OceanGate Disaster: Expert Warned CEO of ‘Dangerous Risks’ Before Fatal Submarine Explosion
A leading submersibles expert, Rob McCallum, had warned the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, of the “dangerous risks” associated with the company’s experimental submarine, Titan, before it imploded on June 18, 2023, killing all five people on board.
McCallum, the founder, expedition leader, and divemaster of Eyos expeditions, a company that conducts similar work with submersibles, expressed his concerns about the operation’s failures in an interview with The Independent.
“I have become increasingly amazed and maddened as the levels and many layers of incompetence and deception within OceanGate are exposed,” he said.
“The epic failure of OceanGate has done great harm to the reputation of legitimate and professional organizations, and set back progress many years,” McCallum added.
According to McCallum, there were several “little individual warning signs” ahead of the monumental failure of the Titan sub. One of the major concerns was that the submersible was never certified or classed.
The Titan submersible vanished on June 18, 2023, while on a tour of the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic Ocean. On board were Rush, 61, British explorer Hamish Harding, 58, veteran French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
The sub imploded around 90 minutes into a descent, killing all five on board. A video showing the moment Wendy Rush first hears the sound of the implosion while watching on from the sub’s support ship was released last month.
“What was that bang?” she asks.
The eerie video has been used as evidence in a wider ongoing investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, which has spent the last two years looking into the sub’s cataclysmic failure.
The final report, which McCallum suspects will be damning, is in its final stages according to the Coast Guard, who told The Independent the Marine Board of Investigation is “pressing to release it by the end of the month.”
McCallum believes Rush is going to be the one held responsible and he expects the report will reveal “a concerted effort by a businessman to work around every single rule in the book to start a business and to make money.”
He says that a decade before the tragedy, between 2009-16, OceanGate frequently sought his advice.
“They used to come down and talk to us about how you could establish a business, how you could buy a submarine, how you would maintain a submarine, and where you could find crew. They used to come and talk to us about getting themselves set up,” McCallum said.
However, Rush’s timeline for the deployment of the Titan sub kept being pushed back.
“There were always excuses,” McCallum said. “But the net result is that the timeline kept shifting. He
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