Titanic Missing Submersible Updates

MacMadame

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The point I was trying to make is that it's super easy to criticize these five people after their demise—and some of the tiktoks I've seen are really gross—but this same sub made several successful trips to the Titanic before. The disclaimer reads as standard legalize to me.
The whistleblower said that every time it went down, it got weaker and there was a greater chance it would implode.
 

puglover

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BittyBug

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New Yorker article that exposes the Titan / OceanGate as even more reckless than previously described and imagined.


I hope that the relatives of those who perished are able to sue the pants off of the company and its board, despite the waivers.
 

Barbara Manatee

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Wow -

By the time that OceanGate finally began diving to the Titanic, in 2021, it had refined its pitch to its “mission specialists.” The days of insinuating that Titan was safe had ended. Now Rush portrayed the submersible as existing at the very fringe of what was physically possible. Clients signed waivers and were informed that the submersible was experimental and unclassed. But the framing was that this was how pioneering exploration is done.

“We were all told—intimately informed—that this was a dangerous mission that could result in death,” an OceanGate “mission specialist” told Fox News last week. “We were versed in how the sub operated. We were versed in various protocols. But there’s a limit . . . it’s not a safe operation, inherently. And that’s part of research and development and exploration.” He went on, “If the Wright brothers had crashed on their first flight, they would have still left the bonds of Earth.”
Rush managed to turn the obvious disregard for safety into a feature not a bug, and convince people they were heroes instead of fools for going along with it. Incredible.
 

Cachoo

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Wow -


Rush managed to turn the obvious disregard for safety into a feature not a bug, and convince people they were heroes instead of fools for going along with it. Incredible.
Just shaking my head reading "The New Yorker" article---one problem is that Stockton Rush was from generational wealth and he could afford to squash any dissent with endless threats, lawsuits and harassment. And the whistle blower, Lochridge, had no protection. But this paragraph absolutely floored me. The exchange happened soon after Lochridge, the pilot, left the company:

Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of finance and administration whether she’d like to take over as chief submersible pilot. “It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting,” she told me. She added that several of the engineers were in their late teens and early twenties, and were at one point being paid fifteen dollars an hour. Without Lochridge around, “I could not work for Stockton,” she said. “I did not trust him.” As soon as she was able to line up a new job, she quit.
 

Barbara Manatee

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It seems to me that the families can reasonably argue that as grim as it was, the waiver still didn't adequately describe the risks.
 

MacMadame

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It seems to me that the families can reasonably argue that as grim as it was, the waiver still didn't adequately describe the risks.
I went to a seminar at Governing Council about Insurance and Risk once and they said those waivers aren't legally binding. (But you should still get them as they can deter lawsuits.)

Also, waivers don't protect a company from negligence. No matter what they say.
 

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