Page 26 - Pierce County Lawyer - January February 2024

balked, blaming his twenty year old son’s fear of giant squids and whales.
In a published interview with People, Sean Bloom recalls the conversation with his father differently, and says it had nothing to do with fear of giant squids and whales:
“the whole reason my dad did not go was because I told him, ‘dude this submarine cannot survive going that deep in the ocean.’ I was worried because I didn’t think the submarine could withstand that kind of pressure and it wasn’t meant to go that far.”9
My son's friend researched what could go wrong and put a little scare in him.
I'm going to talk him down.
He's excited to go, but concerned about the danger.
He researched the marine life at that depth and perceived threats to the vessel.
A sperm-whale attacks the sub or a
giant squid grabs it and compromises the hull.
Really stupid stuff.
9 Young, S. (June 26, 2023). Titan family tragedy avert- ed due to son’s warnings about safety of sub. People.
VectorMine/I-Stock Image
Snap, Crackle, Pop
“The state-of-the-art vessel, designed
and engineered by Ocean Gate Inc. in collaboration with experts from NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington, made its subsea debut in 2018. Through the innovative use of modern materials, Titan is lighter, more spacious, and more comfortable than any other deep-diving submersible exploring the ocean today.” –OceanGate
Karl Stanley, a submersible expert, and friend of Rush, heard Titan’s carbon fiber hull cracking during a dive to 3,760 meters in the Bahamas in April 2019.10 He emailed Rush the next day:
“What we heard...sounded like a flaw/ defect in one area being acted on by
the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged. From the intensity
of the sounds, the fact that they never totally stopped at depth, and the fact that there were sounds at about 300 feet that indicated a relaxing of stored energy (which) would indicate that there is an area of the hull that is breaking down (and) getting spongy.”11
Stanley recommended that Rush cancel the planned dives to the Titanic and conduct fifty test dives before carrying people again. OceanGate recommended that Stanley mind his own business
but developed and touted “a real-time acoustic monitoring system,” which it claimed allowed the crew to continuously assess the health of the hull during the dive.
10 Mann, J. (Jun 24, 2023). A friend said he warned Stockton Rush about defects on the Titan in 2019. CNN Business Insider; see also Casey, S. (August 17, 2023) f.n.3 infra.
11 Id.
In 2021, OceanGate filed in the
District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia12, a document describing the acoustic hull monitoring system
as “an unparalleled safety feature.”
The company claimed that Titan had completed more than fifty test dives and completed detailed engineering and development work under a company- issued $5 million contract to the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL-UW).
However, the executive director of APL- UW told CNN that “the Laboratory was not involved in the design, engineering or testing of the Titan submersible used in the RMS TITANIC expedition.”13 A UW spokesperson later clarified that the Laboratory signed a $5 million collaborative research agreement with OceanGate, but only $650,000 worth
of work was completed before the two organizations parted ways:
12 The federal court in Virginia oversees the explora- tion or removal of artifacts from the Titanic wreckage.
13 Tebor, Celina. (June 21, 2023). University of Wash- ington was not involved in design, engineering or testing of Titan submersible. CNN; Podsada, J. (June 22, 2023). Boeing, UW and NASA deny design partnerships with OceanGate. Everett Herald. Charalambous. P. (June
22, 2023). OceanGate exaggerated details of industry partnerships behind lost Titan submersible. ABC News Online.
26 PIERCE COUNTY LAWYER | January/February 2024