A former operations director for OceanGate, who labeled a doomed experimental submersible unsafe prior to its fatal voyage, testified Tuesday that the tragedy could have been prevented, and that the company bypassed all standard rules.
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00:00I'm the chair of the Coast Guard Marine Board Investigation.
00:07When I was fired, I'm obviously, well, not just concerned for myself and my family, you
00:13know, what are we going to do now, but I didn't want anybody going in that submersible.
00:20I mean, it was dangerous, you know, as I said, the build quality was atrocious.
00:25I had to go up, do presentations all about my experience and my eyes, even at the time,
00:32they were selling me as part of this project for people to come and pay money for future
00:38investment in Titan, the submersible.
00:41Can I say arrogance, thinking they could do this on their own without proper engineering
00:46support?
00:47I mean, proper engineering support from people that have built things that have been subsea,
00:51may not be submersibles, but known products, proper engineers that work for the university.
00:58You have to have the confidence in the equipment to do the job.
01:02It's like every other industry.
01:04If you don't have the confidence in it, you don't do it.
01:06That's it.
01:07And did you have confidence in the way that the Titan was being built at this time?
01:11No confidence whatsoever.
01:13And I was very vocal about that and still am.
01:16Force cutting, bad engineering decisions.
01:21I would say that's the two main things.
01:23The desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could to start making profit.
01:28I knew nothing about the financial side of things, but yeah, there was a big push to
01:35get this done and a lot of steps along the way were missed.
01:40And it was pretty evident, not just to myself, there's no way I was signing off on this.
01:46I knew during 2017 when all these materials came in, there's no way at that point I was
01:51signing off on this.
01:53I, aside from Titan, I, as I said, I had Antipodes, I had Cyclops, I had the maintenance, the
02:01daily operations of that.
02:03My team, as it was going, was getting thinner and thinner.
02:06People were dropping away from Ocean Gate, their turnover was incredible.
02:09They were booked, as far as I know, they were booked out for that summer.
02:17So how that's feasible, having a sub like that, a build quality like that, and then
02:25for these people that are running this organization to think it's okay to put these people at risk.