The co-founder of the company whose submersible imploded on a voyage to view the wreck of the Titanic defended onetime partner Stockton Rush, who was one of five who died aboard the craft and who many are blaming for ignoring repeated safety warnings.
Film director James Cameron, among others, have slammed Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, in the wake of this week’s tragedy. But Guillermo Söhnlein, who started the company with Rusk in 2009 and left four years later, said much of the criticism is coming from people who don’t have all the facts.
“In this kind of community, there are completely different opinions and views about how to do things, how to design submersibles, how to engineer them, build them, how to operate in the dives,” Söhnlein told U.K.’s Times Radio. “But one thing that’s true of me and the other experts, is none of us were involved in the design, engineering, building, testing or even diving of the subs. So it’s impossible for anyone to really speculate from the outside.”
Cameron, who directed the iconic 1997 movie “Titanic,” said Rush should have known the Titan’s carbon-fiber would ultimately be insufficient to handle the pressure of the deep sea.
“You don’t use composites for vessels that are seeing external pressure,” Cameron said. “They’re great for internal pressure vessels like scuba tanks, for example, but they’re terrible for external pressure. … They fail over time, each dive adds more and more microscopic damage. So, yes, they operated the sub safely at [the] Titanic [wreck site] last year and the year before, but it was only a matter of time before it caught up with them.”
The submersible lost contact with the surface early Sunday, sparking an international rescue effort. But hopes dimmed as experts said oxygen aboard the craft was running out and finding and recovering it from a depth of 12,500 feet could prove nearly impossible. Then, on Thursday an underwater remotely operated vehicle spotted wreckage of the submersible, indicating it had imploded under the 6,000-pounds-per-square-inch pressure of the North Atlantic depths.
Söhnlein insisted that his former partner was committed to safety.
“I was involved in the early phases of the overall development program during our predecessor subs to Titan, and I know from firsthand experience that we were extremely committed to safety and risk mitigation was a key part of the company culture,” he said.
“We were extremely committed to safety and risk mitigation was a clear part of company culture.”
OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein says regulation is ‘sparse’ for submersibles going as deep in the ocean as the Titan did. @gsohnlein | @ChloeTilley pic.twitter.com/VgAq9MHSqd
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) June 23, 2023
Meanwhile, Samad Dawood, the brother of Shahzada Dawood and uncle of Suleman Dawood, who both died in the incident, told ABC News their deaths have left his family in anguish.
“This is beyond what you could ever imagine in terms of the kind of hardships and struggle that we’ve had. I think what we’ve seen is enormous tragedy and devastation and a lot of emotions. Obviously we were hoping to hear some good news about the rescue and them coming back. It was heartbreaking to find out that that’s not the case.”
“We’re deeply grateful for all the support and the love and the effort that the people have made, working tireless nights being optimistic in giving a sense of hope, giving that transparency to us,” he continued. “But obviously we were devastated as a family … that we couldn’t get them back safe.”
