“It was later than I thought; When I first believed you; Now I cannot share your laughter; Ship of fools.” - Grateful Dead.
Comedian Dave Chappelle does a bizarre impression of the dead people on the Titanic as OceanGate’s doomed submersible approached.
In a gurgling voice, he cries, “Come, join us in our watery grave.”
I don’t know why I find this funny. It’s in poor taste to poke fun at dead people who cannot poke back. Yet Chappelle deftly captures a comical absurdity: A shipwreck on its way to a shipwreck.
The pilot of this submersible, OceanGate’s Stockton Rush, ignored warnings about the integrity of his vessel.
The comedy is that this arrogant CEO imploded with his inadequately engineered craft, the Titan, on June 18, 2023 at age 61. The tragedy is that he took four passengers with him.
The U.S. Coast Guard has launched a 10-day hearing into this disaster that will continue into next week. But OceanGate’s former operations director David Lochridge has already pinpointed the most likely cause in just a few words.
"Stockton liked to do things on the cheap," he testified on Tuesday.
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Sell it, don’t smell it
In 2016, Lochridge moved his entire family from Scotland to work for OceanGate. The veteran engineer and submersible pilot said he soon came to feel that he was hired to lend the company a touch of scientific credibility.
"I was, I felt, a show pony," he said. "I was made by the company to stand up there and do talks. It was difficult. I had to go up and do presentations. All of it."
Nevertheless, in 2018 Lochridge warned that the Titan’s carbon shell wasn’t properly tested to ensure it could withstand the 12,500-foot depth of the Titanic.
Rush responded by giving Lochridge 10 minutes to clean out his desk, according to Lochridge.
"The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” Lochridge told the Coast Guard. "There was very little in the way of science."
Saving money, wasting lives
Corporate history is littered with cost-cutting executives who refused to heed warnings. A few examples:
A Halliburton employee warned BP about the risks of leaks before its Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The explosion killed eleven people and became history’s largest oil spill.
Employees at Boeing long warned that its cost-cutting efforts could lead to crashes, and the company is struggling to recover from the ensuing disasters to this day.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department filed a $100 million lawsuit against the owner of the cargo vessel that caused the deadly collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in March. The suit claims the company recklessly cut costs and ignored known electric problems on the ship.
The Titanic’s captain famously chose to ignore iceberg warnings. The ship’s owner, White Star Line, had declared the ship “unsinkable,” and it did not bother to equip it with enough lifeboats.
Rush to the bottom
The ironically named OceanGate CEO was in too much of a hurry to bring wealthy tourists to the Titanic.
"There was a big push to get this done,” Lochridge said. “A lot of steps along the way were missed.”
Marketing overtook engineering.
"It was all smoke and mirrors," Lochridge said. "All the social media that you see about all these past expeditions, they always had issues with their expeditions."
Rush, for instance, didn’t listen to Lochridge during a dangerous dive in 2016. Rush was piloting another submersible, the Cyclops 1, to tour an Italian ocean liner that sank off the coast of Massachusetts in 1956.
Rush steered the craft recklessly and crashed into the decaying shipwreck. "Don't tell me what to do,'" Rush demanded as Lochridge had tried to take control.
One passenger was in tears and shouted for Rush to turn over the controls to Lochridge, who was clearly a more experienced pilot.
Rush began to panic. He finally relented by throwing the ship’s video game controller at Lochridge. "He hit me on the side of my head," Lochridge said.
Lochridge is hardly alone in his harsh assessment of Rush. OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen told the Coast Guard panel this week that he refused to pilot a Titanic expedition in 2018.
“I didn’t trust Stockton,” he said. “Nothing I got was the truth.”
G. Michael Harris, a renowned adventurer who has led several trips to the Titanic, told NewsNation this week that industry professionals had long been concerned about Rush and the integrity of the Titan.
Rush, he said, was “a complete, unequivocal narcissist, and in the end, a murderer.”
A quarter-million ways to die
The final analysis will show that OceanGate’s Titan submersible was a shoddy, carbon-fiber canister operated by an ego maniac with a video game controller. And for this OceanGate charged some passengers $250,000 a seat.
There’s something both tragic and comic about rich people dying at the bottom of the ocean in a quest to see where other rich people died 101 years before them.
Climbing onboard was British businessman Hamish Harding as well as Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman, members of one of Pakistan's most prominent families.
Also onboard was French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet. Nargeolet’s family has filed a $50 million lawsuit against OceanGate, alleging passengers knew they were going to die on their way down.
"The crew may well have heard the carbon fiber's crackling noise grow more intense as the weight of the water pressed on Titan's hull," the lawsuit said. "By experts' reckoning, they would have continued to descend, in full knowledge of the vessel's irreversible failures, experiencing terror and mental anguish prior to the Titan ultimately imploding."
They were officially declared lost on June 22, 2023 though some of their remains were later recovered.
Their demise will add to the commercial viability of the underwater site.
Future submariners who can afford the fares will be able to explore what’s left of the sunken Titanic as well as the imploded Titan. It’ll be an alluring two-for-one deal.
It just took one determined CEO to make the Titanic an even bigger and better watery grave.
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Fabulous piece, Al!
Sending around.
First and foremost, it's a tragedy. The fact that this CEO wouldn't go in his own craft was a huge red flag. Hearing about him wanting to do everything in the cheap is so unsettling..
Why didn't anyone stand up to him? I don't understand the continuing obsession people have with viewing these shipwrecks. Maybe I have no sense of adventure. Just sad all around. But we always have the (Grateful) Dead to lift our spirits. That's foolproof.
"May the Four Winds Blow You Home Again".