After the implosion, the uncomfortable questions about the Titan. Was this a preventable tragedy?
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English lesson number 589. At Plain English, we use current events and trending topics to help you upgrade your English. And if you’re ready to make faster progress, then I invite you to explore all the lesson resources at PlainEnglish.com/589. That includes a step-by-step video lesson, the transcript of the audio, translations of key words into 9 languages, and the opportunity to practice today’s expression.
That, by the way, is “buyer beware” and it’s a great one to practice. So if you’re a Plus+ member, go to the bottom of the transcript and you can write your own examples with “buyer beware” and I’ll give you personal feedback.
The main story today is a continuation of Monday’s topic on the Titan tragedy. There are uncomfortable questions about this tragedy—including about the choices the company made in the design of the Titan. Let’s get going.
Questions and dilemmas after Titan tragedy
What happened to the Titan submersible was a tragedy. Five people lost their lives, instantly, deep in the North Atlantic Ocean. But this was a somewhat unique tragedy. The people onboard knew they were taking an extraordinary risk. And in the days after the Titan imploded, uncomfortable questions surfaced about what happened.
The more information that comes out, the more Stockton Rush, the founder of OceanGate, seems to have been cavalier about safety and reckless in the way he sold the trip to his customers.
Let’s start with the first uncomfortable question: design.
The Titan was a capsule-shaped submersible designed to take one captain and four passengers to a depth of 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface. The ocean exerts an extraordinary amount of pressure on anything that deep. So any submersible must be able to withstand the pressure.
The Titan was far from the first submersible to go deep into the ocean.
Every year, there are hundreds of dives, many that go far deeper into the ocean than 4,000 meters, and they happen without problems. Some submersibles carry humans, others are controlled remotely. The existing submersibles follow design and engineering guidelines that are rigorous and tested by experience. They are made of steel or titanium. They’re heavy and have a lot of custom electronics and custom-made equipment. Most are spheres. A spherical design means that the water pressure is equal on all parts of the surface.
The Titan, by contrast, was made of carbon fiber, a synthetic material that has not been used by other deep-sea submersibles. Carbon fiber is a lot lighter than steel or titanium and it costs less. It’s also more flexible. But the experts in this area say that carbon fiber is not a strong enough material to go deep in the ocean.
The Titan had a capsule design, which allowed for more interior comfort. The existing designs on other vessels, could fit only three people, and they were a lot more cramped, and with worse views. So the carbon-fiber Titan could accommodate five people in relative comfort, with a large viewing portal. But the tradeoff is that some parts of the vessel would be subject to more water pressure than others, and the whole thing was made of a weaker material.
How can you know if a submersible is safe deep in the ocean? Most submersibles, whether used for tourism or for scientific research, are certified by an independent scientific body. The certification process is an independent evaluation of the safety of the design of the submersible and that evaluation includes detailed independent tests.
But the founder of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, decided not to submit the Titan’s design to the independent certification process. He said their standards are too rigid. He conceded that the international standards do prevent tragedy, but he said they stifle innovation.
He said his design was so innovative, it would take too long to explain it to the independent engineers. In an interview that now sounds flippant, he said he could build a safe submersible by “breaking the rules.” In e-mails and text messages, he mocked and dismissed the scientists and engineers who wa rned him about safety. He can’t answer for his statements today because he was in the Titan when it imploded.
In 2016, more than three dozen people signed a letter expressing deep concerns over the Titan’s design. They called OceanGate’s design approach “experimental” and they warned it could lead to “catastrophic” results. But since the independent assessment was optional, there was nothing they could do except state their opinion.
That leads us to the second difficult question: regulation. No government tested or licensed the dive. Ships that travel the ocean must be registered in a country, and the ship that brought the Titan to the Titanic site was registered in Canada. That means the ship was subject to regulations in Canada. But there was nothing wrong with the ship; the problem was with the Titan. And the Titan submersible was just cargo on the Canadian ship.
By the time the Titan got into the water, it was in international waters, where it was not subject to any kind of government regulation.
Why, you might be asking, why should a government regulate a submersible? Of all the challenges governments deal with, why should they now get into the business of regulating exploratory undersea vessels?
After all , submersibles don’t carry a lot of people, they’re mainly used for scientific exploration, and they’re mainly used in international waters. There’s already an international standards-setting body. If someone wants to go on an adventure trip with a company that doesn’t follow the standards—well, buyer beware . They sign a waiver. They know it’s risky: that’s why they do it! So why should governments even get involved?
The answer to that question is yet another dilemma: the rescue mission. The United States, France, and Canada all sent expensive ships and crews to a dangerous part of the ocean. People worked around the clock for four days. The three countries sent ships, planes, and undersea equipment. Navies got involved. This was not cheap. And it’s not just the money. All rescue missions—on land or in the water—carry danger to the people performing the rescue. This mission also distracted those agencies from the other work they would have been doing that week.
Search and rescue is a legitimate government service. If your boat has engine trouble a few miles out to sea, if you get lost on a hike in the backcountry, if your small plane crashes in a rural area, you’ll be thankful that your government has the resources and willingness to come look for you.
And in this case, three governments mobilized enormous resources to rescue five people—five human lives that deserved every effort at rescue. But this feels different than if they were five hikers lost in the wilderness. The purpose of this trip was to take very, very wealthy people who had paid an enormous sum of money on a risky, adventure-seeking vacation. And the company they did it with, in its hubris , decided not to get the vessel certified by the standards-setting body.
So if international governments are called upon to perform rescues of people on adventure tourism, then those governments have an interest in making sure the companies that sponsor these adventures aren’t being reckless.
When the Titanic sank in 1912, it brought in a new era of safety regulations for shipping. Now the Titan disaster in 2023 may do the same for adventure tourism.
The founder of OceanGate is from a very prominent, very wealthy family. He was making the decisions about the Titan vessel. But the passengers—no matter how rich they are—they sign waivers, but it’s impossible for them to truly know how risky a trip like that is.
A former employee of OceanGate raised significant concerns about the design of the Titan. He said that maybe the company would understand the risks they were taking with their design decisions, but that passengers would have no way of knowing the true level of risk.
OceanGate fired him in 2018.
Texts and e-mails
E-mails and text messages from Stockton Rush have come to light since the tragedy. They don’t look good. He had some very, very harsh words for the people who warned him about his design. In sales conversations, he described his trip—incredibly—as “way safer” than taking a helicopter ride and safer than scuba diving .
When he talked about safety, he frequently cited the industry’s 35-year safety record—nobody had died or been injured in a submersible at this depth before. But he neglected to mention that his design was experimental and almost the whole industry—the whole industry that built the safety record he was bragging about—they all opposed his design and they warned him.
In television interviews, he overstated—this is the polite word—he overstated the involvement of Boeing, NASA, and a university in the Titan’s design. In a television interview, he can be seen laughing and joking at how many of the Titan’s components were purchased off-the-shelf—like a video game controller that was used for steering.
This guy brought the Uber and Facebook model to deep-sea exploration: “move fast and break things.” Ignore the doubters. Crank up the sales pitch. Play fast and loose with the truth. Existing regulations, safeguards? That belongs to a previous age. We’re innovators. Here’s a quote from Stockton Rush, talking about all the safety precautions the industry takes: “At some point, safety is just pure waste.”
People who talked to Stockton Rush about safety all came away thinking one thing: he believed everything he said about that ship’s safety. I mean, he was on it after all. But that’s why you have independent evaluations. Your judgment gets clouded when it’s your own invention.
What an absolute terrible, terrible and preventable tragedy this was. And I say preventable: I keep thinking about that 20-year-old in Las Vegas. He convinced his dad not to take the trip. He evaluated Stockton Rush’s sales pitch and said, “no thank you.” Stockton Rush flew to Las Vegas to pressure those two into going, he called the kid “uninformed,” had some really condescending things to say—the texts are all now public. And still the 20-year-old said no. He saved his own life and his dad’s life.
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