The CEO of the company which operated the doomed Titan submersible dismissed safety warnings about the craft as “baseless cries” and a “personal insult.”
In a series of e-mails reviewed by BBC, Rob McCallum, a consultant for OceanGate, told company chief Stockton Rush he was putting the lives of his clients at risk by not having his submersible certified by outside third parties.
The Titan suffered a “catastrophic implosion” while descending to the wreckage of the Titanic, resulting in the death of Rush and four other passengers. Wreckage of the craft was discovered on Thursday.
“I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic,” McCallum wrote to to Rush in March 2018. “In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: ‘She is unsinkable.’”
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“I implore you to take every care in your testing and sea trials and to be very, very conservative,” he said in another missive. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”
McCallum told the British news agency that he had repeatedly voiced these concerns with the company. The Titan vessel was never classed or certified by any outside agency. Rush, however, wouldn’t listen.
“We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often,” he shot back to McCallum. “I take this as a serious personal insult.”
