The relatives of a Titan sub passenger claim they were 'well aware' they were going to die before the implosion, a lawsuit reveals.
The family of deceased passenger, Paul Henri-Nargeolet, are suing OceanGate and it's founder Stockton Rush for wrongful death and are seeking more than $50 million in damages, The Independent reports.
They have also accused the company and founder of gross negligence, pre-death pain, suffering and mental anguish as well as other counts on Tuesday (6 August) at Washington State Court.
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The Titan submersible would take paying passengers to visit the wreckage of the RMS Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.
On June 18, 2023, Henri-Nargeolet and five other crew members, including Rush, 61, and father-and-son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, set out to visit the wreck site before losing contact with the 'mothership' less than two hours into the journey.
After a frantic search for the crew, it was soon discovered that the sub had suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’, which would have seen the passengers dead in less than a fraction of a second.
The lawsuit claims the implosion and the passenger's deaths were ‘directly due’ to OceanGate’s 'persistent carelessness, recklessness and negligence'.
The suit further alleges that Rush had ‘designed, constructed and operated’ the Titan submersible ‘in a manner outside the norms of the diving community and industry.’
Noting the use of carbon fiber instead of titanium to construct the sub's hull, Rush ‘believed that titanium was unnecessarily heavy’ and had supposedly chosen carbon fiber which ‘breaks down over time under pressure', according to the suit.
However, the suit further claims that he did think about the possibility of 'catastrophic failure where you have imperfections in the [carbon fiber] structure' and therefore installed a security system to detect any issues.
Even though the Titan had been down to the wreck of the Titanic a few times, the suit claims the journeys would have weakened the ‘carbon-fiber hull and/or the connections and seals between disparate types of material’.
The lawsuit alleges that Titan was never approved by DNV, and that Rush had supposedly never sought certification because he thought it would be difficult to 'educate' them on the advantages of the vessel's 'innovative' design.
Crew members were also made to sign a waiver which 'failed to disclose many key, relevant risk factors…regarding the design and operation of TITAN or the materials used in its construction' and that Rush and OceanGate had 'actively fostered Nargeolet’s (and others’) false impressions about the safety and seaworthiness of the vessel', the suit further claims.
It was also claimed that Rush became ‘infuriated’ when Oceangate’s head of marine operations, who was ‘the employee ultimately most responsible for the safety of anyone sailing’ on the sub, asked to scan the hull to include on the safety report, which Rush allegedly refused - with this alleged situation supposedly leading to the employee's termination.
The suit also claims that although he was warned of the safety issues, ‘none of the warnings were heeded'.
On that fateful day, the acoustic safety system’s alarm sounded which warned that the hull was ‘cracking under extreme pressure’ and that ‘common sense dictates that the crew were well aware they were going to die, before dying', the suit alleges.
It said: “The crew may well have heard the carbon fiber’s crackling noise grow more intense as the weight of the water pressed on TITAN’s hull.
“By experts’ reckoning, they would have continued to descend, in full knowledge of the vessel’s irreversible failures, experiencing terror and mental anguish prior to the Titan ultimately imploding.”
The Coast Guard's investigation into the incident is still ongoing, and OceanGate has suspended all exploration operations since the disaster, NBC News reports.
LADbible has contacted OceanGate for comment.
Topics: Titan Submersible, Titanic, Money, Crime, US News, News
Britt Jones