We are learning of
more missed warning signs for the company
behind the Titan submersible
that imploded on a mission
to the Titanic.
According to The New Yorker,
David Lockridge,
who was a former Ocean
Gate employee
who claims that he was
wrongfully terminated
for raising red flags,
one sent an ominous email to a colleague
about the doomed vessel writing.
That sub is an accident
waiting to happen.
He also added this about then
CEO Stockton Rush.
He said,
I don't want to be seen as a tattletale,
but I'm worried
He kills himself and others in a quest
to boost his ego.
Rush, of course, was among five
people who died in the tragedy.
Joining me now is Ben
Taub of The New Yorker
who wrote this really incredible story.
Ben, and you obtained
this never before
seen report
by David Lockridge,
the fired Ocean Gate employee
And it details
so many issues
that he found with the sub
during an inspection.
Tell us more about what he
found in this report.
Sure.
Yeah.
David Lockridge
was perhaps
the only highly experienced
submarine pilot
who worked at Ocean Gate at the time,
and he was hired
as the director of Marine Operations.
And as part of that role,
as they transitioned from the building
phase into the testing phase,
he was required to sign off
that this was safe to dove.
So he was raising concerns on the
on the factory floor
for much of the latter
half of 2017
and was just constantly being dismissed,
at which point
he decided he was going to take
this serious inspection report
and he was going to detail everything
in writing
and submit it
in writing to Stockton Branch,
the CEO,
and Tony Nelson,
the director of engineering.
And in this
over the next sort of day of
it was January 18th. 2018.
So more than five years ago
Lockridge inspected every piece,
every major component of the sub
and found
that glue was coming away
from the scenes of the ballast bags.
You had mounting bolts
threatening to rupture things,
sealing faces
that had errant punch holes
over in grooves
that deviated from standard parameters.
Everything that could go wrong
was sort of going wrong.
There were snagging hazards
that were important
components attached with zip ties,
flammable flooring
and the internal interior
vinyl wrapping would emit
highly toxic gases upon ignition.
But the number one concern for Lockridge
was that the actual core
of this submarine,
the pressure boundary,
which is what keeps people alive at
3800 meters where Titanic is,
where the external water
pressure is, about £6,000 per square
inch is made of carbon fiber,
which is not used at the in
deep ocean submersibles
because under compression
it's a capricious material.
It's not made to
to be used under compression.
It's fibers.
It's like rope.
It's strong under tension,
but not under compression.
So he examined
a section of it
and found that it was filled with with,
you know, little, little holes he held.
It was laminating these layers
it was porous.
He held a light behind it
and found that the light
was streaming through.
And he refused to sign off on the diet
and stuck to in.
Rush said that
because you refused to sign off
on this man's testing,
you cannot do your job
as director of operations.
And so he fired them on the spot.
Yeah, in a way.
He was doing the job, Ben,
and he was fired for doing his job.
And you have to wonder
what would have happened
if he'd been able to actually do his job.
So you have in this
you also
you're interested
in instances where Rush, he seems to take
personal offense to criticism, right?
Because Lockridge knows people
outside of Ocean Gate
and there's a coed head of a company
that actually has a classed titanium sub.
Of course,
this sub,
the submersible that imploded,
it was not classed
and this co-head of this company says
to him, basically warning him
and he lashes out.
Stockton rushed us, saying
that he's tired of industry players
who try to use a safety argument
to stop innovation.
He seemed so confident that he was doing
something new and different
and that he was being stymied by people
saying it was in the name of safety.
But he seemed convinced
it wasn't, even though
truly clearly it was
Yeah.
At the
end of the day,
this tragedy comes down to hubris.
It was a matter of this kind of,
you know, Silicon
Valley disruptor attitude,
but it wasn't about
beating the other companies.
It was about trying to beat physics.
And you're not going to win that.
And they didn't win that.
And it was sort of blindingly obvious
for four years that this sub was not
being constructed in a manner
that would work under great pressure.
You can build as a sub
that's experimental
but you can't take passengers
and that's completely illegal.
And so they structured the company
such that it was falling outside of U.S.
jurisdiction in various ways.
They had all kinds of sort of steps taken
so that they weren't actually passengers.
They were categorized
as mission specialists.
But how can you have a 19 year old kid
who's terrified of going inside
in specialists?
It's completely incoherence.
And I imagine that this will, you know,
this will continue
for a long time in courts
because you can only call something
an accident if it's truly an accident.
And if there's five years
of very explicit warnings
from engineers
explaining this is how it will implode,
and you refuse to to
to take them seriously.
There has to come a point
where someone takes responsibility
for that.
Dave Lockridge on the hit for his part
after he was there.
What's the lesson here on classing
because he was so stocked
in Rush resistant
to having his submersible classed.
And yet what is so clear
in your report
is how essential that process is
to providing a submersible
that is safe for
people to go to these depths.
Yeah.
300 meters is not actually you know,
it is an extreme depth, let's be clear.
But it's not unprecedented.
Nothing he was doing
was breaking boundaries
The boundary
breaking part of this operation
was to try to do it
in a sub that was unclassified
and was clearly designed
to do what it did, which was to fail.
Class submarines can go
have been going to the Titanic
since the eighties.
And one of the guys in
my article had been leading tours
of the Titanic
in the mid 2000
using Soviet submarines
that were built in the eighties.
Others in the article,
because I happened to be at sea with them
some years ago
for a much more sort of serious venture
where they were sending
a manned submersible
that was classed to the deepest point
in each ocean.
The deepest point in the Pacific
Ocean is 11,000 meters.
It's triple the depth of Titanic.
And for that sub
they took the guy
from the classification agency
to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
He signed
that it was unlimited depth
at the 11,000 meters down.
And for that solved,
you know, in a titanium spherical hull
which evenly distributes
the pressure,
not a cylinder
which will get crushed under pressure.
Titanium is that titanium sphere hull.
The Titanic didn't
even count as a dove for classification
and insurance reasons.
Every hundred dives
you have to do inspections,
but the threshold for
them was 4000 meters.
And if it's above 4000,
Titanic's three 800.
It's not even a dove
So the notion that stopped
Rush was doing something innovative.
It's a complete lie.
And basically
he had just changed the narrative
around the point that it became clear
that they would never get it class
because it was going to be a failure.
And the way that they did
that was to sort of
lie to their mission specialists, again,
their passengers
who they'd misclassified
on purpose for legal reasons,
that this, you know,
they stopped trying
to say that it was safe.
They started telling them explicitly,
oh, yeah, it's incredibly dangerous.
You might die. You have to sign a waiver.
This is an experimental sub,
which was true.
But the lie there was that
this is how serious operation is done.
It's not how it's done at all.
And last thing that I just need to make
very clear
is that Dave
Lockridge actually did raise this
with the US government
after he was fired.
He was so concerned
about what was going on
that he shared his report
with OSHA
and occupational
Safety and Health Administration.
And that report was then
passed on from oceans to the US
Coast Guard,
and there's no
evidence of any follow up from there.
That was in March of 20. 18.
Yeah, you make that so clear.
He tried to raise some flags
and in the end
he was buried in legal bills,
as you describe in your report.
Then excellent reporting.
I think it's such an important lesson
for so many people,
not just when it comes to submersibles
and deep ocean exploration,
but anything that could be unsafe.
It's a really important read.
So thank you for
being with us and sharing it.