An engineer who worked on the ill-fated submersible that imploded on its way down to the wreck of the Titanic said he was pressured to put a substandard machine below the surface.
Tony Nissen, lead engineer for the Titan submersible, said that a few years before the final, fatal voyage, he told the company’s founder “I’m not not getting in it.”
The Titan was a submersible craft owned by a company called OceanGate. It famously offered the chance for five people to go deep below the surface of the North Atlantic to view the wreck of the doomed ship Titanic, which sank in 1912. In June of 2023, the craft imploded from the incredible pressure under water, killing all five people aboard. OceanGate co-founder Stockton Rush was among the dead.
Engineer Nissen’s testimony was the first offered at what will likely be a two-week-long series of hearings before the U.S. Coast Guard to get to the bottom of the tragic voyage. He said that Rush was a hard boss to work for, and a man who prioritized costs and deadlines at the expense of crew and passenger safety. Nissen said he and Rush would argue nearly every day, though Nissen kept this out of view of other staff. Most people, Nissen said, would “eventually back down to Stockton.”
In 2018, Nissen said, a lightning bolt hit the Titan and he was worried this may have damaged the hull, but that Rush pressured the crew to get the submersible in the water anyway. According to Nissen, he refused point blank to drive the submersible ten years before the tragedy because he was not convinced the other operators were up to the task. Nissen even prevented an early mission to the Titanic because the Titan wasn’t “working like we thought it would.” That cost him his job in 2019.
Staff from the Coast Guard at the hearing pointed to poor storage protocols that may have degraded the craft’s integrity. They said Titan had been stored for seven months out in the elements from 2022 to 2023. After that, no third-party evaluators were called in to examine the hull, they claimed.
After the 2023 fatal implosion, OceanGate stopped operating as a company. The organization’s former director of finance and human resources, Bonnie Carl, told the committee she knew about the safety problems, and so did the company’s director of operations.
