OceanGate fired an employee after he raised safety concerns

Investigators are currently racing against time in order to find Titan, a small commercial submarine disappear In the North Atlantic on Sunday with five people on board. Now, new reports reveal that the company behind the ill-fated underwater tour has fired a former employee after he expressed concern about the safety of the missing vehicle’s design.

OceanGate Cruises, which charters Insanely expensive water cruises Like the one that went awry this weekend, it was previously the subject of a lawsuit involving the former Director of Naval Operations. The CEO in question, David Lockridge, lost his job at the company in January 2018 after submitting a “scathing” report to the company’s senior management that highlighted several safety concerns regarding its business model, TechCrunch reports. reports.

The legal dispute began in 2018 after Lochridge was fired, after which OceanGate sued him, accusing him of leaking classified information to the company about its submarine. Then Lochridge Filing a mandatory counterclaimclaiming wrongful termination for being a whistleblower.

Lockridge Accused His repeated efforts to bring attention to Titan’s design problems were ignored by senior company officials; He felt that these problems could eventually “pose a safety risk to staff” and to paying passengers. The concerns began shortly after Lochridge was instructed to perform a vehicle quality inspection that revealed “several issues that constitute serious safety concerns,” according to the lawsuit.

One problem was the Titan’s hull – which was made of what was then known as the Titan The first of its kind Carbon fiber construction. TechCrunch writes that the material OceanGate used to craft its ship was attractive because it “can be stronger and lighter than steel.” However, the material can also be “subject to sudden failure under pressure,” the outlet notes — and Lockridge worried that small flaws in the structure could hypothetically expand under the pressure of deep-ocean diving. Luchridge suggested that the company conduct “critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental hull design,” but it was repeatedly met with protests from company management, according to the lawsuit.

Another contention was the submarine’s viewing port—that is, the forward window through which passengers could see the ocean. According to Lockridge’s claims, he repeatedly “denied” information by other members of the team about the submarine’s viewing port. In the end, Lochridge attends a meeting where he is given full information about the viewport, and it does not go well…

At the meeting, Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to viewport information from the engineering department – the viewport in the bow of the submarine was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 metres, even though OceanGate had intended to carry passengers to depths of up to 4,000 metres. Lochridge knew that the viewport manufacturer would only certify at a depth of 1,300 meters due to the experimental viewport design submitted by OceanGate, which was outside the human occupancy (“PVHO”) pressure vessel standards. OceanGate refused to pay the manufacturer to build a viewing port that would meet the required depth of 4,000 metres.

In other words, according to the lawsuit, the Titan’s viewport wasn’t really designed for the depths at which the car was traveling. In fact, the submarine was in the midst of diving to a site Titanic Sunday’s wreck when it disappeared – which is said to be 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

Lochridge’s lawsuit did not last particularly far and the former employee and company were quickly settled.

Nearly five years later, it’s hard not to consider the lawsuit a visionaryAnd Given that Titan is now a frenzied topic The chase across the sea. By the time the company lost contact with the submarine, it was expected that there would be approximately four days of air remaining. Now, things are significantly more serious. As of Tuesday morning, officials said there is less than 40 hours left before the oxygen supply runs out.

On board the missing vehicle are OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was piloting the submarine when it disappeared, as well as Paul-Henry Nargeolet, former French naval officer Hamish Harding, British billionaireAnd Shahzadeh Dawood (Also billionaire), along with 19-year-old Suleiman Ibn Dawood.