An ex-employee of OceanGate has revealed the ‘first red flag’ she noticed about the safety of the doomed Titan submersible.
The disaster of the sub occurred just over a year ago in June 2023 when five people boarded to travel down to visit the Titanic wreck.
The vessel was carrying OceanGate CEO Stockton rush, British explorer Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman.
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They had journeyed down thousands of feet when the sub suddenly lost contact with its mother ship.
A frantic search began until it was confirmed by the US Coast Guard that all five passengers had died due to a ‘catastrophic implosion’.
The US Coast Guard is now conducting a hearing to ‘uncover the facts surrounding the incident and develop recommendations to prevent similar tragedies in the future’.
After the first photo of the sub taken after the implosion was released, a former employee has now spoken out over the alleged safety concerns she had before the mission.
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Bonnie Carl joined OceanGate as a human resources and finance director.
She told the hearing that she was aware of a waiver people were required to sign before going on the sub, but claims she ‘never saw anyone sign anything’ as her job to get the money from customers was early on in the process.
Sky News reports her saying: “When I was taking money, we hadn’t even finished building the Titan.”
Not only was she a finance and human resources director, but she was also a 'pilot in training' – so she had conducted a dozen domestic dives in the vessel.
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Carl alleged that there were ‘a couple of things that gave me pause’ regarding the sub’s safety.
The ex-employee alleged the ‘first red flag’ was engineering director Tony Nissen not letting her see paperwork for the sub’s acrylic dome.
Carl further claimed how an O ring groove on the Titan’s titanium also looked ‘odd’ to her.
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With her experience as a scuba diver, she said that her questions about this spot weren’t ‘satisfactorily answered’.
In a later safety meeting, Carl claimed the paperwork kept from her revealed the dome was rated to be capable of reaching a depth of 1,300 meters.
Obviously, this is much, much less than what’s needed to reach the Titanic's wreck.
However, she claims this was why Nissen ‘didn’t want us to see it’.
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Carl further said that she left the company in 2018 as OceanGate was not a place she ‘wanted to work if that was their attitude to safety’.
“I didn’t want to work for that company.” she added.