The public hearings are scheduled to start September 16 and last two weeks.
Thanks for that, @PastTense .
I haven’t been following the upcoming Titan submersible case. The public hearing phase of the USCG inquiry will start on 16 September in North Charleston, South Carolina which is along the state’s Atlantic coastline in the middle of its coastline. That is a little north (along the coast) of Beaufort and Hilton Head Island (which are near Savannah GA), and a fair distance south of Myrtle Beach.
Here is a USCG press release on it ➜ https://www.news.uscg.mil/Press-Releases/Article/3854599/us-coast-guard-to-convene-public-hearing-into-the-loss-of-titan-submersible ⇦ titled, U.S. Coast Guard to convene public hearing into the loss of Titan submersible.
The hearing’s location is Charleston County Council Chambers, located at 4045 Bridge View Drive, North Charleston, South Carolina. USCG says there will be live-streaming, with details to be released as the date nears.
And,
The formal hearing is scheduled to convene daily at 8:30 a.m. EDT on the following dates:
Monday, Sept. 16, 2024
Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024
Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024
Friday, Sept. 20, 2024
Monday, Sept. 23, 2024
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024
Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024
Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024
Friday, Sept. 27, 2024 (if necessary)
The formal hearing was convened by Vice Adm. Peter W. Gautier, deputy commandant for operations. An MBI (Marine Board of Investigation) is the highest level of investigation in the Coast Guard.
Hearings have started; live at:
David Lockridge is testifying. He worked on the submersible and tried to blow the whistle on it, but got muzzled by a threat of litigation.
He says that there were literally holes in the lamination that were revealed by shining a torch on it.
So Rush fixed it - by spraying truck box lining on the holes.
I’ve concluded Rush wasn’t just grossly incompetent. He was evil.
*jury-rigged
Yes, that leapt out to me as well.
They haven’t even started a trial yet.
I find it hard to accept that Rush was the only OceanGate employee who knew about the truck bed liner, or the cuts and delaminations in the hull. Besides of course, Lochridge.
Some video of the wreckage:
Scott Manley (not a sub expert but generally a smart and thoughtful guy) speculates that the failure started at the forward ring section where the carbon fiber meets the titanium. The two materials have a different modulus of compression–that is, one shrinks more under a given amount of pressure–and this mismatch initiated the failure.
Yeah, brutal. In a mere 20 milliseconds, the OceanGate Titan and all within it imploded under that tremendous pressure of 375-400 atmospheres (almost 3 tons per square inch) at the Titanic‘s depth on the floor.
In the CNN article link below, Lochridge said on Tuesday that the tragedy could have been prevented if US safety authorities had investigated his complaints.
The thing is, regulatory inspectors try to sniff out flaws and non-compliances. But IME, mostly as an engineer in medical devices but some years in regulatory and FDA inspections in RA/QA, Regulatory Affairs and Quality Assurance — during audits and inspections the inspectors can be guided away from those flawed areas and encouraged to look at the areas that are solid. I’ve seen it in audits. IOW it’s the employees who frequently know where the flaws and non-compliances are in their products and processes.
Like Lochridge and, I suspect, some others.
Magiver and I speculated on just this point of failure in July of last year. My takeaway (to avoid the wall of text I posted at the time):
“Rigidly joining unlike materials at a critical interface will bite you in the ass. Find another way if you can, test the shit out of it if you can’t, and expect it to fail anyway.”
It is not at all shocking to me that they didn’t, and it did.
Both are correct.
It does sound like a Trump-style complaint.
I watched Manley’s analysis last night. I’m hoping, as he does, the simulation guys will redo their work assuming a forward ring failure instead of the mid-cylinder failure point they’d assumed was the weakest point.
A CNN story about the David Lochridge testimony was posted just a few posts up. If anyone should find it more convenient, here’s a short CBC video providing a cogent and concise analysis. Bottom line: haste, arrogance, cost-cutting, and flawed engineering made the disaster all but inevitable.
The video is only 12 minutes long but is well worth watching for a quick summary of the whole story. Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush fired Lochridge after he started raising safety concerns.
In a report I heard yesterday Lockridge said he went to the Coast Guard and OSHA but they told him they had too many investigations on their plate already to look into his information. After he was sued by Oceangate neither agency offered whistleblower protections so he went silent.
I’d believe that if he wasn’t on board. Just grossly incompetent imho.
I agree. He’s guilty of incompetence and magical thinking.
Rush was really a “reality is what I say it is” type narcissist.
@Northern_Piper has it right—he was straight-up evil, as evidenced by the way he ran his business and harassed and threatened his employees. Do you think that just because he was also incompetent and stupid enough to set foot in his own sub, ensuring he got what he deserved, he was not actually evil? Believe the testimonies.
A point I am very fond of making: evil doesn’t mean smart. IMHO, more often than not, it actually means so incredibly stupid that rational actors will make the paradoxical assumption that the evil dimwit must be some kind of secret genius because surely no one could be that stupid.
But it turns out they can. And here we have exhibit 137,238. See also SBF.