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The company, whose submersible Titan imploded near the Titanic wreckage last month, killing five people including CEO Stockton Rush, has stripped down its website to a single page, noting it has suspended operations and removed its Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.
The company’s LinkedIn page is no longer accessible—and one of its Instagram pages has been set to private, while the other (focusing on expeditions) has been taken down completely.
Following the ill-fated tragic journey, former employees of OceanGate began to emerge to discuss their previous concerns about the safety of the Titan submersible. Email exchanges showed the firm’s former director of marine operations and chief submersible pilot warning another employee, “That sub is not safe to dive.”
In legal filings related to a 2018 lawsuit against the company, that pilot, David Lochridge, said he had repeatedly warned the submersible was not being built or tested to suitable safety standards, potentially putting paying passengers “milliseconds from implosion.”
Rush, in a separate email chain with an employee who raised concerns, wrote he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market… We have heard the baseless cries of ‘You are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”
The Titan submersible that imploded was one of two seacraft used by OceanGate. The Cyclops 1 was a separate sub that would travel as far as 500 meters deep, far more shallow than the 4,000 attempted by Titan.
