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I'm Sam Kazlowski.
More than two years after the implosion of a submersible expedition to the Titanic wreck, the US Coast Guard has released its final report into what went wrong. According to the three hundred and thirty five page document, the disaster, which killed five people, was preventable and driven flawed design, regulatory avoidance, and a toxic workplace culture. This landmark report paints a damning picture of Oceangate, the company behind the mission,
and of its late CEO, Stockton Rush. Today we are going to take you through what happened to the Titan, what the report found, its recommendations, and whether anyone could still face legal consequences.
Emma, why don't we go back to revisit this story. It was two years ago. It was the biggest story in the world for a while there. It's now got a documentary on Netflix that has almost brought it back into the frame. And now we've got this report. Take me back to what the titan sub was and what happened to it.
Yes, so the titan was a deep sea submersible operated by this private US company called ocean Gate. Now when I say submersible, it was a vessel about the size of a mini van and for the price of two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars per per tourists were offered the chance to travel down in the submersible to see the wreck of the Titanic, the iconic shipwreck which lies about three and a half thousand meters underwater in
the North Atlantic. Now, on the eighteenth of June twenty twenty three, five people were on board the Titan that includes Ocean Gates CEO and pilot of the vessels stocked and Rush, a British billionaire named Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul Henri Najalais, and Pakistani businessman Shazada Darwood, who
was there with his teenage son. The vessel lost contact about an hour and forty five minutes into its journey, and what followed was, as you would remember, an international search and rescue effort that absolutely gripped the world.
And when they first went missing, there was this hope that the crew could still be alive.
Absolutely so we knew that the crew had four days worth of oxygen emergency oxygen, so in the event that they got trapped on the ocean floor, there would be four days hypothetically for them to survive down there. But on the twenty second of June, debris from the sub was found near the Titanic site, roughly six hundred k's off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. Now officials confirmed pretty much straightaway that the vessel had imploded on its descent, killing everyone on board instantly.
And the reason we're talking about it today is that the US Coast Guard has released this very lengthy report into the incident, trying to break down exactly where things went wrong. Before we get into the report itself. Just explain to me the role of the US Coast Guard in all of this.
Yes, so the Coast Guard or the USCG is responsible for a whole raft of maritime measures, including leading rescue missions, does that in US waters or in international areas under US responsibility. It has maritime security responsibilities, and it also acts as a regulatory and certificational authority, so it has some safety responsibilities. Like in the case of the Titan Sub.
The Coast Guard leads investigations also into marine casualties, So where there is loss of life or potential violations of maritime law, it will lead investigations. Now, in line with that, the Coast Guard led the Titan sub investigation because Oceangate was a US based company and several of its passengers were US citizens, despite the fact that it imploded somewhere in international waters off Canada.
So they've spent two years looking at this incident. What's the top line finding here?
So the biggest finding here is that the deaths of the five people on board were entirely preventable and that Oceangate failed at its leadership level and at every level across the board. So the report found that the vessel's design was never certified by independent engineers, and if you've seen the Netflix stock o that goes into this a
little bit. Essentially, the vessel constructed and needed the certification of a third party group to say, yep, this is fit to explore the ocean floor to this certain depth, and with that certification it would have been able to sell tickets and operate as a fully legit tourist provider. Safety warnings from engineers and staff were repeatedly ignored, the report found, and it also said that key safety processes
were missing or deliberately avoided. One of the biggest red flags that we've learned about in this report and over the course of the last two years from various whistleblowers is the use of carbon fiber for the Titan's main pressure hull.
As in the hull itself was made of carbon fiber.
Yes, so the part of the sub that keeps the passengers alive under extreme pressure at depths of three thousand
and four thousand meters below the sea level. That material had never been used in a deep sea sub like this before, so in the early days of the Titan sub, the carbon fiber element was seen as really innovative as this big breakthrough because carbon fiber is incredibly light, it's a lot cheaper and easier to use, so there were a lot of reasons to kind of be excited about carbon fiber being in the hull.
So is that actually in terms of the mechanics of it, is that what failed to lead to the implosion? Yep.
Now to understand this we have to do a little bit of quick science talk about carbon fiber. But think of carbon fiber like millions of little strands of string, all connected, so all of those little strands can break or weaken. An analysis of the sub showed that this
process had begun, called delamination. The layers of the carbon fiber had started to separate, so there was evidence of stress damage to the hull, and every time one of those strings broke or came apart, it weakened the entire structure. Engineers and staff had reportedly raised concerns about the design on several occasions over the course of many years, but according to the report from the Coast Guard oceangate created a quote culture of fear and retaliation that silenced employees.
One employee was even fired after raising safety concerns and multiple employees left the company during the development of the sub and prior to that fatal journey in June twenty twenty three.
And I think what really strikes me about this report is that it doesn't seem to be one factor just in isolation. It's the conflation of factors. It's the idea that you can have a material that wasn't seaworthy, but then the concerns raised not being heard because of company culture exactly. Either one of those by itself perhaps wouldn't have led to this outcome. Tell me about the role of the CEO, Stockton Rush in all of this, because he was on board when the sub imploded, right.
Yeah, so he died with the four other passengers. But the findings against him in this report are incredibly scathing. So the overarching theme or all of the findings kind of trace back to this common finding that he had this intense influence over everything and almost a narcissistic arrogance about achieving the goal of taking the sub to the Titanic,
regardless of any safety risks. So he was the CEO, the lead designer, the pilot, and the report says he pursued innovation and speed as in speed to achieve the expedition over safety and skipped established testing procedures. In fact, the report says, and I think this is really critical and what a lot of people have been waiting for, that if he had survived, he would have likely faced criminal charges for his role in the disaster and for contributing to the deaths of the passengers.
The report was really detailed about the way in which he influenced company culture and his leadership style. Give me a quick sense of the specifics there about that culture piece.
Yes, so there's a strong link between Rush and these findings of a toxic work environment. The report states that for several years preceding the incident, Oceangate cut corners, quote, leveraged intimidation tactics and what the report called the company's favorable reputation to evade regulatory scrutiny. So this reputation of being a really innovative company doing something exciting and different,
and that they took advantage of that. The finding stated that 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.
And what about the other passengers in all of this, I mean, were they aware of all of these risks and perhaps regulatory missing pieces before they jumped into that vessel.
Yeah, that's a question that has come up a lot over the last couple of years. And the report found ultimately that the passengers were misled by the company. The report says Oceangate called the passengers mission special and this was a sort of loophole to get around the fact that they were not certified to run the expedition with
paying tourists. But by bringing these people on as mission specialists, they could argue that each person on board had a particular role so served a purpose in that way, and the contracts that they were made to sign really downplayed the risks. In some cases, they overstated how tested and
safe the vessel really was. And to quote the report quote, there was a systematic pattern of misrepresentation in how Oceangate described for Titan's capabilities and testing history to clients and to the public.
So this large report has come out. Have we heard from Oceangate in response to the report, and are they still actually operating as a company.
Yeah, it's worth noting the company essentially ceased operations after the disaster just weeks after, so it hasn't responded directly to the report at the time of recording. The website's been taken down, and Oceangate hasn't made any public statements for over a year. I don't think anyone is really expecting to hear from anyone affiliated with Oceangate. A lot of the people that worked for them have tried really hard to distance themselves from that period of their careers.
Have we heard much from the families of the passengers who died.
Yeah, some of the families have spoken out this week, in particular the Darwood family, so that's the father and son who died on board. They released a statement saying no report could ease their loss, but they're hopeful that it will lead to accountability and prevent future tragedies.
I was really interested by that note that you raised around the fact that it was likely that the CEO would face criminal charges had he not been part of the group that died. Are they going to be any legal consequences for this? Obviously not surrounding him, but surrounding other personnel in the company or the company itself.
It is possible. So while we know Oceangate no longer exists as a company, the Coast Guard has referred the case to US federal prosecutors, and that could then open the door to civil lawsuit or even criminal charges for anyone else involved. But in terms of criminal proceedings, Stocked and Rush, the CEO really is at the center of all of the negligence that can be traced back to human decision makingper interesting, but on a broader level, you know,
we could see civil suits from the families. And the report calls for really significant change to how submersibles like this are regulated, and particularly how private companies operate them, because right now it's a pretty unregulated space.
And one quote that really stood out to me in those recommendations and that sense of discussing, you know, this isn't the last time that we're going to see people try and push the barriers of exploration, be it in space or under the ocean or on land. That line around innovation must never come at the cost of safety. Yeah, tell me about the recommendations to kind of wrap this all up, how does the US Coast Guard think that we should all move forward in this space.
So there are seventeen recommendations, a lot focused on safety and certification. So the fact that that third party certification never happened for the Titan, ultimately the Coastguard wants to ensure that never happens again. So there's a series of regulations there. There are recommendations for stronger whistle blower protections because we know that several employees really tried to raise
the alarm on this before the tragedy happened. And there's recommendations around clearer oversight of deep sea exploration, so frameworks around international waters tourism in that space and who should be responsible for kind of global safety and safety frameworks. And it's recommended to ban or strictly limit the use of unproven materials like carbon fiber for primary hold pressure vessels until they can be independently validated in deep ocean conditions.
It really gives me the sense that they're trying to strike a balance between preserving that space for deep sea exploration, the natural human desire to figure out what's out there and what's deeper than we've ever gone before. But also make sure that things are happening safely.
Yeah, and you don't want to over regulate this space to limit scientific exploration. But I guess there's a divide between tourism versus valid scientific exploration and research. I think to wrap it up, it's all about kind of correcting failures and plugging regulatory gaps. But as the report said, Oceangate strategy was to circumvent regulatory frameworks rather than engage with them in good faith. So hopefully this is a turning point for how deep sea tourism is regulated.
All right, m So, right now the Coast Guard will hand this to prosecutors and we'll wait to see if some of those more formal criminal charges or civil cases are laid. Thank you so much for taking us through that, Thanks for having me, and thank you for joining us on the Daily Ods this morning. We're going to be back in your headphones with those headlines in the afternoon. Until then, have a fantastic dame. We'll speak to you later. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Bungelung Calkatin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.