Culture on My Mind
SUBSAFE
July 24, 2023

On June 18, 2023, the submersible Titan imploded during an excursion to the wreck of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean. The submersible was owned and operated by OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, and the incident claimed the lives of Rush, French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani-British billionaire Shahzada Dawood, and Dawood’s son Suleman.

I watched as the internet exploded in memes and mockery over this event. I get the reasoning behind it: According to the 2022 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse, nearly half of the world’s wealth – 47.8%, or 221.7 trillion in US dollars – is controlled by 1.2% of the world’s population. Over half of the world’s population has a wealth of less than $10,000, and one-third of the population lives in the $10,000-$100,000 range. 

This year, Forbes reported that there are 2,640 billionaires on the planet. They are collectively worth $12.2 trillion. That’s 2.6% of the world’s wealth controlled by a tiny fraction of the world’s population, and they are concentrated in the United States, China, India, and Germany.

I’m not here today to adjudicate that. It’s merely the motive behind the reaction of the masses as one billionaire’s hubris killed four other people. And while it’s possible that those four passengers may have known about the submersible’s shortcomings, it’s not likely in my opinion.

I look at skydiving, scuba diving, bungee jumping, rollercoasters, and other such thrill-seeking experiences that people enjoy. Most of them are taken with the assumption that some higher authority has oversight… that the attraction has a safety record and someone would have shut them down if it wasn’t safe to an acceptable degree of risk.

OceanGate has been transporting paying customers on submersible trips since 2010, including several trips to other shipwrecks. On its face, 13 years without significant incidents is a pretty good track record. Most people in search of a thrill-seeking experience would stop looking for problems at that point and sign the requisite waivers.

I don’t engage in the internet’s mockery of the Titan implosion because I can reasonably assume that those four passengers made the same risk calculations. But what came out after the Titan implosion is what really bothered me as a former submariner. 

In a 2019 Smithsonian Magazine article, Rush was referred to as a “daredevil inventor” who believed that the U.S. Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 “needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation”. He later admitted that he broke rules with “logic and good engineering” behind those decisions. He described safety as a “pure waste” and suggested that people should do nothing in life if they want to remain safe.

The OceanGate submersible had multiple engineering issues which Rush ignored based on faulty assumptions and questionable engineering experience. Rush also ignored dissenting opinions from David Lochridge and Rob McCallum, even to the point of firing dissenters and pursuing legal action against them.

But, most importantly to what I want to discuss here, he openly stated in a now deleted video meeting with Teledyne Marine that he bucked the trend of hiring submarine veterans – “50-year-old white guys” – because he wanted his team to be younger and more inspirational.

The thing is that the talent that he kicked aside because he wanted to “make expeditions to the Titanic more enjoyable for his customers” could have potentially saved those customers on June 18, 2023. Submarine veterans (like me) know about the history of the USS Thresher and the quality assurance program that was developed as a result.

On April 10, 1963, the USS Thresher (SSN-593) was lost at sea with all hands. She was a Permit-class nuclear submarine, the fastest and quietest of the day, and designed to hunt and kill Soviet submarines during the Cold War. Thresher was launched in 1960 and conducted her sea trials over the next couple of years to thoroughly evaluate her new and complex technological systems. After a series of operations, she entered Portsmouth Shipyard in July 1962 for a post-shakedown availability to examine and repair systems, and as typical for first-of-class boats, the availability took longer than expected. Thresher was finally certified for sea and undocked on April 8, 1963.

The crew began post-overhaul sea trials the next day, and everything seemed to be okay until the deep-dive tests on April 10th. Thresher slowly dove deeper while making circles under her surface support ship, Skylark, pausing every 100 feet of depth to perform a shipwide integrity check. As the submarine neared test depth, Skylark received a garbled communication indicating “…minor difficulties, have positive up angle, attempting to blow”.

That “blow” would be an emergency blow of the main ballast tanks, which means rapidly filling the large tanks with high-pressure air and making the ship overwhelmingly positively buoyant. You’ve probably seen the stock footage in movies and television, particularly during The Hunt for Red October.

There was one more even more garbled message from the deep and Skylark‘s crew knew that something was wrong. An extensive search was conducted and Thresher‘s families were notified that night. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George W. Anderson Jr. held a press conference to announce that the submarine was lost with all hands.

After an investigation, the root cause of the disaster was determined to be a failure of the saltwater piping system. Specifically, there was a joint that relied on silver brazing instead of welding, and that failure would have potentially shorted out an electrical panel, shut down the reactor, and caused a loss of propulsion. There was also some concern over excessive moisture in the high-pressure air system which would have frozen during an emergency blow and plugged up the piping. The Navy made several modifications to systems to prevent these failures in the future. 

They also instituted the Submarine Safety Program, better known as SUBSAFE, which is a quality assurance program specifically designed to provide maximum reasonable assurance that submarine hulls will remain watertight and can recover from unanticipated flooding. The program’s scope includes every system exposed to sea pressure or critical to recovery during a flood. Any work on those systems is tightly controlled to ensure that materials, assembly, maintenance, and testing are perfect, including certifications with traceable quality evidence from point of manufacture to point of installation.

The track record speaks for itself: From 1915 to 1963, the United States Navy lost 16 submarines through non-combat-related causes. After SUBSAFE was introduced in 1963, the only submarine lost in similar causes was the USS Scorpion (SSN-589), and she was not SUBSAFE certified.

It’s an expensive program, but the cost of failure is much higher, and it’s a program that could have prevented the Titan disaster had some “50-year-old white guys” been consulted. SUBSAFE is embedded in the DNA of pretty much anyone who has earned a set of submarine dolphins. The regulations are written in blood.

The story of Stockton Rush and the Titan should serve as a cautionary tale. Safety and engineering may not be sexy and edgy, but it is a necessary part of pushing the limits of knowledge and understanding. The ocean’s depths are perhaps the largest unexplored frontier on Earth, and while I personally think that we should leave the Titanic graveyard alone, we should definitely continue to research the sea. 

But we should never willingly throw away experience and wisdom in the process, otherwise, we invite hubris, ignorance, and ultimately disaster.

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Culture on My Mind is inspired by the weekly Can’t Let It Go segment on the NPR Politics Podcast where each host brings one thing to the table that they just can’t stop thinking about.

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