Federal engineer to give evidence at Titan submersible disaster hearing
25 September 2024, 07:24
The Coast Guard opened a public hearing earlier this month that is part of a high-level investigation into the cause of the implosion.
An engineer with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is scheduled to give evidence in front of the United States Coast Guard on Wednesday about the experimental submersible that imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic.
Engineer Don Kramer is due to give evidence as the investigation continues into the implosion of OceanGate’s Titan submersible in June 2023.
British adventurer Hamish Harding and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood died alongside OceanGate Expeditions’ chief executive Stockton Rush and Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
The Coast Guard opened a public hearing earlier this month that is part of a high-level investigation into the cause of the implosion. Some of the testimony has focused on the troubled nature of the company.
Earlier in the hearing, former OceanGate operations director David Lochridge said he frequently clashed with Mr Rush and felt the company was committed only to making money.
“The whole idea behind the company was to make money,” Mr Lochridge testified. “There was very little in the way of science.”
Mr Lochridge and other previous witnesses painted a picture of a company that was impatient to get its unconventionally designed craft into the water. The accident set off a worldwide debate about the future of private undersea exploration.
The hearing is expected to run through Friday and include several more witnesses, some of whom were closely connected to the company. Other witnesses scheduled to testify on Wednesday were William Kohnen of Hydrospace Group Inc and Bart Kemper of Kemper Engineering.
The co-founder of the company told the Coast Guard panel on Monday that he hoped a silver lining of the disaster is that it will inspire a renewed interest in exploration, including the deepest waters of the world’s oceans.
Businessman Guillermo Sohnlein, who helped found OceanGate with Mr Rush, ultimately left the company before the Titan disaster.
“This can’t be the end of deep ocean exploration. This can’t be the end of deep-diving submersibles and I don’t believe that it will be,” Mr Sohnlein said.
Coast Guard officials noted at the start of the hearing that the submersible had not been independently reviewed, as is standard practice. That and Titan’s unusual design subjected it to scrutiny in the undersea exploration community.
OceanGate, based in Washington state, suspended its operations after the implosion. The company has no full-time employees currently, but has been represented by an attorney during the hearing.
During the submersible’s final dive on June 18, 2023, the crew lost contact after an exchange of texts about Titan’s depth and weight as it descended. The support ship Polar Prince then sent repeated messages asking if Titan could still see the ship on its onboard display.
One of the last messages from Titan’s crew to Polar Prince before the submersible imploded stated, “all good here”, according to a visual re-creation presented earlier in the hearing.
When the submersible was reported overdue, rescuers rushed ships, planes and other equipment to an area about 435 miles (700 kilometres) south of St John’s, Newfoundland. Wreckage of the Titan was subsequently found on the ocean floor about 330 yards (300 metres) off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said. No one on board survived.
OceanGate said it has been fully co-operating with the Coast Guard and NTSB investigations since they began. Titan had been making voyages to the Titanic wreckage site going back to 2021.
