#oceangate submersible disaster

[heartsyhawk]

All the everything else about the whole thing aside why did nobody have a pause about the fact that the CEO/pilot of the disaster tube has a name and on the record dialogue that are like word for word believably from a Bioshock Villain?

I don't understand what about him inspired this kind of confidence.

[prideprejudce]

people saying that users aren’t being compassionate enough towards the billionaires stuck in the death coffin at the bottom of the ocean and calling us “ghouls” for bringing up the absolute absurdity of the entire situation and it’s like……of course no one ever deserves to die by suffocation or freezing to death and it’s a hope that by some miracle that these people are found and somehow saved. however people are aloud to point out the irony of how our current wealth gap is so high that there are people who are able to spend 250k, an amount that most people don’t see in their entire lives, like it’s a movie ticket. except instead of seeing a movie they are entering a death chamber to the bottom of the ocean so they can gawk at the mass grave of over a thousand people

“the CEO of the company tricked them and he’s the real capitalist villain while the other passengers are blameless” I agree that the CEO (who is also stuck in the submarine with them) is as grimy as they come and cut corners in order to make as much money as possible. that’s a given. but as we are seeing now, most people who have never even stepped foot in the ocean their entire lives could see that this was a disaster waiting to happen. you don’t have to be a maritime expert to see that. the submersible has no emergency beacon, is controlled by an off brand game controller, made from parts from a camp store, navigated by texts from above, is bolted in from the outside, and has a contract that passengers sign that mentions “death” three times on the front page. most people couldn’t be paid to step foot in it - and these people paid 250k to go to the bottom of the ocean in it

once again, no one is relishing at people dying stuck in an essentially gutted out minivan at the bottom of the ocean. especially when one passenger is 19 and the other is a legitimate titanic researcher. but people are allowed to be mad that thousands upon thousands of dollars of taxpayer money and resources are being used to try and literally pluck these people out of the ocean and save them from a grave that they literally helped dig themselves into without a care in the world. they are the 1% who can put themselves in peril as much as they please and spend money and waste resources like it’s water but will always expect to be saved from the brink of death by us regular folk so they can call themselves an “adventurer” at their next luncheon

[paddysnuffles]

Part of why I'm glad the sub never made it to the Titanic

One of the things that I feared about the Oceangate trip was that they’d break with tradition regarding the engine room.

You see, since the first expedition to the wreck, it has been considered absolutely taboo to go near it.

This is because the engineers volunteered to stay behind to keep the lights going as long as possible to make it more likely that help would arrive on time. As a way of showing respect for those men who knowingly chose to die to help others, their area of the ship is considered taboo for exploration.

And I sincerely doubt that the Oceangate dudebros would have cared about keeping up the tradition of respecting the sacrifice of those men.

[lucasdoesnotcare]

Well, the titan "submarine" is your local fucking reminder that "Regulations are written in blood" Is NOT a just a fucking saying or just a fucking joke.

[hussyknee]

Pitchbot Hall of Fame tweet 💀💀

(alt included)

[porracristo]

ENG ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ It's fascinating to see the human effort to rescue and save people's lives in danger. It's only five people this time, but 5 lives hold greater value than 500 others… instagram.com/porracristo/

[thatrandomblogsays]

Torn between: if you don’t want to have a horrible death, don’t pay to be bolted into a tin can uncertified death trap vs. the loss of life is tragic and maybe we should hold off on making jokes while the passengers could still be slowly suffocating or freezing to death

[dougielombax]

One year ago today.

What a fucking shitshow!

I’ll admit it feels like it’s been longer.

This whole situation could’ve been avoided if the submersible was constructed in accordance with the appropriate safety regulations!

Fucking hell.

[the-golden-vanity]

I was talking to my dad about antarctic exploration yesterday, and he said that Baron Adrien de Gerlache was the turn-of-the-20th-century equivalent of the OceanGate submarine morons.

I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that he's absolutely not wrong about that.

[random-bakwaas]

The contrast between the news coverage of the Titan submersible and that of the smuggling vessel that sunk on the Greek coast just four days before it is such depressing social commentary on the state of the media.

It's a tragic event, brimming with controversy, crime and injustice to human rights. 78 survivors, out of 750 passengers. 78 survivors, and not one of them was one of the hundred children on board.

A hundred children dead at the bottom of the sea. Yet it was overshadowed by the deaths of 5 billionaires in an entirely avoidable expedition. The Central Mediterranean Sea is one of the world’s deadliest migration routes, and this is one of its worst tragedies. And all the news speaks of is five wealthy men with a taste for the dramatic.

The media may call itself the fourth pillar of democracy, the voice of the people, whatever else it pleases, but the fact remains- it feeds on the sensational, and its primary aim is to tell people what they want to hear.

Former POTUS Barack Obama recently made a statement regarding this, highlighting the lack of coverage in the smuggling case and contrasting it with the submersible case. It was not until this that newspapers really began reporting on it, as is evident when you check the dates of publication of articles and note the delta between them and the event. But not every story that deserves to be told will have the voices of famous people making sure it is heard. And if the media isn’t there for that, who is?

At the end of the day, Joseph Stalin’s words still ring depressingly true: One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Read the Guardian's take here, Arwa Mahdavi puts it together pretty well: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/22/the-greek-shipwreck-was-a-horrific-tragedy-yet-it-didnt-get-the-attention-of-the-titanic-story And read the IRC's update and how-to-help here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ct2AXOWsCnP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D

[paddysnuffles]

Why was Oceangate visiting the Titanic an issue but visiting other disaster sites isn't?: Thoughts from a Titanic nerd

Alright, as someone who’s had a special interest on the Titanic for well over 20 years, here’s my take on the Oceangate incident.

Part of why it took me so long to say something was that I felt the need to think about why the idea of the “expedition” enraged me so much. It’s not like we don’t visit disaster sites as tourists regularly. Take Pompeii and Herculaneum, for instance – as disastrous as it gets, yet no one would argue that it’s tasteless to visit those sites. So could it be just a matter of how much time has passed?

That may be an aspect of it, but there are plenty of modern disasters that we visit, such as the Frank Slide site not too far from where I live. Half a town was buried alive in 1903, with most of the victims still being under the rubble to this day. But there’s a visitor’s centre where you can see the slide site from the windows and learn about the event. 

So what gives? Why was the Oceangate trip so enraging?

And here’s the conclusion I’ve come to:

In the case of Pompeii and Herculaneum, we visit the sites of disasters that affected everyone – rich and poor, slave and master, animals and humans. And we do so to learn about the past, to see what life was like over 1,000 years ago. Because, like it or not, those sites are pristine windows into the past.

In the case of Frank Slide, we visit to learn from the mistakes of the past (the local Indigenous folk had vehemently warned white people to not build so close to Turtle Mountain, as it had a history of “moving” and white people said they were just being superstitious) as well as to remember the stories of the people who died (most of which were poor working families of miners).

Then there’s the Titanic.

Proper expeditions for study and retrieval fit into the same categories as the disasters mentioned above. When a disaster site is being disturbed in order to learn about what happened and to uncover more about the stories of the people lost in the event, disturbing the site is acceptable. It’s necessary and done with a sobering level of respect; that this isn’t about gawking at a gravesite. Note that the descendants of Titanic victims don’t typically have a problem with exploration of the site done for educational purposes, but they did have an issue with turning the site into a tourist travel spot.

Another aspect to why the Oceangate tourism trip was problematic and that breaks from the categories listed above is that the trip involved obscenely rich people going to gawk at what is primarily the resting place of thousands of poor people. Most of the Titanic survivors were rich, because the poor were kept locked in their areas while the rich were escorted to safety in half-full boats when there already weren’t enough boats to go around (more on that in a minute). If the “expedition” were for everyday people to view the site then maaaaybe it’d be acceptable. But it wasn’t. 

It was a trip for the obscenely rich to gawk at the gravesite of poor people whose deaths were largely caused by rich people repeatedly ignoring safety precautions. From the fact that the Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats as it was (largely because the company thought they messed with the ship’s aesthetic and made the deck look cluttered) to the lookouts not having enough binoculars because they lost one of them and no one thought to bring extra or ask a passenger to borrow theirs, to ignoring iceberg warnings and still going fast despite knowing it wasn’t safe to do so, and more.

So while I feel bad for the 19-year-old who didn’t want to go in the first place, I don’t feel sorry for the others. Not even the Titanic expert. Because by being a part of this trip he was condoning both the disrespect of the dead as well as condoning the behaviour of the CEO who mocked safety regulations. And as a Titanic expert, he should have been aware that lack of safety precautions were not only the primary reason the ship sank, but also the primary reason why naval safety regulations (such as ships being required to have at least enough lifeboats for everyone on board but ideally a couple extra as a buffer) were first set in place.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

since i seem to be becoming a titanic guy, ive decided to just lean into it and explain the best i can, in laymans terms, what happened to titan and why the design had been criticised by experts in the deep-sea diving community. 

i will preface this with the fact that im not an engineer. i have a psychology degree so this is not in my wheelhouse; im simply attempting to relay the information that has been made public in a more layman-friendly way. if i get anything wrong, please correct me.

a second preface is that quite a lot of this post is relying on oceanliner design’s video on this topic. though hes less critical of oceangate than i am, mike does a great job of breaking everything down so anyone can understand it. [any statements i make without listing a source are likely to be information from this video]

so with that out of the way, lets jump into it:

first, lets talk about what titan was. ive seen it described as a submarine by many people and im pretty sure ive also described it as such, but titan was a deep-sea submersible with a guiding philosophy of simplicity.

whats the difference between them?

submarines are self-independent vehicles meaning they do not rely on exterior support.

meanwhile, submersibles can submerge and can act independently to an extent, they primarily rely on exterior support such as being tethered to the mother-ship, or in titans case, receiving navigational inputs from said ship.

and here we meet our first bit of criticism; almost all other submersibles do not rely on external navigational inputs. they have their own equipment and systems for this. it may seem trivial, but as oceanographer peter girguis points out, these systems are as important for navigation as they are for the safety of the crew. [x]

when you are in water that deep, you need to know your exact position and be in constant contact with the mother ship. and its not as if oceangate did not have access to this technology, the beacons they use are commercially available. instead, they relied on short texts as a form of communication which is simply unacceptable. the submersible limiting factor has real-time verbal communication between those in the sub and those on the mother ship on dives 27,000 feet deeper than the titanic wreck.

“titan [did] not appear to have some of the other kinds of sensors, beacons and other systems that we use in research, that are also important just to maintain contact.”

“titan was not designed with research in mind.”

most deep-sea submersible designs are based around the design for the dsv alvin as it was one of the first of its kind. you might ask why its alvin that designs are based around and not another. well that would be because alvin was launched in 1964 and is still in use today and has completed over 5000 dives.

and this is why so many in the deep-sea submersible community are so outraged at titans design. titan was around 5 or 6 years old when it imploded; alvin is 59 this year. we have the technology to create submersibles like alvin or limiting factor that are arguably safer to be in than on the deck of a ship [x]; this disaster should never have fucking happened.

okay, so now lets move onto the actual design of titan which differs very much to most other deep-sea submersible and this is not a good thing. the reason most designs are so similar is because these features have been shown time and time again to be safe. again, ill refer to what peter girguis stated:

anyway, ill get back on topic. this is alvins design:

alvins pressure vessel is a large sphere with titanium walls that are 2 inches or 5cm thick. titanium is used as it is a very strong metal as whathisname from 2012 sang about, and a sphere is used because its the best shape for equally distributing pressure. when designing these vessels, you do not want any areas where pressure can build up and a sphere does not have any; the entire structure reinforces itself.

unlike literally every other deep-sea submersible, titans pressure vessel was not a sphere and not made of titanium, rather it was cylindrical with two hemisphere on either side and was built out of carbon fiber. see the shape below:

the important part is the big circle labelled “personal sphere”. this is called the pressure vessel and is where crew and any equipment needing protection from the water pressure reside. this vessel needs to be able to withstand around 6000 pounds or 3 tonnes of pressure per square inch, which is about 400 times the pressure on the surface.

if they had followed previous designs, they would have had to make a much larger sphere in order to fit everyone. but the bigger you make your sphere, the weaker it becomes so you then have to use thicker walls, and all of this makes the pressure vessel much heavier. and this is where youd run into problems because the submersible still needs to be able to plucked from the ocean at the end of the trip and to power itself in the water. the heavier it is, the harder this becomes.

first, well address the shape. as the design philosophy of titan was so that it could carry up to 6 passengers, it would have been very difficult for the pressure vessel to be shaped as a sphere. alvin, in comparison, can only fit three crew and equipment.

so instead, they chose a cylinder. this is not a terrible choice by itself. it is preferable to use round shapes in high-pressure environments as pressure builds up in corners, especially right angles. if youve ever wondered why plane windows have round corners, its because the square windows on the de havilland comet (the worlds first jetliner) gave areas where pressure could build up and caused the jet to suffer a series of explosive decompressions. it crashed many times. [x]

now, well get into where the design really has problems: the materials used. as i mentioned, the majority of the pressure vessel was made of carbon fiber. the ceo of oceangate, stockton rush, believed that carbon fiber would have a better strength-to-buoyancy ratio than titanium, and this was one reason why it was chosen. [x]

so in terms of shape, its not the worst choice. it is much preferable to use a sphere as a cylinder is not as adept at equally distributing pressure, but their choice was at least logical.

on the end of the cylinder, there were two titanium rings bonded to the carbon fiber hull (though the method of bonding is not publicly available), and these rings were then bolted to two titanium hemispheres. now, you might notice that titan does have four right angles in the pressure vessels, but these are within the vessel so as long as no pressure can get into vessel, these are fine.

the problem with this is that carbon fiber is an experimental material that has not been fully evaluated. stockton rush was very aware of this as he was repeatedly warned by many experts in the field, including deep-sea exploration specialist rob mccallum who stated that:

“that carbon fibre is not an acceptable material”

if this occurs, not only do the gaps give areas for pressure to build, the pressure vessel becomes much weaker, and runs the risk of failing as happened. this risk only gets worse when you decide to use expired carbon fiber.

now, you might be saying “kai, you literally told us earlier that they did use titanium” and if you are, A+ to you my friend, youve led us straight onto another problem with the design of the titan: using multiple materials.

one major concern about the carbon fiber for the hull is that it had to be layered up and cured in between until the hull was 12.7cm or 7 inches thick. these layers cause a problem that titanium does not have; there is a risk of de-lamination, aka the layers separating. as previously stated, the titan was several years old so it had already gone through many pressurisations and dive cycles which all run the risk of de-laminating the hull.

and this, ladies and gentleman and those of us past that stage, is why deep-sea submersibles use titanium not carbon fiber.

by designing titan like this, stockton rush strayed ridiculously far away from any other designs which have been tested and shown to work. the submersible was not safe to travel on, especially so far down to be able to visit the titanic wreck. as rob mccallum states:

you just dont do it. by introducing areas where multiple materials meet, you are introducing potential points of failure because well done, stockton, youve introduced yet another area where pressure can build up.

“[titan] was the only submersible in the world doing commercial work that was unclassed. it was not certified by an independent agency.”

in fact, it makes sense to go through the process because you then know that your vessel is safe and idk, its probably better for marketing if your vessel has been certified as safe.

mccallum goes on to describe stockton as a “maverick entrepreneur” who wanted to think outside of the box even when it comes to things like the rules of physics or tried and true engineering principles.

and im sure we can all guess why. it wouldnt have passed and the company has recognised that the design lays outside of the accepted system. though its not a mandatory process even though it really fucking should be, theres no reason to not let your vessels be examined by a marine organisation.

we know that the hull was breached. we know this as one of the very few safety features aboard titan was something known as a “real-time hull health monitoring system” or an rtm. [x]

and he is completely right because what happened to the titan showed how the design of it was so flawed. [x]

“if you steer away from sound engineering principles, which are all based on hard won experience, there is a price to pay, and its a terrible price”

this did what it said on the tin and it did before the catastrophic implosion of titan. when the rtm picked up on too much strain on the hull, it sounded an alarm as a warning. those on board were prepped so they knew what this meant so they used one of the other few safety features on the sub: dropping the ballasts.

ballasts are heavy material gathered in the bottom of a ship or vessel to help stabilise the ship. you use them in order to stop a ship from becoming top-heavy as a top-heavy ship is much more likely to capsize; see the ss principessa jolanda that sank at launch as she launched with all her fittings completed and empty ballasts, causing the center of gravity to be too high. some ships have port and starboard (left and right) water ballasts and if theyre listing dangerously to one side, they can release the water in that ballast to attempt to stabilise the ship.

this, again, is an area of criticism as most submersibles have multiple features that can be used in an emergency. marine geologist, chris goldfinger points out that most submersibles have multiple ways of self-rescue, such as detaching the pressure vessel from the sub itself. [x]

in the case of the titan, dropping the ballasts was the only way the ship could surface in an emergency. it appears that those on board attempted to do so, but did not surface quick enough to avoid catastrophe.

“[titan did not have] nearly that much redundancy and self-rescue capability."

“im concerned that they [oceangate] overlooked some of the features that we build into research submersibles, because they struck [the builders] as costly or unnecessary, or uninteresting. a lot of those features that we see across submersibles have evolved over decades, precisely because they work, and because we know it increases safety for the crew.”

"i have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation"

hes also stated that titan was underprepared which most experts in the field agree with, such as girguis who stated that:

and we know that stockton rush was aware of all these issues; email exchanges show that people at the company came to him with concerns, but he brushed them away. instead, we have statements from him like:

he heard warnings from employees and from deep-sea submersible experts, and a former employee david lochridge alleged in a counterclaim lawsuit in 2018 that he was fired for raising concerns over quality control and testing of potential flaws. [x]

keep in mind that oceangate originally sued him for breach of contract because he brought all of his concerns to osha because he was that concerned. though, this was settled out of court, it clearly shows that this disaster was years in the making.

“it was only a matter of time before they killed somebody.”

as victor vescovo stated:

[enbycrip]

ID: “Reflecting on it, the reason I think the OceanGate situation has become such a flashpoint for anger is because it's such a perfect microcosm of the problem with everything right now.

Decisions are not made based on safety, reasonable caution, or concern for human life. Every decision is instead made from a default assumption of what if the bad thing just DIDN'T happen?'

We are given pie-in-the-sky promises and sizzle reels and an endless PR hype-cycle for every new innovation and inevitably it fails to work, harms people, and then is maybe barely apologized for before the next bad idea comes down the pike.

OceanGate's underengineered, undercooked, doomed submarine isn't merely a metaphor for the hubris of the wealthy, it is a scale model of the way the wealthy dictate our reality. All consequences can be ignored, all blowback can be forestalled, let the end-user eat the cost.

I am not angry because the submarine was badly-made. I am angry because I live in a vastly larger pressure vessel being managed and maintained by the exact same people.”

This encapsulates my thoughts on Oceangate so well.

People who amass vast, obscene amounts of resources through fraud and harm to others, including criminal negligence and exploitation, then build generationally on that fact, passing those lessons on to their kids along with their stolen wealth, try to portray themselves as “genius entrepreneurs” because they know that actual story of how they obtained it will, rightly, make people excoriate them.

The small safeguards we had, at least for a while, like health and safety rules, unions, parental leave and protections for characteristics like gender, disability and race, however inadequate, were small protections for the vast majority of humanity against limitless exploitation. So of *course* oligarchs have been trying to destroy them since at least the 1980s (as ever, fuck Reagan and Thatcher).

The Titan situation was an incredible microcosm on how disaster capitalists work - exploit the public purse mercilessly, put everyone involved in terrible danger through deeply irresponsible, criminal negligence towards their rights and safety, spin that fact as “sleek innovation”, and then expect the public purse to pick up the pieces when it implodes.

The sole difference was that, in this rare case, the disaster capitalist actually suffered the consequences. Usually they walk off with huge profits.

[darkangel1791]

So there was a book written about a ship named Titan, that sank.

Then there was a ship built named Titanic, that sank .

Then there was a submersible named Titan, that went to the wreck of the Titanic . . .

I'm sensing a pattern

[lucasdoesnotcare]

Most expensive group burial:

(Titan submersible)

[she-wrote]

I know much has been said about the whole Titanic disaster. But since I've been studying the warping nature of reality in postmodernism, here are my few cents:

So one of the arguments that the Oceangate CEO made was how safety stands in the way of innovation. This reminds me of that scene from Don't Look Up where yet another billionare discredits all claims about safety...vouching for future and innovation (two delusional symbols of capitalism, I must add).

But when did innovation became synonymous with impulsive risks? There has been many risks in the history that took many lives, but it is safe to say that the scientists didn't hand their lives. They took calculated risk.

But this billionaire rhetoric towards actual physical safety becomes warped into a mere stock market gamble.

And all will be fine in the end. Why? Because rich never imagine themselves dying a horrible death. They live in a "future" that is away from all the climate change problems and migrant deaths.