Key Employee Who Called the OceanGate Titan Submersible Unsafe Testifies

TIME

A former operations director for OceanGate, who labeled a doomed experimental submersible unsafe prior to its fatal voyage, testified Tuesday that the tragedy could have been prevented, and that the company bypassed all standard rules.

Transcript

00:00I'm the chair of the Coast Guard Marine Board Investigation.

00:07When I was fired, I'm obviously, well, not just concerned for myself and my family, you

00:13know, what are we going to do now, but I didn't want anybody going in that submersible.

00:20I mean, it was dangerous, you know, as I said, the build quality was atrocious.

00:25I had to go up, do presentations all about my experience and my eyes, even at the time,

00:32they were selling me as part of this project for people to come and pay money for future

00:38investment in Titan, the submersible.

00:41Can I say arrogance, thinking they could do this on their own without proper engineering

00:46support?

00:47I mean, proper engineering support from people that have built things that have been subsea,

00:51may not be submersibles, but known products, proper engineers that work for the university.

00:58You have to have the confidence in the equipment to do the job.

01:02It's like every other industry.

01:04If you don't have the confidence in it, you don't do it.

01:06That's it.

01:07And did you have confidence in the way that the Titan was being built at this time?

01:11No confidence whatsoever.

01:13And I was very vocal about that and still am.

01:16Force cutting, bad engineering decisions.

01:21I would say that's the two main things.

01:23The desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could to start making profit.

01:28I knew nothing about the financial side of things, but yeah, there was a big push to

01:35get this done and a lot of steps along the way were missed.

01:40And it was pretty evident, not just to myself, there's no way I was signing off on this.

01:46I knew during 2017 when all these materials came in, there's no way at that point I was

01:51signing off on this.

01:53I, aside from Titan, I, as I said, I had Antipodes, I had Cyclops, I had the maintenance, the

02:01daily operations of that.

02:03My team, as it was going, was getting thinner and thinner.

02:06People were dropping away from Ocean Gate, their turnover was incredible.

02:09They were booked, as far as I know, they were booked out for that summer.

02:17So how that's feasible, having a sub like that, a build quality like that, and then

02:25for these people that are running this organization to think it's okay to put these people at risk.

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