The family of French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet has filed a $50 million wrongful death lawsuit against OceanGate, the private company that operates the Titan submarine that sank in June 2023 during an expedition to visit the sunken wreck of the Titanic.
Nicknamed “Mr. Titanic,” Nargeolet, 77, was one of five people on the ship who died, including OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush, British adventurer Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman Dawood. The story gained worldwide attention after the submarine lost communication shortly after embarking on its June 18 mission.
Four days later, after a difficult search and rescue mission to reach the passengers before the oxygen supply ran out, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had discovered a debris field underwater near the wreckage of the Titanic, indicating that the submarine had likely imploded and that there were no survivors.
Although Nargeolet has been to the site more than 30 times and was part of the first human expedition to visit the shipwreck in 1987, the lawsuit alleges that he would not have participated if he had known about the “troubled history of the doomed submarine.” According to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in Washington state, OceanGate and Rush failed to disclose “basic facts” about the Titan's condition and durability.
“The lawsuit alleges serious problems with the Titan submarine,” Tony Buzbee, one of the attorneys pressing the family in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “It is significant that while the University of Washington and Boeing had significant roles in the design of earlier but similar versions of the Titan, both deny any role in the submarine model that recently crashed.”
“We hope that through this lawsuit, we can get answers for the family about exactly how this happened, who was involved and how those involved were able to allow it,” Buzbee added.
Just a few weeks after the tragedy, OceanGate announced that it would cease all operations, but since Titan was just one of several submarines OceanGate owned, it was unclear at the time whether the company would eventually continue. Over the following year, more information about the disaster emerged, including Rush's decidedly relaxed demeanor just a few weeks before the mission.
Rush explained in a radio interview just a few weeks before the launch that they decided to launch in June, when the waters around the wreckage were apparently “at their calmest,” and at one point even joked: “What could go wrong?”
Following the accident, the U.S. Coast Guard launched a high-profile investigation into the disaster, which has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. A long-awaited public hearing is scheduled for September as part of the ongoing investigation.