting in It’: Former Titan Submersible Engineer Testifies

    ‘I Told Him I’m Not Getting in It’: Former Titan Submersible Engineer Testifies

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    The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible hearing kicked off with a startling revelation.

    “I told him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen said to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act as a pilot in an upcoming expedition to the Titanic.

    “It’s the operations crew, I don’t trust them,” Nissen told the investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. You can take a look at where we started when I was hired. Nothing I got was the truth.”

    Nissen’s testimony, which focused on the design, building, and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber submersible, was a dramatic start to nearly two weeks of public testimony in the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s hearings into the fatal June 2023 implosion of the Titan. Its five occupants, including Rush, all likely died instantly.

    Before Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard presented a detailed timeline of OceanGate as a company, the development of the Titan submersible, and its trips to the wreck of the Titanic, resting nearly 3,800 meters down in the north Atlantic. These slides revealed new information, including over 100 instances of equipment failures and incidents on the Titan’s trips in 2021 and 2022. An animated timeline of the final few hours of the Titan also included the final text messages sent by people on the sub. One sent at about 2,400 meters depth read “all good here.” The last message, sent as the sub slowed its descent at nearly 3,400 meters, read “dropped two wts.”

    The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon fiber sub had been stored in an outdoor parking lot in temperatures as low as 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (–17 Celsius) in the run-up to last year’s Titanic missions. Some engineers worried that water freezing in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause defects in the material.

    Nissen said that almost from when he joined OceanGate in 2016, Rush kept changing the company’s direction. A move to certify the vessel with an independent third party fell by the wayside, as did plans to test more scale models of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull when one failed early under pressure. Rush then downgraded titanium components to save money and time. “It was death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.

    He faced tough questioning about OceanGate’s choice of carbon fiber for a hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to provide an early warning of failure. One investigator raised WIRED’s reporting that an outside expert Nissen hired to assess the acoustic system later had misgivings about Rush’s understanding of its limitations.

    “Given the time and constraints we had,” Nissen said, “we did all the testing and brought in every expert we could find. We built it like an aircraft.”

    Nissen walked the Coast Guard board through deep-water testing in the Bahamas in 2018, during which he says the sub was struck by lightning. Measurements on the Titan’s hull later showed that it was flexing beyond its calculated safety factor. When a pilot subsequently found a crack in the hull, Nissen said, he wouldn’t sign off on another dive. “I killed it,” he testified. “The hull is done.” Nissen was subsequently fired.

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  • The Coast Guard’s OceanGate Hearings Start Next Week—but Key Witnesses Won’t Appear

    The Coast Guard’s OceanGate Hearings Start Next Week—but Key Witnesses Won’t Appear

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    On Monday, September 16, the US Coast Guard is convening a Marine Board of Investigation hearing into the loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible in June 2023 and the deaths of the five people on board, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. It intends to use the two-week livestreamed hearing in Charleston, South Carolina, to help it determine the cause of sub’s implosion, if incompetence or negligence was involved, and whether any laws were broken. It could then refer the matter to criminal prosecutors and make recommendations to improve marine safety.

    It hopes to do all that without publicly hearing from most of OceanGate’s remaining executives or Rush’s wife Wendy, who sometimes took a leading role during Stockton’s dives. Nor will the investigation include public testimony from any of the companies that designed and built the Titan’s innovative carbon fiber hulls, or any of the senior operations staff who prepared, maintained, or supported the Titan on its 2023 expedition.

    In fact, it seems few of the 24 witnesses subpoenaed were even on board the Titan’s support vessel, the Polar Prince, for the final mission: Renata Rojas, an unpaid volunteer, and Tym Catterson, a contractor with experience of piloting submersibles.

    Anonymous sources close to the investigation but not authorized to talk with the media told WIRED that the Coast Guard had approached some contemporary OceanGate staff and executives, and third-party suppliers, but was told that if compelled to appear they would assert their Fifth Amendment rights. That means that they could refuse to testify on the grounds that their responses might incriminate them or expose them to legal risk.

    WIRED approached OceanGate and the hull manufacturers for comment. A lawyer for Janicki Industries, which cured and machined a portion of the hull, wrote that it was not participating in the hearings. WIRED did not receive replies from the others before publication.

    There was speculation that former US Coast Guard rear admiral John Lockwood, who joined OceanGate’s board in 2013, would testify, but he is also missing from the list.

    The absence of people who would appear to have relevant knowledge has caused consternation among former OceanGate employees and marine experts, who are skeptical that the full story of the Titan’s demise can be told without them.

    “Personally, if I was in the Coast Guard, I’d bring them in and make them take the Fifth,” says Alton J. Hall Jr., a maritime lawyer. “They do have subpoena power, so I’m not really sure why they’re not.”

    Melissa Leake, a Coast Guard public information officer and its deputy public affairs officer for the Atlantic area, noted that the Coast Guard does not comment on reasons for not calling specific witnesses. However, she denied that the Coast Guard did not subpoena certain individuals or organizations because they would plead the Fifth.

    What the board has is a wealth of digital and physical evidence, such as data from previous dives and wreckage of the Titan recovered from the Atlantic seafloor, including some of its carbon fiber hull. One of the expert witnesses being called is a materials engineer from the National Transportation Safety Board’s Materials Laboratory.

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  • The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined

    The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined

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    The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

    On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

    Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

    In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist on the ceiling. About 3 feet long, it was a scale model of a submersible called Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, had cofounded the company in 2009 as a sort of submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. At first, Rush acquired older, steel-hulled subs for expeditions, but in 2013 OceanGate had begun designing what the company called “a revolutionary new manned submersible.” Among the sub’s innovations were its lightweight hull, which was built from carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic, 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

    Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive. If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.

    “I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”

    “Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.

    The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.

    In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.

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