Bill Price, a retired California businessman, says that while he was a 'crew' member doing a dive in 2021, OceanGate employees shared a few nightmare-inducing analogies with those aboard the vessel.
Apparently, employees have been recorded explaining to customers that should they get crushed by pressure in the ocean, death would be instantaneous. They compared it to 'a Coke can' getting 'smashed with a sledgehammer.'
Mr Price also recalls that another analogy the staff said that an implosion would be like 'an elephant standing on one foot, with 100 more elephants on top of it.'
“In a macabre way,” Mr Price said, “it was reassuring.”
Mr Price had his own nightmare while aboard the vessel when the weights wouldn't drop, and the 'crew' inside had to resort to a cartoonish solution to continue the tour. Apparently, the “drop-weight mechanism” malfunctioned on Price's trip, and Rush, who was aboard this trip, suggested that the best way to fix it was to manually dislodge these beams that were supposed to drop off automatically.
According to a New York Times piece, Rush told everyone aboard that they were going to rock the submersible from the inside. This involved lining up and rushing, as a group, from side to side to create a rocking motion. Luckily for them, that worked, and they were able to drop off the extra, weighted pipes and continue their tour.
“After several rolls, we got momentum going,” Mr Price said. “Then, we heard a clunk, and we all collectively knew one had dropped off. So we continued to do that until the weights were all out.”
“The fact that we went through that, we experienced some worst-case scenarios, and we overcame it, my thinking was, ‘We can do this,’” Mr Price said.
OceanGate has come under fire in recent weeks for ignoring safety concerns and engaging in activities that could potentially injure or kill customers. In the latest report, it has been revealed that of the 90 attempts to reach the depth of the Titanic wreck, the Titan only managed to succeed 13 times, which adds up to a success rate of about 14 per cent.
OceanGate's 'Titan' submarine used new untested engineering, which was 'experimental; Ofer Ketter, president of SubMerge diving company and a submarine expert, has said. "They did not follow any of the known and established procedures for testing and regulation and class that a lot of submersible manufacturers follow. To put it in layman's terms, they experimented with untested and unregulated engineering, and they failed. It was a tragedy."
All five men onboard were killed when the submarine 'Titan' imploded on a voyage to the wreckage of the Titanic on June 18.
