Suleman and Shahzada Dawood.
Courtesy: Dawood Family
The OceanGate Expeditions submersible that went missing with five people aboard while attempting to visit the location of the Titanic wreckage has only 41 hours or less of oxygen left, U.S. Coast Guard officials said Tuesday.
Also Tuesday, federal court filings from a 2018 lawsuit got here to light, revealing that a then-OceanGate director warned that the corporate’s submersible posed potential “extreme danger” to passengers since it had not been properly tested to be used at very low water depths.
Rescuers are searching an area of ocean that’s “larger than the state of Connecticut” for the Titan submersible, Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick said at a news briefing Tuesday.
But there have been “no results” to date, he said.
“Search and rescue crews are working across the clock to search out the submersible and crew,” said Frederick, who called it a “very complex search.”
The submersible went missing Sunday, lower than two hours into its dive about 900 nautical miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, is on board the vessel.
Also aboard are billionaire Hamish Harding, owner of Motion Aviation; Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48; and his 19-year-old son Suleman. The fifth person is a crew member of the vessel.
OceanGate began offering trips on the submersible, whose passengers pay $250,000 apiece, in 2021.
“That is your likelihood to step outside of on a regular basis life and discover something truly extraordinary,” the corporate said on its website promoting the trips.
In a “CBS Sunday Morning” segment in November about his trip on the submersible, correspondent David Pogue read out loud the text of a waiver he signed for the tour.
“An experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and will lead to physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death,” Pogue read.
2018 lawsuit
Court filings from a 2018 lawsuit between OceanGate and its former director of marine operations, David Lochridge, show that he had “disagreed with OceanGate’s position to dive the submersible with none non-destructive testing to prove its integrity.”
Lochridge, in a court filing first reported by The Recent Republic, said the failure to perform that testing would “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.”
“Lochridge first expressed verbal concerns over the protection and quality control issues regarding the Titan to OceanGate executive management,” Lochridge’s court filing said. “These verbal communications were ignored.”
The filing said that Lochridge had been denied access to information concerning the vessel’s viewport — the section where passengers could look out from the submersible — which revealed that it “was only built to certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers right down to depths of 4,000 meters.”
“Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters on account of the experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (‘PVHO’) standards,” the filing said.
FILE – Submersible pilot Randy Holt, right, communicates with the support boat as he and Stockton Rush, left, CEO and Co-Founding father of OceanGate, dive in the corporate’s submersible, “Antipodes,” about three miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., June 28, 2013.
Wilfredo Lee | AP Photo
“OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to construct a viewport that may meet the required depth of 4,000 meters,” the filing said. “The paying passengers wouldn’t bear in mind, and wouldn’t learn, of this experimental design, the shortage of non-destructive testing of the hull, or that hazardous flammable
materials were getting used throughout the submersible.”
OceanGate had sued Lochridge and his wife in Washington state court in June 2018, alleging breach of contract, fraud and other claims that the corporate said arose from him discussing OceanGate’s confidential information with at the very least two other people, in addition to representatives of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in purported violation of a nondisclosure agreement.
Lochridge then filed a counterclaim against OceanGate in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
The case was settled in late 2018.
OceanGate didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment concerning the lawsuit. A spokesman for the lawyer who had represented OceanGate within the Lochridge case declined to comment.
The Titanic sunk on its maiden voyage from England to Recent York City on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg. Greater than 1,500 people died within the disaster.
The wreckage of the ship was not found until 1985 off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. It sits about 13,000 feet under the Atlantic Ocean.
That is breaking news. Check back for updates.
