When the Titan submersible made its fateful dive into the North Atlantic Ocean on Sunday, it also plunged into the murkily regulated waters of deep-sea exploration.
It is a space on the high seas where laws and conventions can be sidestepped by risk-taking entrepreneurs and wealthy tourists who help fund their dreams.
“We’re at a point in submersible operations in deep water that’s kind of akin to where aviation was in the early 20th century,” said Campbell University history professor Salvatore Mercogliano, who specializes in maritime history and policy.
Photo: AP
“Aviation was in its infancy — and it took accidents for decisions to be made to be put into laws,” Mercogliano said. “There’ll be a time when you won’t think twice about getting on a submersible and going down 13,000 feet [3,962m]. But we’re not there yet.”
Thursday’s announcement by the US Coast Guard that the Titan had imploded near the Titanic shipwreck, killing all five people onboard, has drawn attention to how these expeditions are regulated.
Mercogliano said such operations are scrutinized less than the companies that launch people into space. In the Titan’s case, that is partly because it operated in international waters, far from the reach of many laws of the US or other nations.
The Titan was not registered as a US vessel or with international agencies that regulate safety, Mercogliano said, adding that it was also not classified by a maritime industry group that sets standards on matters such as hull construction.
The OceanGate chief executive officer Stockton Rush, who died on Titan, had said he did not want to be bogged down by such standards.
“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” Rush wrote in a blog post on his company’s Web site.
The Titan was a small vessel that was launched from another ship, Canadian icebreaker the Polar Prince, a setup that Mercogliano likened to pulling a boat on a trailer, in terms of regulatory purposes.
“The highway patrol has jurisdiction over the car and over the trailer, but not over the boat,” he said. “The boat is cargo.”
Experts have said wrongful death and negligence lawsuits are likely in the Titan case — and they could be successful.
However, legal action could face challenges, including waivers signed by the Titan passengers that warned of the myriad ways they could die.
Mike Reiss, a writer for The Simpsons television show who went on a Titanic expedition with OceanGate last year, said that his waiver said he would be “subject to extreme pressure. And any failure of the vessel could cause severe injury or death.”
“I will be exposed to risks associated with high-pressure gases, pure oxygen, high-voltage systems which could lead to injury, disability and death,” Reiss said on Thursday, going by memory. “If I am injured, I may not receive immediate medical attention.”
Thomas Schoenbaum, a University of Washington law professor and author of the book Admiralty and Maritime Law, said such documents could be upheld in court if they are worded well.
“If those waivers are good, and I imagine they probably are because a lawyer probably drafted them, [families] may not be able to recover damages,” he said.
However, OceanGate could still face repercussions under the US Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, Schoenbaum said.
However, it would depend on which arm of OceanGate owned the Titan submersible. Rush told the Associated Press in 2021 that it was a US company.
However, Schoenbaum said OceanGate Expeditions, which led dives to the Titanic, was based in the Bahamas.
The Bahamas subsidiary has the potential to circumvent US law, but courts have at times “pierced the corporate veil” and OceanGate could be found liable, Schoenbaum said.
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