Posted on 06/21/2023 6:41:03 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A submersible carrying tourists to look at the remains of the Titanic went missing on Sunday, and the odds of anyone onboard surviving grow lower by the day. It’s also been reported that the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, the company behind the excursion, is onboard. And the more information that comes out, the less surprising it is that we’ve ended up in this situation.
Metro reports that last year, when asked about the safety of the Titan submersible, Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s CEO, said, “You know, there’s a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”
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According to the report, OceanGate fired David Lochridge when he questioned how safe the Titan was and later sued him after he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, claiming he violated the terms of his contract. Lochridge then countersued, claiming he was wrongfully terminated. In the suit, he said he pushed back against launching the Titan without doing “non-destructive testing to prove its integrity.”
“The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design, the lack of non-destructive testing of the hull, or that hazardous flammable materials were being used within the submersible,” Lochridge said in his suit.
From the CBS story:
The Titan relied on carbon fiber for a hull that would carry passengers as deep as 4,000 meters, a depth that Lochridge claimed in the court filing had never been reached in a carbon fiber-constructed sub. According to his claim, he learned the vessel was built to withstand a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate planned to take passengers to 4,000 meters. Titan relied on carbon fiber for a hull that would carry passengers as deep as 4,000 meters, a depth that Lochridge claimed in the court filing had never been reached in a carbon fiber-constructed sub. According to his claim, he learned the vessel was built to withstand a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate planned to take passengers to 4,000 meters.
He also said that even though the Titan was made out of carbon fiber, no carbon fiber sub had ever gone that deep before.
If these claims are true, they paint a pretty clear picture of a CEO who didn’t care about safety and was happy to risk other people’s lives to make a little money.
It does have a toilet.
But food supplies, and I imagine water, were limited.
It was a Logitech G F710. Logitech’s stock took a dive (no pun intended) and there’s a healthy market for the gamepad at the moment.
This was actually the 5th trip the sub made.
They have limited supplies of water?
I heard 1 bottle of water and a sammich.
I find it ironic that a doomed vessel went toward the bottom of the ocean to visit a doomed ship.
Fitting if the vessle with the chewy nugat center was resting along side the Titanic.
Well, nothing seems to be working as far as we can tell. Do you suppose that any desalination system that they may have had is still working?
They didn’t expect to be down there for several days. They probably took water aboard.
That seems unfair. Logitech's product was never intended to control a submersible, so I don't see what happened as their fault.
I was just teasing you, because they are surrounded by water at 500 atmospheres.
So many foreseeable things that could go wrong and the guy took a maglev train through every one of those foreseeable things.
lmao!
The news organizations pushed the controller issue very early on with an utter disregard for all of the other safety issues. Logitech just got ran over in the process.
“and several such SMEs plus those who are in the carbon fiber fabrication industry have commented about the bad layup technique chosen.”
The cross layup is required with fabric that has single direction fibers. These rolls are manufactured with fiber patterns designed for particular uses.
I haven’t seen any of the comments you refer to.
I’m going to take a guess and say the CEO dispensed with safety concerns, because of money issues. It became a choice between not launching subs and losing his company or launch subs and try and correct problems along the way.
In my opinion, if I’m correct, he should have perhaps been more modest about what he could do. There is a lot to see when you go 1000 feet below the sea. He might have been able to generate a lot of business by being more realistic and still work on a sub that he could go 12,500 feet.
“where the atmospheres are about 100,000 times the surface.”
About 400x.
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Yours is more accurate but his is more fabulous.
In my retelling of the story Ima make it 1,000,000
I’m aware that carbon fibre, while stronger than steel, can be prone to sheering if the forces against it goes against the grain. It probably wouldn’t have been my material of choice to use for structural purposes.
I admit to sometimes making napkin calculations and not worrying too much about accuracy. I may be Aspergers, but I’m not that Aspergers.
That’s the thing about carbon fiber. It looks fine to the naked eye one second and it disintegrates the next.
This doesn’t seem to have been ‘best tested’ equipment.
It’s true that the people made their choice and took their chances; but it doesn’t seem to have been a fully informed choice.
Even with cross-laid fabric strips, the pattern of layup is critical. Go over to Sub Brief’s review of the current situation and check the comments - you can also Google those comments and find articles making similar comments well prior to this incident.
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