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HOW SERIOUS ARE WE ABOUT SAFETY, REALLY?

“With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide.

With integrity, you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt.”

~ Zig Ziglar

“Safety is our number one priority,” was something Stockton Rush said a lot. The founder and CEO of submersible company OceanGate took an unorthodox approach to the design of the company’s underwater vehicles. As a result, the safety of their vehicles often came up in interviews.

“Safety is our number one priority,” Rush wrote in a 2018 press release announcing the launch ofTitan, a submersible designed to explore the wreck of theTitanic. “We believe real-time health monitoring should be standard safety equipment on all manned submersibles.”

Titan’s real-time monitoring system was designed to check the condition of its hull during deep dives, when it would be subjected to extremely high pressures. With nine acoustic sensors and 18 strain gauges, the monitoring system would keep tabs on the cylindrical carbon-fibre hull and its interface with the titanium domes on each end. The intention was that the sensors would give the pilot sufficient advance warning of a potential problem to allow a safe return to the surface before a catastrophic failure.

The problem was that the safety system Rush was describing was, in fact, no safety system at all. Yes, the analysis that his system conducted would detect when a component was about to fail – it was designed to do that during hull testing as part of the design process. What itwasn’t designed to do was provide operational feedback, because, in practice, the time between a warning and failure of the hull was highly likely to be far too short to allow resurfacing in time.

Nevertheless, Rush, who preferred to label the cutting of corners asinnovation, had made the decision to sidestep the independent testing usually imposed on new submersible designs. This was despite the fact thatTitan used materials and a design philosophy that were quite different from any previous submersible used to dive four kilometres deep. Rush managed to spin the fact that his sub required a hull warning system to sound like it was safer and more advanced than others, when clearly the opposite was true.

Ironically, it would seem that “Safety is our number one priority” were Stockton Rush’s famous last words. In June 2023, the world learnt thatTitan had very likely suffered a violent and cataclysmic implosion that killed Rush and his four passengers in milliseconds.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, evidence of behaviours in stark contrast to Rush’s verbalised commitment to safety would come to light. Rush had been incredibly strategic in ensuring he was legally protected, by operating outside US jurisdiction. He had intentionally ignored industry standards – and the laws of physics – in the name of minimising costs masquerading as innovation. In one almost comic example, OceanGate had apparently used a Sony PlayStation 3 controller to operate the submersible. Rush had allegedly disregarded advice and fired people, including experts in the field of submersibles, who had raised or reported safety concerns.

Other favourite sayings of Rush came to light after the much-publicised loss ofTitan, which highlight attitudes very much at odds with the “Safety is our number one priority” mantra. These include such comments as, “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” and that he’d “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation,” and the particularly horrifying, “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘You are going to kill someone!’ way too often.”

The tale of Stockton Rush, OceanGate and theTitan is a particularly grim example of how proclaiming safety as the top priority and enacting that commitment can be two entirely different things.

Similar discrepancies between a publicly voiced commitment to safety and the demonstrated behaviours, actions, and decisions have underscored many disasters throughout history.

Few will forget the harrowing images of the tsunami that swept across the Japanese region of Tōhoku and the city of Sendai following a massive earthquake on March 11, 2011. The disaster triggered subsequent serious damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, including core meltdowns and the release of a large amount of radioactive material into the environment.

An independent investigation report found that the causes of the Daiichi accident had been foreseeable and that the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), had failed to meet basic safety requirements such as risk assessment, preparing for containing collate