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MAINE, USA: The 2023 Titan submersible disaster that killed five people could have been prevented, the US Coast Guard said Tuesday, but OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush ignored safety warnings, design flaws and crucial oversight that could have resulted in criminal charges — had he survived.

The Titan suffered a catastrophic implosion as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic, sparking a dayslong search in the North Atlantic off Canada that grabbed international headlines. The Coast Guard convened its highest level of investigation in the aftermath, and the disaster has led to lawsuits and calls for tighter regulation of the developing private deep sea expedition industry.

The Titan was owned by OceanGate, a private company based in Washington state. The Coast Guard report found the company’s safety procedures were “critically flawed” and cited “glaring disparities” between safety protocols and actual practices.

Preventing the next Titan disaster

Jason Neubauer, with the Marine Board of Investigation, said that the findings will help prevent future tragedies.

“There is a need for stronger oversight and clear options for operators who are exploring new
concepts outside of the existing regulatory framework,” he said in a statement.

OceanGate suspended operations in July 2023. A spokesperson for the company said it has been wound down and was fully cooperating with the investigation.

“We again offer our deepest condolences to the families of those who died on June 18, 2023, and to all those impacted by the tragedy,” said the spokesperson, Christian Hammond.

Coast Guard report describes ‘red flags’ at OceanGate

Throughout the report, which spans more than 300 pages, investigators repeatedly point to OceanGate’s culture of downplaying, ignoring and even falsifying key safety information to improve its reputation and evade scrutiny from regulators. OceanGate ignored “red flags” and had a “toxic workplace culture,” while its mission was hindered by lack of domestic and international framework for submersible operations, the report says.

Numerous OceanGate employees have come forward in the two years since the implosion to support those claims. The report says firings of senior staff members and the looming threat of being fired were used to dissuade employees and contractors from expressing safety concerns.

“By strategically creating and exploiting regulatory confusion and oversight challenges, OceanGate was ultimately able to operate TITAN completely outside of the established deep-sea protocols,” the report found.

The Titan’s inadequacies

Investigators found that the submersible’s design, certification, maintenance and inspection process were all inadequate. Coast Guard officials noted at the start of last year’s hearing that the submersible had not been independently reviewed, as is standard practice.

Mounting financial pressures in 2023 led to a decision by OceanGate to store the Titan submersible outdoors over the Canadian winter, where its hull was exposed to temperature fluctuations that compromised the integrity of the vessel, the report said.

The Marine Board concluded that Rush, OceanGate’s CEO, “exhibited negligence” that contributed to the deaths of four people. If Rush had survived, the case would have been handed off to the US Department of Justice and he may have been subject to criminal charges, the board said.

The Marine Board said one challenge of the investigation was that “significant amounts” of video footage evidence that had been captured by witnesses was not subject to its subpoena authority because the witnesses weren’t US citizens.

The victims of the Titan disaster

In addition to Rush, the implosion killed French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British adventurer Hamish Harding and two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.

The family of Nargeolet, a veteran French undersea explorer known as “Mr. Titanic,” filed a more than $50 million lawsuit last year that said the crew experienced “terror and mental anguish” before the disaster. The lawsuit accused OceanGate of gross negligence.

The Titan’s final dive

Titan had been making voyages to the Titanic site since 2021. The Titan’s final dive came on
June 18, 2023, a Sunday morning when the submersible would lose contact with its support vessel about two hours later. The submersible was reported overdue that afternoon, and ships, planes and equipment were rushed to the scene about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Wreckage of the Titan would subsequently be found on the ocean floor about 330 yards (300 meters) off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said.

The Marine Board of Investigation held several days of hearings about the implosion in October 2024. During those hearings, the lead engineer of the submersible said he felt pressured to get the vessel ready to dive and refused to pilot it for a journey several years earlier.

Tony Nissen told the board that he had told Rush: “I’m not getting in it.”

Katmandu: Floods that damaged hydropower dams in Nepal and destroyed the main bridge connecting the country to China show the vulnerability of infrastructure and need for smart rebuilding in a region bearing the brunt of a warming planet, experts say.

The flooding of the Bhotekoshi River on July 8 also killed nine people and damaged an inland container depot that was being built to support increasing trade between the two countries. The 10 damaged hydropower facilities, including three under construction, have a combined capacity that could power 600,000 South Asian homes.

Another smaller flood in the area on July 30 damaged roads and structures, but caused less overall destruction. Elsewhere in the Himalayas, flash floods swept away roads, homes and hotels on Tuesday in northern India, killing at least four people and leaving many others trapped under debris, officials said.

The Himalayan region, which crosses Nepal and several nearby countries including India, is especially vulnerable to heavy rains, floods and landslides because the area is warming up faster than the rest of the world due to human-caused climate change. Climate experts say the increasing frequency of extreme weather has changed the playbook for assessing infrastructure risks while also increasing the need for smart rebuilding plans.

“The statistics of the past no longer apply for the future,” said John Pomeroy, a hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “The risk that goes into building a bridge or other infrastructure is generally based on historical observations of past risk, but this is no longer useful because future risk is different and often much higher.”

While damage estimates from the July floods in the Rasuwa region are still being calculated, past construction costs give a sense of the financial toll. The Sino-Nepal Friendship Bridge alone, for example, took $68 million to rebuild after it was destroyed by a 2015 earthquake that ravaged Nepal.

The latest disaster has also stoked fears of long-lasting economic damage in a region north of the capital city Katmandu that spent years rebuilding after the 2015 quake. Nepali government officials estimate that $724 million worth of trade with China is conducted over the bridge each year, and that has come to a standstill.

“Thank God there wasn’t much damage to local villages, but the container depot and bridges have been completely destroyed. This has severely affected workers, hotel operators, laborers, and truck drivers who rely on cross-border trade for their livelihoods,” said Kaami Tsering, a local government official, in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Among those affected is Urken Tamang, a 50-year-old parking attendant at the depot who has been out of work for several weeks. A small tea shop he runs nearby with his family has also suffered.

“We’ve been unlucky,” said Tamang, a former farmer who sold his land and changed jobs when work on the depot began. He added: “The whole area was severely damaged by the 2015 earthquake, and just when life was slowly returning to normal, this devastating flood struck.”

Disasters show need for climate-resilient infrastructure

The Nepal floods are the latest in a series of disasters in South Asia during this year’s monsoon season. Research has shown that extreme weather has become more frequent in the region including heat waves, heavy rains and melting glaciers.

Climate experts said smart planning and rebuilding in climate-vulnerable regions must include accounting for multiple risks, installing early warning systems, preparing local communities for disasters and, when needed, relocating infrastructure.

“What we have to avoid is the insanity of rebuilding after a natural disaster in the same place where it occurred and where we know it will occur again at even higher probability,” said Pomeroy, the Canadian hydrologist. “That’s a very poor decision. Unfortunately, that’s what most countries do.”

Before rebuilding in Rasuwa, Nepal government officials need to assess overall risks, including those due to extreme weather and climate change, said Bipin Dulal, an analyst at Katmandu-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development.

The bridge connecting the two countries was rebuilt to better withstand earthquakes after it was destroyed in 2015, but it appears that officials didn’t properly account for the risk of flooding as intense as what occurred in early July, Dulal said.

“We have to see what the extreme risk scenarios can be and we should rebuild in a way in which the infrastructure can handle those extremes,” said Dulal.

Dulal said that large building projects in South Asia typically undertake environmental impact assessments that don’t adequately factor in the risks of floods and other disasters. The center is developing a multi-hazard risk assessment framework that it hopes will be adopted by planners and builders in the region to better account for the dangers of extreme weather.

Resilient structures can save billions in the long run

In 2024 alone, there were 167 disasters in Asia — including storms, floods, heat waves and earthquakes — which was the most of any continent, according to the Emergency Events Database maintained by the University of Louvain, Belgium. These led to losses of over $32 billion, the researchers found.

“These disasters are all wake-up calls. These risks are real,” said Ramesh Subramaniam, global director of programs and strategy at the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure.

A CDRI analysis found that $124 billion worth of Nepal’s infrastructure is vulnerable to the impacts of climate-driven disasters, creating the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses if the country doesn’t invest in resiliency.

“Investing a relatively smaller figure now would prevent the loss of these enormous sums of damages,” said Subramaniam.

Subramaniam said that most climate investments are directed toward mitigation, such as building clean energy projects and trying to reduce the amount of planet-heating gases being released. But given extreme weather damage already occurring, investing in adapting to global warming is also equally important, he said.

“I think countries are learning and adaptation is becoming a standard feature in their annual planning,” he said.

Global efforts to prepare for and deal with such losses include a climate loss and damage fund set up by the United Nations in 2023. The fund currently has $348 million available, which the UN warns is only a fraction of the yearly need for economic damage related to human-caused climate change. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank have also provided loans or grants to build climate-resilient projects.

In Nepal’s recently flood-ravaged region, Tsering, the local government official, said the repeated disasters have taken more than a financial toll on residents.

“Even though the river has now returned to a normal flow, the fear remains,” he said. “People will always worry that something like this could happen again.”