Coast Guard hearings open a new chapter in investigation of OceanGate sub tragedy
The U.S. Coast Guard is beginning two weeks of public hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its crew during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck — but even before the start of the hearings, the official in charge of the hearings made clear that there’s lots more investigation to be done.
“The hearing is the first step in publicly showing the proceedings,” Jason Neubauer, chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, told reporters today. “We may hold additional proceedings. There could be additional witnesses interviewed. So, I would say it’s hard to give a projection on the end date for the investigation.”
Public hearings are due to run from Monday through Sept. 27 in North Charleston, S.C., with the proceedings livestreamed via YouTube. They’ll delve into the causes of Titan’s implosion, which killed the five people on board — including Stockton Rush, the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate.
The other crew members were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet and three mission specialists who paid OceanGate to participate in the dive: Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive and adventurer, plus Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.
Soon after Titan’s disappearance on June 18, 2023, OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations, and its website literally went dark. These hearings will mark one of the rare occasions when people who were associated with the company will be speaking publicly about OceanGate’s activities.
The morning agenda for Monday’s hearing, beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT) calls for testimony from Tony Nissen, who was OceanGate’s director of engineering from 2016 to 2019.
Later witnesses include OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein and several other former employees; Tym Catterson, a contractor who was on Titan’s mothership when the sub was lost; and whistleblower David Lochridge, who raised concerns about Titan in 2018 while acting as OceanGate’s director of marine operations, sparking a legal tussle that ended up squelching those concerns.
Two former mission specialists who went on earlier Titanic dives, Renata Rojas and Fred Hagen, are due to testify later this week. The Coast Guard’s witness list also mentions representatives from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, Boeing and NASA who are familiar with OceanGate’s history, plus shipping experts and Coast Guard officials. But the list doesn’t mention Gordon Gardiner, who was named to succeed Stockton Rush as OceanGate’s CEO, or any other current representatives of the company.
In advance of the hearings, investigators said the evidence suggests Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion during its final dive, due to a rupture in the carbon-composite hull or in the seals between the hull and its titanium end caps. Experts on submersibles — including Triton Submarines CEO Patrick Lahey, who’s due to testify on Friday — have said they privately warned OceanGate about the sub’s vulnerabilities, to no avail.
Neubauer said it would be up to other government agencies to follow up on the Coast Guard’s work. “The purpose of this administrative hearing is to uncover the facts surrounding the incident,” he said. “We are charged also to detect misconduct or negligence by credentialed mariners, and if there’s any detection of a criminal act, we would make a recommendation to the Department of Justice. But the main focus of the hearing is to find the facts and make recommendations to make sure it does not happen again.”
When the final round of hearings is complete, the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board will “split off and conduct independent analysis and finish the reports,” Neubauer said.
The reports are likely to recommend new regulations aimed at addressing the safety lapses that led to Titan’s loss. “Those safety recommendations can go domestically to the Coast Guard that oversees federal regulations for these types of operations,” Neubauer said. “But more importantly, I think we can also go globally, to the International Maritime Organization that oversees the operations on the high seas and in other countries. So, I think that’s another possible outcome of this hearing.”
The findings could also fuel legal arguments in civil lawsuits targeting OceanGate and other parties. At least one wrongful-death suit has been filed already, on behalf of P.H. Nargeolet’s family.