The Unforgiving Sea: OceanGate, Titan, and Unforgiven Hubris

“Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” – Herman Melville

This week’s drama of the Oceangate submersible Titan ended the way I think most of us knew it would:

A vast multinational search for five people who had descended to view the wreckage of the sunken R.M.S. Titanic ended on Thursday after pieces of the privately owned submersible vessel that had carried them were found on the ocean floor, evidence of a “catastrophic implosion” with no survivors, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The dramatic search effort, in a remote area of the North Atlantic 900 miles off Cape Cod, Mass., had mesmerized people worldwide for days after the 22-foot watercraft, called Titan, lost contact with its parent ship less than two hours into its voyage on Sunday. The grim discovery, by a remotely operated vehicle scouring the sea bottom, also trained attention on high-risk, high-cost adventure tourism, raising questions about the safety protocols followed by companies that run such expeditions.

…

Stockton Rush, 61, the chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned Titan, was piloting the submersible and among those presumed dead. Others on board were Hamish Harding, 58, a British explorer; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, a French maritime expert who had made more than 35 dives to the Titanic; Shahzada Dawood, 48, a British businessman; and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood, a university student.

On the scale of things, the deaths of five people would seem to be minor stuff. What caused this to vault into public consciousness was the horror at the idea of these people slowly running out of oxygen at the bottom of the sea, the race against time before that happened and, to be honest, the ongoing romance we attach to the Titanic and her watery grave. There has also been some schadenfreude over people paying enormous amounts of money to cram into a tin can that resulted in their deaths. But I temper that with knowing that five people were killed, including a teenager who had his entire life ahead of him.

A lot of people have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the coverage of the sinking of the Andriana, which sank in Greek waters, likely drowning several hundred migrants. And while I see their point, I don’t think the two incidents are comparable, other than both involving ships. Andriana was massively overloaded and apparently sank when she turned too fast while trying to evade the Greek Coast Guard. The crew abandoned their charges and had, in fact, locked many passengers below decks, dooming them. There was no days-long drama, only hours to pull people from the water before the sea claimed them. And the Greek Coast Guard did what they could on such short notice, pulling more than a hundred people to safety. Yes, the press coverage was wildly different — at least in the United States. But by the time the press got the word, the event was over, mostly for the worse.

Returning to the Titan, a lot is coming out about the OceanGate company. How they seemed to cut corners on safety, how their now-deceased owner railed against government regulation, how whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm on the design and specs. Doubtless there will be investigations as to what went wrong here, along with lawsuits and perhaps criminal charges.

As to how the accident itself happened, we may never for sure. But my suspicion is that the cause of the accident was a material fatigue (which this OceanGate submersible design had problems with before).

Let me back up a few decades. In the early days of commercial aviation, the first commercial jetliner was the deHavilland Comet. Within a year, it became obvious that something was going terribly wrong as two planes came apart in midair. The investigation that unravelled the mystery was when a Comet fuselage was placed in tank and repeatedly pumped full of water. Eventually, it burst. Examination showed that the repeated pressurization caused microscopic cracks in the material — metal fatigue. Eventually, the cracks spontaneously lined up until the structure failed. This is why modern airplanes are routinely examined for metal fatigue and fatigued parts are replaced.

The Titan was built from a carbon-fiber composite with titanium endcaps and a large window. The point of structural failure could be literally anywhere. But I would be surprised if this was not determined to be the ultimate cause of this tragedy.

But fundamentally, exploring the deep ocean is not something you do on a wing and a prayer. Below is a link to a documentary on James Cameron’s expedition to the Challenger Deep — the deepest trench in the ocean. And while Cameron pushes his people and, in the end, left a potential safety system behind, there is an enormous amount of work, care, testing, retesting and development involved in constructing his submersible.

The thing about exploring the depths of the ocean is that it is a lot like exploring space: the environment is brutally unforgiving of error and hubris. This isn’t like barnstorming with an airplane; it’s pushing technology and science to its limits. As Cameron points out in an interview embedded below, submersible exploration has actually had an excellent safety record because of the enormous care people put into it. We’ve just gotten a horrifying demonstration of what can happen when people don’t.

‘Titanic’ director James Cameron on the ‘catastrophic implosion’ of Titan submersible: “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field.” pic.twitter.com/vO8JkCXS5f

— ABC News (@ABC) June 22, 2023