OceanGate employees are set to testify at a hearing about the doomed Titan submersible more than a year after it imploded in the North Atlantic.
The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation released the schedule and witness list for the hearing, which will start on September 16 in North Charleston, South Carolina. It is expected to last two weeks.
“It aims to uncover the facts surrounding the incident and develop recommendations to prevent similar tragedies in the future,” the press release on Friday said of the hearing.
The witness list includes ex-OceanGate staff members like Tony Nissen, its engineering director, Bonnie Carl, and David Lochridge, its operations director.
The entire hearing will be live-streamed on the Coast Guard’s YouTube channel, per the release.
The Titan submersible set off on June 18, 2023, to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, nearly 13,000 feet underwater.
But less than two hours after the dive started, it went off the radar, sparking a frantic search and rescue operation.
The US Coast Guard and OceanGate announced on June 22 that debris found on the sea bed confirmed that the submersible had imploded and that the five men on board were dead.
The victims were British billionaire Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani multimillionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, and the former French navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who had previously complained about how strict regulations held back the marine exploration industry even though it was “obscenely safe,” was also one of the victims of the implosion.
After the tragedy, legal experts told BI that OceanGate was likely protected from future lawsuits because passengers on the missing sub signed a waiver that mentioned the risk of death several times.
But in August, Nargeolet’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against OceanGate and Rush’s estate for over $50 million, saying the implosion resulted from “carelessness, recklessness and negligence” by the company.
Representatives of the Coast Guard didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside business hours.
