OceanGate Titan submersible damaged on multiple dives before catastrophic implosion, NTSB report finds
The doomed vessel imploded near the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic Ocean in 2023, resulting in the instantaneous death of all 5 occupants
A scathing new report into the Titan submersible disaster that killed five people has found the vessel was damaged during earlier dives and built through a flawed engineering process that failed to meet safety standards — conditions that ultimately led to its fatal implosion.
The report released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Wednesday also found that OceanGate, the vessel’s operator, did not adequately test Titan or know its actual strength and durability.
EXPLOSIVE NEW REPORT BLAMES OCEANGATE AND ITS CEO FOR ‘PREVENTABLE’ TITAN SUB DISASTER
“We found that the Titan pressure vessel likely sustained damage after it surfaced at the end of dive 80 in the form of one or more delaminations, which weakened the pressure vessel,” the report states. In plain terms, delamination means that the layers of material started to come apart inside the carbon fiber hull.
Those delaminations deteriorated between dive 80 and dive 88, its final dive, resulting in a local buckling failure that led to the implosion. In fact, it found that after dive 82, the Titan sustained additional damage of unknown origin that further deteriorated and weakened the pressure vessel.
The new report stated that OceanGate’s real-time monitoring data analysis of Titan’s pressure was flawed, so the company was unaware that the vessel was damaged and needed to be immediately removed from service. The sensors meant to detect hull strain didn’t trigger proper alarms and engineers misread or dismissed the data, the report found.
The vessel’s flawed engineering and carbon fiber design were outlined as the primary cause for its ultimate demise.
“We determined that the probable cause of the hull failure and implosion… was OceanGate’s inadequate engineering process, which failed to establish the actual strength and durability of the Titan pressure vessel and resulted in the company operating a carbon fiber composite vessel that sustained delamination damage… resulting in a damaged internal structure that subsequently led to a local buckling failure of the pressure vessel,” the report states.
VIDEO SHOWS OCEANGATE CEO’S WIFE REACT AFTER SOUND NOW THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN TITAN SUB IMPLOSION
The report also said the wreckage of the Titan likely would have been found sooner had OceanGate followed standard guidance for emergency response, and that would have saved “time and resources even though a rescue was not possible in this case.”
The NTSB report follows on from a 335-page report by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) released in August which found that the tragedy was preventable and also the result of a flawed experimental design and ignored safety warnings.
Kash Patel outlines SPLC fraud indictment, gang arrests, and foiled mass shooting in FBI weekly briefing
FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Blanche announced an 11-count grand jury indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this week, alleging the organization secretly funneled more than $3 million in donations to individuals tied to violent extremist groups, including people associated with the Ku Klux Klan and the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The SPLC indictment was one piece of a sprawling weekly enforcement briefing that read like a catalog of what happens when federal law enforcement actually does its job. From gang takedowns in Georgia and Southern California to a foiled mass shooting plot in Houston to the rescue of a child taken to Cuba, Patel’s Weekly Watch update covered arrests, indictments, and operations spanning at least nine states and multiple countries.
The breadth of the briefing matters. For years, critics on the right argued the FBI had become a politicized bureaucracy more interested in pursuing its own institutional vendettas than protecting ordinary Americans. Patel’s update offered a different picture, one field office after another reporting convictions, seizures, rescues, and disrupted plots.
The SPLC indictment: $3 million to extremists
The headline case was the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has spent decades positioning itself as America’s foremost monitor of hate groups. Patel said the 11-count indictment alleges the SPLC funneled donated money to benefit people in extremist organizations and even encouraged their criminal conduct.
Patel described the recipients as members of “violent extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan” and “hate groups like the ones who organized the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.” He said the organization “secretly funneled more than $3 million dollars in donations to benefit people in these groups and even spur their criminal conduct.”
The irony is thick enough to cut. The SPLC built its brand, and its fundraising empire, by labeling mainstream conservative organizations as “hate groups.” It wielded that label to pressure tech companies, payment processors, and media outlets into blacklisting right-of-center voices. Now a federal grand jury has returned an indictment alleging the SPLC itself was channeling donor money to actual violent extremists.
Patel said the case “show[s] that no organization is above the law.” The court and jurisdiction behind the indictment were not disclosed in the briefing, and no case number was provided. But the charge count, eleven, suggests prosecutors believe they have a substantial paper trail.
Operation Sweet Silence dismantles Georgia gang
In Columbus, Georgia, FBI Atlanta led Operation Sweet Silence, which officials said dismantled the Zohannon Street Gang and its associates. The operation produced 30 convictions, the seizure of more than $270 million worth of drugs, and the confiscation of 119 firearms. The operation targeted violent crime and what officials described as cartel-linked drug trafficking.
Those are not small numbers. A quarter-billion dollars in drugs and more than a hundred firearms removed from a single operation in a mid-sized Georgia city tells you something about the scale of the narcotics pipeline running through American communities, and the firepower protecting it.
MS-13 members sentenced in Houston
In Houston, eight individuals identified as members of MS-13 were sentenced to decades in prison for murders carried out under the direction of gang leadership in El Salvador. The sentences reflect the transnational command structure of MS-13, where orders for killings on American soil originate thousands of miles away.
Patel also reported that FBI Charlotte and FBI Houston Joint Terrorism Task Forces, acting on a public tip, prevented a planned mass shooting targeting Houston’s Jewish community. The briefing did not name the suspect or provide details on the arrest, but the prevention of a targeted attack on a religious community through citizen cooperation and inter-office coordination stands as exactly the kind of work the bureau was built to do.
House Republicans probe ActBlue over suspected foreign donations as employees plead the Fifth
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan says Republicans are investigating the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue over what he calls mounting evidence that the organization accepted illegal foreign contributions, and then tried to cover it up when Congress came asking questions.
Jordan laid out the case describing a pattern of resignations, a firing, Fifth Amendment invocations, and what he characterized as misleading statements to Congress by ActBlue’s own leadership. The committee released an interim report the day before his appearance, and Jordan did not mince words about what it found.
The platform raises billions for Democrats every election cycle. Jordan told listeners the investigation has uncovered a troubling sequence: four senior fraud-prevention and legal staffers resigned, a fifth, the general counsel, was fired with a large severance package, and when Congress deposed all five, every one of them refused to answer questions.
146 times: the Fifth Amendment wall
The scale of that refusal is now documented. The ActBlue employees invoked the Fifth Amendment at least 146 times in depositions conducted between July and December 2025. Two current officials and three former lawyers declined to answer any substantive questions from congressional investigators.
