Blame is the currency of the weak-kneed and the faint-hearted.
I’m hearing so much of this “I-told-you-so” and “I-knew-it” kind of reactions to the tragedy that bookended the saga of the Ocean Gate minisub TITAN.
All five of its crew and passengers died in what the US Navy described as a “catastrophic implosion” that may have occurred not too long after the Titan lost communication with its mother ship on Sunday, June 18.
More clues are being gathered as we speak tending to suggest that the moment this communication failed was, in fact, THE moment of the implosion.
If it’s any consolation, an implosion 12,500 feet deep in the ocean is such a powerful instantaneous shockwave event none of the passengers would have felt anything, certainly not pain, when they died.
In earlier dives, other submersible crews would strap on a styrofoam bucket (I suppose the size of your KFC chicken bucket) to their minisub’s external frame before descending to depths where the water pressure is as much as 380 times greater than on the surface.
When they’re back on top, that bucket would have shrunk to the size of a thimble after all the air had been squeezed out of its porous material.
So there’s no possibility of recovering any human remains from 12,500 feet deep. Flesh would simply disintegrate like jell-o and perhaps fittingly so for the Titanic wrecksite to become the final resting place of five curious people obsessed by her lure.
The Titan had not been certified by state or third-party institutions to be capable of safely doing what it attempted to do—to bring “tourists” on a viewing adventure of the world’s most popular shipwreck.
And this is the arena where everybody seem to want to play the blame game.
To be sure, this wasn’t the Titan’s maiden dive, nor the Titan the only submersible of its kind.
The Titan was Ocean Gate Adventures’ equivalent of Jeff Bezo’s SpaceX rocketship “Inspiration 4” that safely returned from an “edge of space orbit” with a payload that included 4 civilian astro-tourists.
When those 4 astro-tourists enlisted to be catapulted by rocketship to space, they signed a waiver similar to what the 3 civilians aboard the Titan signed.
In it, they acknowledged the potential of death—the word was used expressly three times—and, thus, knowingly pre-absolved the companies organizing these extreme (and extremely expensive) adventure tours from liability.
I think these waivers can stand, even against the argument that what they gave was not “informed consent.” You can’t expect pure novices to understand anything much about technology this sophisticated. There certainly exists no empirical standard by which a judge can evaluate how intelligent or dumb one is when he decided go trust any science beyond his grasp.
So all that the court will concern itself with is whether that consent was obtained by coercion or under duress. Of course, clearly it was not. You don’t willingly fork over $250,000 (about P14,500,000) to book a “joyride” under duress.
I think this is why so much of the negative p-r flak is being directed at Ocean Gate co-founder Stockton Rush, an American.
He was one of the 5 fatalities in this tragic accident. Critics of the Monday morning quarterbacking kind rake him over the coals for such trivial observations as why the Titan was being operated using a gaming console control stick—like some cheap videogame.
They criticize his use of an untested –or at least uncertified—carbon fiber-titanium composite material for the submersible’s pressure chamber: was it too brittle, wasn’t it too light, etc.
In earlier interviews, Rush had sounded too cavalier, even borderline arrogant, shushing all those who criticized his aversion towards third party inputs to his design philosophy. He wanted to push the envelop on materials research and development while keeping production costs down.
That’s actually the Chinese design approach, for example, making a vehicle’s engine out of conventional materials—reliable steel—and trimming the rest of the vehicle in cheap plastic.
Rush had advocated using off-the-shelf components for non-critical parts of the Titan, so that he can pour all the money on developing that titanium pressure nose cone, with its less expensive plexiglass porthole.
It appears that this most expensive component of the submersible was, indeed, one of the first design elements to fail. So even if he had cut corners on the less critical components, this did not appear to have led to the catastrophe.
Not using the most advanced, most cutting-edge materials is not necessarily folly, I believe. It’s an oxymoron that sometimes cheaper materials have an even wider safety margin.
The late great Baguio newsman Manny Salenga illustrated this to us, his media colleagues, during one of those famous mine tours in the 1980s.
Manny Salenga used to handle p-r for Benguet Corporation—and I don’t mind saying here that as p-r guys go, they don’t come any better than Manny Salenga (who was an engineer). Manny, by the way, was also the organizing president of the Baguio chapter of Toastmasters International.
“Underground we still use massive pinewood timber to shore up tunnels, instead of steel beams. It’s not purely a company decision but rather a concession with our miners,” he commentated as he toured us through a typical underground mine tunnel.
He said he himself was perplexed by it all, until he asked an old miner with greying hair to explain why.
“Ti landok ngamin, engineer ket killaat nga matukkol. Daytoy pinewood ket kayo. Agsakang pag dayta, santu ag-ngiritngit, san tu in-innayad nga makil-lo ken agbakug bago matukkol, ikan na ka pay lang ti gundaway mo nga tumaray!”
(When steel fails it breaks instantly. But pine timber is made of pliant wood. It bows, it creaks, it slowly bends and gradually buckles before finally giving way. It gives you an opportunity to still run!)
I couldn’t stop laughing at the explanation but it made perfect sense.
It doesn’t mean, of course, that the mining industry had stayed in the Stone Age and never progressed beyond timber. Most mining tunnels today are lined with reinforced prefabricated concrete sleeves. But these new materials are required to exhibit some margin of torsion tolerance before reaching the point of failure.
In other words, industry pioneers, in conceiving of new materials and technology, always paid homage to the savvy lessons of old technology. There’s no conceptual conflict in marrying old know-how with new, or admixing breakthrough materials with others snatched off-the-shelf. This was Rush’s line of thinking. I don’t really disagree with him.
The tragedy that befell the Titan is certainly regrettable. But I prefer to honor the sacrifice of the 5 passengers and crew in the more positive context that they paid the price none of the rest of us was willing too, or let alone could afford.
You don’t have to do anything heroic to be a hero. You just need to be CONSIDERED one by people who have all the right to think of you as one. The Titan crew went over the edge, into the abyss—maybe against some better scientific judgment. But WHAT ELSE will you do with a deep-dive submersible? Dive, of course.
Ships in the harbor are safe—but that’s NOT what ships were made for.
As for the cynics who see nothing but wrong in all directions, civilization certainly didn’t get this far because of them.*
About the Author
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”
About Images: Some of the images used in the articles are from the posts in Atty. Joel Rodriguez Dizon’s Facebook account, and/or Facebook groups and pages he manages or/and member of.