Ports could block uncertified vessels after OceanGate disaster, experts claim
The Titan disaster could see ports block operators from setting sail if their submersibles aren’t classified as part of a tightening of rules, industry experts believe.
Experts have questioned the apparent lack of classing over the doomed Titan sub, which suffered a catastrophic implosion killing all five people onboard during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck.
Classing is a standard practice to ensure seafaring vehicles are up to standards, but the tragedy has led to calls for rules governing submersibles operating in international waters to be beefed up.
Guillermo Sohnlein, co-founder of OceanGate Exploration, the parent company of the vessel claimed it is “tricky to navigate” current regulations on submersibles, which he described as “pretty sparse” and “antiquated”.
Will Kohnen, Chair of the US-based Marine Techology Society’s submersible committee, raised safety concerns about the Titan five years ago, saying current rules had created a “loophole” meaning classification of vessels like Titan diving in international waters outside of territorial jurisdiction can be avoided.
“There are 10 submersibles in the world today. They can go 4,000 metres and deeper. They’re all certified and the Titan was an exception,” he told i.
“In fact of all the submersibles that operate in the world, 90 to 95 per cent are all certified. Certainly in the field of deep diving. The Titan was very much an outlier.
“It took five people to 4,000 metres and no one had ever done that.
“I still think part of the answer is if you are not going to certify your submarine you have to paint in 30-metre letters ‘experimental’ on the hul. So it’s full disclosure to the public that this is experimental. You are in your own risk.”
Changing the current rules was a “political issue”, with the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) possibly playing a role in any tightening of current procedures, he suggested.
“I think the solution is: everybody has to leave from some port. And the jurisdictions of where the boat leaves from might say ‘OK, if you don’t certify it and you want to go to the Galapagos, you can’t leave from San Diego. You’re just not getting the permit’. So it’s kind of doing the gatekeeping.
“I’ve presented white papers in Washington to the Coast Guard saying, ‘Look, we need to do something’. There’s rules and regulations for upgrading submersibles in the United States since 1993 and they could be reviewed.”
In 2018, the manned underwater vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society raised concerns to OceanGate’s CEO Stockton Rush that the firm’s “current ‘experimental” approach could result in problems “from minor to catastrophic”.
The society recommended the firm introduce a prototype testing system reviewed by the DNV, the world’s largest classification society, or the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), another leading certification company.
The following year, a blog on OceanGate’s website read: “While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon fibre pressure vesse-s and a real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring system.
“Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.”
Frank Owen, a retired Royal Australian Navy commander and submarine escape and rescue project director, said there was “no legal requirement “ for vessels like the Titan operating in international waters to be certified.
“You might find that in the North Sea the British government requires that anything happening there will be certified, because the government may say that it’s in their search and rescue area, it’s in territorial seas,” he said.
“But when you’re doing dives in the open ocean, and on the high seas, there is no entity that can enforce this.”
Rules could possibly be beefed if countries banned operators working in international waters from sailing from their shores unless they could prove that the vessels are certified, he said.
But Mr Owen, who was part of the project to introduce the Australian Submarine Rescue Vehicle Remora, rejected suggestions certification of an submersible with innovative would take years.
“With Remora, nobody had had a manned, remotely operated vehicle with an articulated skirt that could rotate to 60 degrees. That had bever been done before. ” he said.
“DNV looked at the rules that they use, and other bits, and they put together a package and worked with this to allow 23 weeks from contract to delivery.”
Professor Blair Thornton, an expert in marine autonomy from the University of Southampton, said that it was “important to recognise that certified systems do also fail” with certification of a submersible “not an absolute guarantee”.
“Because the type of vehicles are very few in number, their designs are very different. So a lot of the time the design certification processes will be very unique and bespoke to the particular system that’s being built,” he said.
“Because the system isn’t certified it doesn’t necessarily mean there were fundamental flaws in its design.
“I remember, around 2018, in a conference listening to groups talking about the use of carbon fibres in deep sea pressure housings. And at the time no one had ever thought of this as a possibility.
“My understanding is that the people at OceanGate were working closely with world experts to design and test a system that they believed would be able to cope with these pressures.
“Unfortunately, we now learn that it wasn’t rigorous enough. But whether certification would have guaranteed that something like this would have been avoided is unclear.”
