OceanGate hit with $50M wrongful death lawsuit over submersible implosion

SEATTLE (CN) — The family of a French diver who died when the Titan submersible depressurized during a voyage to the Titanic wreckage last year filed a wrongful death lawsuit accusing the company behind the trip of “persistent carelessness, recklessness and negligence” leading to his death.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet, known as “Mr. Titanic” for his prolific knowledge of the Titanic shipwreck site, was hired to act as a navigator for OceanGate, the company that launched the experimental deep-sea submersible on its fatal dive to the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean in June 2023. He was among the five people aboard the vessel that day who died when the sub depressurized.

“Nargeolet may have died doing what he loved to do, but his death — and the deaths of the other Titan crew members — was wrongful,” the plaintiffs' say in the lawsuit.

Nargeolet had participated in 37 dives to the site, the most of any diver, including the first expedition to the site 1987, his family notes in the lawsuit.

The implosion of the submersible killed Nargeolet, OceanGate founder Richard Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman.

The Titan lost contact with its support ship two hours after plunging into the ocean on June 18, 2023. Over the next four days, the search and rescue mission received extensive worldwide attention as hopes of finding the crew alive slowly dwindled. The wreckage of the sub was found less than 1,000 feet from the bow of the Titanic.

Nargeolet’s estate filed the suit on Tuesday in King County Superior Court in Washington, where OceanGate was headquartered before the company ceased all operations in the aftermath of the implosion.

The family accuses the company and its founder and CEO Rush, who was piloting the Titan when it imploded, of misleading Nargeolet about the safety of the Titan submersible and says experts had warned the founder of its dangers.

“Many of the particulars about the vessel’s flaws and shortcomings were not disclosed and were purposely concealed,” attorneys with the Buzbee Law firm representing the estate said in a statement.

The Titan sub was constructed from carbon fiber, a lightweight material that breaks down over time under pressure, instead of from titanium, which is typically used in modern commercial-manned submersibles, according to the plaintiffs.

The family accuses Rush of portraying an acoustic safety system to detect cracking noises in the carbon fiber as an advanced feature and says it was one that likely informed the crew of the danger they were in without providing aid.

“While the exact cause of failure may never be determined, experts agree that the Titan’s crew would have realized exactly what was happening,” the family writes. “Common sense dictates that the crew were well aware they were going to die, before dying.”

The safety mechanism Rush relied on was designed to drop weights when cracking was detected to bring the Titan back up, which the family says failed.

“The crew may well have heard the carbon fiber’s crackling noise grow more intense as the weight of the water pressed on Titan’s hull,” the family writes. “By experts’ reckoning, they would have continued to descend, in full knowledge of the vessel’s irreversible failures, experiencing terror and mental anguish prior to the Titan ultimately imploding.”

The sub was piloted using a Logitech video game controller that was Bluetooth rather than hardwired.

The family says the sub’s “hip, contemporary, wireless electronics systems, which differed entirely from any previously designed submersible” were reliant on a constant source of power.

In the lawsuit, the family describes Rush as seemingly proud to flout convention and industry standards and says he “actively cultivated an image of himself as a ‘maverick genius’ of the deep-sea diving world.”

Rush asserted that the Titan’s carbon-fiber hull construction was safe and said he was working with Boeing and the University of Washington, which was only true to a limited extent relating to an earlier project by the company, Nargeolet’s family argues in the lawsuit.

This gave Nargeolet, a former commander in the French navy, the “apparent assurance that serious minds and deep pockets were participating alongside Rush and his team,” the family says.

“We are hopeful that through this lawsuit we can get answers for the family as to exactly how this happened, who all were involved, and how those involved could allow this to happen,” Tony Buzbee of the Buzbee Law Firm said in a statement.

The family names OceanGate and Rush's estate as defendants, as well as the company's former director of engineering Tony Nissen, and the companies Hydrospace Group, Janicki Industries and Electroimpact for their role in the design and manufacturing of the Titan. The family requests a jury trial and seeks more than $50 million in damages.

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