According to court documents reviewed by CBS MoneyWatch, OceanGate fired employee David Lochridge in 2018 after he expressed concern about the submersible's safety.
In his complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, Lochridge alleged he had raised concerns about the safety of the Titan with OceanGate and advised the company to conduct more testing of the the vessel's hull. Lochridge said he had disagreed with his employer about the best way to test the safety of the sub and that he objected to OceanGate's decision to perform dives without "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's legal filing stated.
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.
Lochridge also expressed concern that the company planned for the sub to rely on an acoustic monitoring system to detect if the hull was breaking down or about to fail. That wouldn't provide much help in an emergency, Lochridge claimed in the filing, because the acoustic analysis would only alert people about imminent problems, "often milliseconds before an implosion."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/titanic-submarine-oceangate-hull-safety-lawsuit/
RobertJHarsh 23 points 10 months ago
Welp. He's alive. So he wins.