Page 24 - Pierce County Lawyer - January February 2024

Shutterstock image.
It was Titan’s last trip. The OceanGate submersible imploded ninety minutes into its 12,500 foot descent to the
wreckage of the Titanic which rests at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, three- hundred seventy miles off the coast of Newfoundland. All five people aboard died instantly including OceanGate founder and CEO, Stockton Rush British billionaire, Hamish Harding, one of Pakistan’s richest men, Suleman Dawood and his son, Shahzada, and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet. Millions around the world were shocked by the tragedy but not a large number of deep sea submersible experts, who had warned Rush repeatedly that Titan was disaster waiting to happen.
Stockton Rush
an MBA at UC Berkely, and became a successful venture capitalist and entrepreneur.
During the 2000s Rush tinkered with various shallow water submersibles.
In 2009, he founded OceanGate in Everett, Washington to provide crewed submersibles for deep sea tourism, industry, research and exploration. The company bought the all-steel Cyclops 1 in 2015, which was rated to a depth of 1,500 feet. But Rush hankered to go much deeper and built Cyclops 2, later renamed Titan, in 2018.
The Titan
"Titan is one-of-a-kind. It is the only human-occupied pressure hull made of carbon fiber designed under a Space Act Agreement with NASA to withstand the immense pressures in the deep ocean."2 –OceanGate
“June 13, 2023—North Atlantic--Fate cleared up the weather, blew off the fog, and calmed the waves, as the submersible and its five passengers dived through the surface waters
and fell into another world. They entered the deep ocean’s uppermost layer, known as the twilight zone, passing creatures glimmering with bioluminescence, tiny fish with enormous teeth. Then they entered the midnight zone, where larger creatures ghost by like alien moons. Two miles down, they entered the abyssal zone—so named because it’s the literal abyss.” - Susan Casey
a
Cyclops 1 on display at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry in 2015, by Isabeljohnson25, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.
Titan was 22.0 ft × 9.2 ft × 8.2 ft and weighed 21,000 pounds. It moved at up to 3 m.p.h. using two horizontal and
two vertical electric thrusters connected to a game controller, which Rush said enabled “anybody to drive.” Titan carried a maximum of five people who sat cross- legged on the floor. There was enough oxygen to last for ninety-six hours. Rush bought the interior LED lights himself at Camping World.
Rush in 2015. Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution
Richard Stockton Rush III was a direct descendant of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a famous Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.1 As a child, Stockton
Rush dreamt of becoming an astronaut and being the first person on Mars. He was fascinated by aviation and aquatics, learned to scuba dive at twelve and earned a commercial pilot’s license
at eighteen. After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton, Rush worked as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas in Seattle, earned
1 The life and times of Dr. Benjamin Rush are chronicled by the same author in Law and Med- icine in Revolutionary America—Dissecting the Rush v Cobbett Trial. Pierce County Lawyer, Vol. 28, Sept/Oct 2018.
3D Model of Titan by Madelgarius, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.
2 NASA admits it had a contract with OceanGate at one time but denies it had anything to do with the design, manufacture, testing or operation of Titan or any expedition to Titanic.
Titan had no seats or seatbelts. American Photo Archive/ Alamy.
24 PIERCE COUNTY LAWYER | January/February 2024