OceanGate already warned about 'catastrophic' safety issues long before its Titanic sub went missing
The easiest way to avoid a tragedy is to pay attention to the warnings. Unfortunately, that's not something that was practiced by OceanGate, the private company that offered the $250,000-a-seat expedition to the Titanic that ended in tragedy.
Years before this incident that shocked the entire world happened, several lawsuits and industry experts had already raised serious safety concerns about the project to OceanGate, according to a report by CBS News.
However, it seems that the company turned a blind eye to these ominous warnings and went ahead with the expedition.
It was a decision that had dire consequences, as all five people aboard the missing submersible are now dead after their vessel suffered what the US Coast Guard said was a "catastrophic implosion" in the ocean depths.
Unreliable design
Right from the get-go, the 23,000-pound submarine, called Titan, was already suffering from a rather unreliable and unstable design.
Not only was it reportedly operated using a wireless controller from Logitech, a company specializing in video game products, an employee from the company itself tried to raise concerns to the higher-ups in 2018 about the Titan's design and the company's protocol for testing the hull's reliability.
OceanGate wanted to perform dives without "non-destructive testing to prove its integrity," but the empoyee wanted to conduct more testing of the vessel's hull.
In his legal filing, he stated that the company could "subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible."
Despite his good intentions, however, he was terminated from his position by the company and was even sued when he reportedly breached his employment contract by when he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Lack of a certificate
Any sincere and respectable business needs to have proper certification to operate, but OceanGate reportedly lacks any.
The company failed to get a go signal from the Marine Technology Society, a professional group that serves the international community of ocean engineers, technologists, policy-makers, and educators.
According to their 2018 letter, the group took a swipe at how OceanGat advertised that the materials used to build the Titan would meet or exceed a certification called DNV-GL, which is considered the ideal metric for marine equipment.
"It does not appear that OceanGate has the intention of following DNV-GL class rules," the society pointed out, stressing that such representations would be "misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold."
The tiny tourist craft went missing in the North Atlantic on June 18 after the sealed craft lost contact with its operator, OceanGate Expeditions.
For the last four days, a multinational mission was conducted to find the submersible that held five people, who all wanted to see the sunken Titanic shp with their own eyes.
The search ended on June 22 EST, as the US Coast Guard announced that Titan suffered a "catastrophic implosion" that most likely killed all five passengers even before the watercraft was reported missing.
