A former employee reportedly resigned from OceanGate after one of the co-founders said he'd "buy himself a Congressman" if the U.S. Coast Guard interfered in the company's plans to reach the ruins of the Titanic .
The bombshell revelation comes after Matthew McCoy, a former OceanGate employee and Coast Guard veteran, said he voiced safety concerns when the company broke ties with the University of Washington’s applied physics lab.
McCoy's fears that the sub would not be safe were doubled when Boeing announced that they would not be c onstructing the carbon fiber hull and that the thickness of the supposed hull had been drastically reduced. McCoy testified that he also had concerns about the financial model when he learned there would be people onboard the vessel.
According to McCoy, he told by Stockton Rush, the late CEO and Co-founder of the company who also perished in the implosion, that the expedition would be flagged in the Bahamas and launched from Canada to avoid dealing with U.S. regulations. McCoy said that he told Rush that U.S. regulatory concerns could come into play if the ship ended up at a U.S. port.
Unbothered by this, Rush allegedly told McCoy: “If the Coast Guard became a problem, then he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away.” McCoy said that he was left "aghast" at the "tense" conversation and promptly resigned.
McCoy's testimony wraps up two weeks of public hearings launched by the Coast Guard to understand what happened last year when OceanGate's Titan Submersible imploded and killed five people. Throughout the various testimonies, the panel heard stories that highlighted many of the company's failures to ensure the safety of those who ventured down to the ship's wreckage.
One such testimony came from a longtime friend of the OceanGate co-founder, who stated that Rush knew that there was a possibility that the mission could end in failure.
Karl Stanley told officials that he had accompanied Rush on a 2019 expedition using Titan and heard several loud cracking sounds. "He told us to be prepared for noises," Stanely said. "He had recently done the solo dive on his own, and basically just said, ‘this is going to make noise’ and ‘brace yourselves.'"
Stanley said there were "a lot of red flags." The comments were repeated from an interview Stanley gave to 60 Minutes Australia months after the vessel initially imploded. “He definitely knew it was going to end like this," he told the broadcaster. "He literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you can go out with."
The Coast Guard also heard from the company's other co-founder , Guillermo Sohnlein, who said that the company cut corners in order to save money because they wanted to build a fleet of submersibles to go down to the ruins. The inquest board also heard from Amber Bay, the director of administration, who slammed the Coast Guard when they seemed to suggest there was a "desperation" to complete underwater missions.
During her testimony, Bay insisted that the company would never "conduct dives that would be risky just to meet a need.” The response came after the board implied OceanGate skipped several safety regulations in order to quickly complete the missions.
“There definitely was an urgency to deliver on what we had offered and a dedication and perseverance towards that goal,” she told officials per NBC affiliate KNTV . Shortly after, Bay broke down into tears when discussing what happened. I had the privilege of knowing the explorer's lives who were lost,” Bay said while crying. “And there’s not a day that passes that I don’t think of them, their families and the loss.”
During the hearings, the Coast Guard also showed never-before-seen video and pictures of the aftermath of the implosion. The Coast Guard also revealed that the final three words of the sub were "All good here."
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