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titanic tourists
The Adriana Shipwreck and the Costs of the Forever Wars
Framing many of the migrant’s deaths as in some sense war-related should force us to pay attention to ways in which fighting in or around their countries of origin might have impacted their fates.
Jul 20, 2023
Seeking news coverage about the Adriana, the boat crowded with some 700 people migrating to Europe to seek a better life that sank in mid-June off the coast of Greece, I googled “migrant ship” and got 483,000 search results in one second. Most of the people aboard the Adriana had drowned in the Mediterranean, among them about 100 children.
I did a similar search for the Titan submersible, which disappeared the same week in the North Atlantic. That kludged-together pseudo-submarine was taking four wealthy men and the 19-year-old son of one of them to view the ruins of the famed passenger ship, the Titanic. They all died when the Titan imploded shortly after it dove. That Google search came up with 79.3 million search results in less than half a second.
Guardian journalist Arwa Mahdawi wrote a powerful column about the different kinds of attention those two boats received. As she astutely pointed out, we in the anglophone world could hardly help but follow the story of the Oceangate submersible’s ill-fated journey. After all, it was the lead news story of the week everywhere and commanded the attention of three national militaries (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) for at least five days.
Why do people care so much about rich men who paid $250,000 apiece to make what any skilled observer would have told them was a treacherous journey, but not hundreds of migrants determined to better their families’ lives, even if they had to risk life itself to reach European shores?
The Adriana was quite another story. As Mahdawi pointed out, the Greek Coast Guard seemed preoccupied with whether the migrants on that boat even “wanted” help, ignoring the fact that many of those aboard the small trawler were children trapped in the ship’s hull and that it was visibly in danger.
On the other hand, few, she pointed out, questioned whether the men in the submersible wanted help—even though its hull was ludicrously bolted shut from the outside prior to departure, making rescue especially unlikely. Glued to the coverage like many Americans, I certainly didn’t think they should be ignored, since every life matters.
But why do people care so much about rich men who paid $250,000 apiece to make what any skilled observer would have told them was a treacherous journey, but not hundreds of migrants determined to better their families’ lives, even if they had to risk life itself to reach European shores? Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in the very different reasons those two groups of travelers set out on their journeys and the kinds of things we value in a world long shaped by Western military power.
An American Preoccupation With the Military
I suspect that we Americans are easily drawn to whatever seems vaguely military in nature, even a “submersible” (rather than a submarine) whose rescue efforts marshaled the resources and expertise of so many U.S. and allied naval forces. We found it anything but boring to learn about U.S. Navy underwater rescue ships and how low you can drop before pressure is likely to capsize a boat. The submersible story, in fact, spun down so many military-style rabbit holes that it was easy to forget what even inspired it.
I’m a Navy spouse and my family, which includes my partner, our two young kids, and various pets, has been moving from one military installation to another over the past decade. In the various communities where we’ve lived, during gatherings with new friends and extended family, the overwhelming interest in my spouse’s career is obvious.
Typical questions have included: “What’s a submarine’s hull made out of?” “How deep can you go?” “What’s the plan if you sink?” “What kind of camo do you wear?” And an unforgettable (to me at least) comment from one of our kids: “That blue camo makes you guys look like blueberries. Do you really want to hide if you fall in the water? What if you need to be rescued?”
In our militarized culture, we seize on the cosmetic parts like the nature of submarines because they’re easier to talk about than the kind of suffering our military has actually caused across a remarkably wide stretch of the planet in this century.
Meanwhile, my career as a therapist for military and refugee communities and as a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which might offer a strange antiwar complement to my spouse’s world, seldom even makes it into the conversation.
Aside from the power and mystery our military evokes with its fancy equipment, I think many Americans love to express interest in it because it seems like the embodiment of civic virtue at a time when otherwise we can agree on ever less. In fact, after 20 years of America’s war on terror in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, references to our military are remarkably widespread (if you’re paying attention).
In our militarized culture, we seize on the cosmetic parts like the nature of submarines because they’re easier to talk about than the kind of suffering our military has actually caused across a remarkably wide stretch of the planet in this century. Most of us will take fancy toys like subs over exhausted servicemembers, bloodied civilians, and frightened, malnourished migrants all too often fleeing the damage of our war on terror.
Migration During Wartime
We live in an era marked by mass migration, which has increased over the past five decades. In fact, more people are now living in a country other than where they were born than at any other time in the last half-century.
Among the major reasons people leave their homes as migrants are certainly the search for education and job opportunities, but never forget those fleeing from armed conflict and political persecution. And of course, another deeply related and more significant reason is climate change and the ever more frequent and intense national disasters like flooding and drought that it causes or intensifies.
The migrants on the Adriana had left Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, and Pakistan for a variety of reasons. Some of the Pakistani men, for instance, were seeking jobs that would allow them to house and feed their desperate families. One Syrian teenager, who ended up drowning, had left the war-torn city of Kobani, hoping to someday enter medical school in Germany—a dream that was unlikely to be realized where he lived due to bombed-out schools and hospitals.
All in all, the Costs of War Project estimates that the war on terror has led to the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.
In my mind’s eye, however, a very specific shadow loomed over so many of their individual stories: America’s forever wars, the series of military operations that began with our 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (which ended up involving us in air strikes and other military activities in neighboring Pakistan as well) and the similarly disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. It would, in the end, metastasize into fighting, training foreign militaries, and intelligence operations in some 85 countries, including each of the countries the Adriana’s passengers hailed from. All in all, the Costs of War Project estimates that the war on terror has led to the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.
The route taken by the Adriana through the central Mediterranean Sea is a particularly common one for refugees fleeing armed conflict and its aftermath. It’s also the most deadly route in the world for migrants—and getting deadlier by the year. Before the Adriana went down, the number of fatalities during the first three months of 2023 had already reached its highest point in six years, at 441 people. And during the first half of this year alone, according to UNICEF, at least 289 children have drowned trying to reach Europe.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned—even if on a distinctly small scale—as a therapist in military and refugee communities, it’s this: A painful history almost invariably precedes anyone’s decision to embark on a journey as dangerous as those the migrants of that ill-fated ship undertook. Though I’m sure many on it would not have said that they were fleeing “war,” it’s hard to disentangle this country’s war on terror from the reasons so many of them made their journeys.
One Syrian father who drowned had been heading for Germany, hoping to help his three-year-old son, who had leukemia and needed a treatment unavailable in his devastated country, an area that the U.S. invasion of Iraq first threw into chaos and where war has now deprived millions of healthcare. Of course, it hardly need be noted that his death only ensures his family’s further impoverishment and his son’s possible death from cancer, not to mention what could happen if he and his mom were forced to make a similar journey to Europe to get care.
Pakistan’s War Story
As many as 350 migrants on the Adriana were from Pakistan where the U.S. had been funding and fighting a counterinsurgency war—via drones and air strikes—against Islamist militant groups since 2004. The war on terror has both directly and indirectly upended and destroyed many lives in Pakistan in this century. That includes tens of thousands of deaths from air strikes, but also the effects of a refugee influx from neighboring Afghanistan that stretched the country’s already limited resources, not to speak of the deterioration of its tourism industry and diminished international investments. All in all, Pakistan has lost more than $150 billion dollars over the past 20 years in that fashion while, for ordinary Pakistanis, the costs of living in an ever more devastated country have only increased. Not surprisingly, the number of jobs per capita decreased.
One young man on the migrant ship was traveling to Europe to seek a job so that he could support his extended family. He had sold 26 buffalo—his main source of income—to pay for the journey and was among the 104 people who were finally rescued by the Greek Coast Guard. After that rescue, he was forced to return to Libya where he had no clear plan for how to make it home. Unlike most of the other Pakistanis on the Adriana, he managed to escape with his life, but his is not necessarily a happy ending. As Zeeshan Usmani, Pakistani activist and founder of the antiwar website Pakistan Body Count, points out, “After you’ve sacrificed so much in search of a better life, you’d likely rather drown than return home. You’ve given all you have.”
Rest Stops in a Militarized World
We certainly learned much about the heady conversations between the Titan’s OceanGate CEO, his staff, and certain estranged colleagues before that submersible embarked on its ill-fated journey, and then about the dim lighting and primitive conditions inside the boat. Barely probed in media coverage of the Adriana, however, was what it was like for those migrants to make the trip itself.
What particularly caught my attention was the place from which they left on their journey to hell and back—Libya. After all, that country has quite a grim history to be the debarkation point for so many migrants. A U.S.-led invasion in 2011 toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country’s remote beaches even less policed than they had been, while Libya itself was divided between two competing governments and a collection of affiliated militias.
In such a chaotic setting, as you might imagine, conditions for migrants transiting through Libya have only continued to deteriorate. Many are kept in warehouses by local authorities for weeks, even months, sometimes without basic needs like blankets and drinking water. Some are even sold into slavery to local residents, and those lucky enough to move on toward European shores have to deal with smugglers whose motives and practices, as the Adriana’s story reminds us, are anything but positive (and sometimes terrorizing).
Consider how you would feel if you’d been adrift at sea, hungry, thirsty, and fearful for your life, when men in another boat armed and wearing masks approached you, further rocking a boat that was already threatening to capsize.
Onward, to the sea itself: When, some 13 hours after the first migrants called for help, the Greek Coast Guard finally responded, it sent a single ship with a crew that included four armed and masked men. The Guard alleges that many of the migrants refused help, waving the men away. Whether or not this was the case, I can imagine their fears that the Greeks, if not smugglers, might at least be allied with them. They also might have feared that the Guard would set them and their children, however young, on rafts to continue drifting at sea, as had happened recently with other migrant ships approached by the Greeks.
If that sounds far-fetched to you, then consider how you would feel if you’d been adrift at sea, hungry, thirsty, and fearful for your life, when men in another boat armed and wearing masks approached you, further rocking a boat that was already threatening to capsize. My guess is: not good.
Uncounted War Deaths
It would be far-fetched to count people like the migrants on the Adriana as “war deaths.” But framing many of their deaths as in some sense war-related should force us to pay attention to ways in which fighting in or around their countries of origin might have impacted their fates. Paying attention to war’s costs would, however, force us Westerners to confront the blood on our hands, as we not only supported (or at least ignored) this country’s wars sufficiently to let them continue for so long, while also backing politicians in both the U.S. and Europe who did relatively little (or far worse) to address the refugee crises that emerged as a result.
To take language used by the Costs of War Project’s Stephanie Savell in her work on what the project calls “indirect war deaths,” migrants like the drowned Syrian teenager seeking an education in Europe could be considered “doubly uncounted” war deaths because they weren’t killed in battle and, as in his case and others like it, their bodies will not be recovered from the Mediterranean’s depths.
When we see stories like his, I think we should all go deeper in our questioning of just what happened, in part by retracing those migrants’ steps to where they began and trying to imagine why they left on such arduous, dangerous journeys. Start with war-gutted economies in countries where millions find slim hope of the kind of decent life that you or I are likely to take for granted, including having a job, a home, health care, and safety from armed violence.
I’ll bet that if you do ask more questions, those migrants will start to seem not just easier to relate to but like true adventurers on this planet—and not those billionaires who paid $250,000 apiece for what even I could have told you was an unlikely shot at making it to the ocean floor alive.
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Even When They Fail, They Win: OceanGate and the Cult of the Super-Wealthy Innovator
This deep-sea tragedy reminds us that even when the super-rich die doing foolhardy stuff, our government and media insist that we move heaven and earth to save them from their own recklessness.
Jul 05, 2023
Like many Americans, I was and remain enthralled by the coverage of the OceanGate Titan tragedy. Although death defying adventures are both above my paygrade and antithetical to my risk-averse temperament, the flood of articles and nonstop cable news segments on OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, his victims, and the Titan rescue and recovery efforts piqued my interest because they are palpable expressions of the lives we do and do not value.
As many have already observed, just two days before the Titan submersible imploded near Newfoundland, hundreds of Syrian, Palestinian, Pakistani, and Egyptian migrant workers drowned when their overloaded boat sank off the coast of Greece. The media’s scant coverage of a tale of maritime misery centered on desperate, impoverished, brown immigrant workers stood in sharp contrast to the round-the-clock coverage devoted to Titan’s wealthy occupants. And while the juxtaposition triggered sufficient public outrage that CNN was ultimately compelled to acknowledge the disparity on air, the brief acknowledgement did nothing to shift the balance of coverage.
To describe the story of the Titan as sensational would be an understatement. Because the submersible’s occupants met their end during a descent to the world’s most famous shipwreck, the Titan’s tale is characterized by the kind of morbid symmetry that drives a Hollywood disaster movie, if not an Aesop’s fable. The fact that the Titan tragedy offers a window onto the hubris of the super-rich further amplifies the story’s resonance, insofar as it is an expression of our decades-long fascination with wealthy people and their excesses.
But what is so intriguing about the lives of wealthy risk-takers? If the answer to this question is that the wealthy embody our collective aspirations, how do we explain the fact that we don’t just vicariously revel in the super-wealthy’s triumphs, we regularly delight in their (excessive) tragedies?
The Titan tragedy offers a window onto the hubris of the super-rich further amplifies the story’s resonance, insofar as it is an expression of our decades-long fascination with wealthy people and their excesses.
A key element of the story is that neoliberalism’s combined commitment to socialism for the wealthy and social Darwinism for the rest of us, has nurtured a collective hero worship of the super-wealthy and a related culture of resentment toward the allegedly undeserving “bad people” and “morons” the rest of us are forced to compete against for scarce resources. Because the super-wealthy are… super-wealthy, we tend to presume that they’re smarter and basically better than the rest of us—a disposition affirmed by corporate bailouts, interest rate hikes that advantage investors by spiking unemployment and depressing wages, and real and imagined wealthy people’s decades long outsized imprint on popular culture. The super-wealthy are not just rockstars (even when they’re not), but because they are presumed to have made all the right moves, they have attained a stature akin to real-life superheroes.
If the super-wealthy exemplify what we might all achieve if we have “the smarts” or are willing to “put in the work,” the Titan tragedy makes plain that their stumbles only affirm their vaunted place in our society.
The Titan tragedy is an expression of the unhealthy reverence we have for the corporate innovator, our real-life superheroes.
Indeed, OceanGate reminds us that even when the super-rich die doing foolhardy stuff, our government and media insist that we move heaven and earth to save them from their own recklessness. Worse yet, even though the super-wealthy’s colossal blunders announce their fallibility, their apparent humanity does little to weaken their grip on either our imagination or our politics. Yes, the fact that our presumed natural betters would either build an inherently flawed submersible deathtrap or be taken in by the haughty exuberance of a blue-blooded charlatan brings our cultural heroes down to earth. However, because these bold risk takers are our “job creators” and the innovators who will eventually find a profitable way to remove carbon from our atmosphere or, failing that, spirit us off to a freshly terraformed Mars, all we can do is indulge their flights of fancy or mock them when they fly too close to the sun.
As countless cathartically cruel memes about the Titan reveal, schadenfreude most certainly informs some of the collective interest in the poorly conceived submersible’s fate. OceanGate’s Titanic trips cost between $105,000 and $250,000 per-person—far more than the average annual household income in the United States. Likening Rush’s arrogant disregard for the risks before him to that of Titanic Captain Edward Smith, film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron has drawn parallels between the tragic ends of the Titanic and the Titan. But comparisons with the Titanic do the bad work of uncoupling the OceanGate CEO from his own historical moment—divorcing the man and his excesses from the troubled times that nurture(d) and permit(ted) them. Rush wasn’t just a bad actor. He was a symptom of a much deeper cultural and political problem that threatens us all, today.
The Titan tragedy is an expression of the unhealthy reverence we have for the corporate innovator, our real-life superheroes. Indeed, Rush’s hubris reflected much the same cost-cutting disregard for human life that characterized Boeing’s 737 MAX program— a reality that had likewise gone largely unrecognized until calamity struck. As was true of Ocean Gate, Boeing’s mismanagement of the MAX program was enabled by a language of “private sector innovation” that presumed corporate leaders were smarter and better than the rest us and should therefore be freed from the shackles of expert testimony and “stifling government oversight.”
Rush wasn’t just a bad actor. He was a symptom of a much deeper cultural and political problem that threatens us all
In contrast to the 737 MAX debacle, Rush’s arrogance led to the deaths of just five wealthy people (Rush among them). OceanGate certainly reveals the fallibility of the class that allegedly makes all the right decisions. Still, the evidence of the super-wealthy’s humanity only strengthens their sway over the popular imagination.
Our culture industry and, sadly, both major political parties insist that individual wealth will not only save us from precarity and alienation, but our personal wealth will allegedly pay dividends for our real and imagined communities. For most of us, the odds of acquiring super-wealth are only about as good as our chances of winning the Powerball. But by reminding us that the super-wealthy can make bad decisions that ultimately cost them their lives, the OceanGate tragedy offers hope, for some, that the rest of us mere mortals—who would never do something as risky as descending to the bottom of the ocean in an uncertified submersible—might escape a life of precarity by right-decisioning our way up the economic ladder.
The super-wealthy may be better than the rest of us, but they’re not gods. Our real-life superheroes are, thus, bound to fail from time to time.
Simply put, calamities like OceanGate make clear that flawed human beings can join the ranks of the super-wealthy. This, for what it’s worth, is much the same culture-work performed by the fiction that our Uber drivers and DoorDashers are up and coming entrepreneurs, rather than misclassified workers.
Superheroes take risks. The super-wealthy may be better than the rest of us, but they’re not gods. Our real-life superheroes are, thus, bound to fail from time to time. And as the popularity of the phrase “go big or go home” reveals, we have come to expect the super-wealthy to fail big—which is easy enough for them to do when taxpayers subsidize the risks.
The OceanGate disaster, former President Trump’s famous love for fast food, and even the much-anticipated Musk-Zuckerberg billionaire cage match would appear to close the divide between the super-wealthy and everyone else. But when these otherwise unrelatable superbeings have been humbled by either tragedy (in the case of the Titan) or contrived public spectacle (Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg) they remain very far removed from the rest of us.
Indeed, the contrast between the response to OceanGate and MAX 8 disasters tells the real story.
It took two crashes resulting in the deaths of nearly 350 passengers and crew engaged in mundane, commercial travel before the corporate media and regulators publicly acknowledged the inherent flaws in the 737 MAX’s design. By contrast, within a day of the disappearance of five wealthy adventurers, the U.S. and Canadian navies, assisted by several commercial deep-sea firms, mobilized a massive and very costly search and rescue operation. Moreover, even before formal confirmation of Titan’s implosion—unambiguous evidence of a fatal design flaw—coverage of the Titan quickly coalesced around well-documented concerns about Rush’s competence, leading to questions about government oversight over the submersible industry.
The real divide between the super-rich and the rest of us remains as wide as ever, despite their public failures and willingness to occasionally perform acts associated with the commoners.
Callousness toward victims of human tragedy is one of neoliberalism’s calling cards.
But does the fact that the lives of the super-wealthy matter more than the lives of everybody else mean we shouldn’t have empathy for wealthy victims of tragedy? Although the schadenfreude-fueled Titan memes may be expressions of discontent over the obvious class-skewed valuation of life in the United States, they are undeniably callous.
Of course, callousness toward victims of human tragedy is one of neoliberalism’s calling cards. Indeed, the regime’s liturgy proclaims an impartial invisible hand rewards and punishes the righteous and villainous, the smart and the dumb. If, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, far too many Americans insisted that New Orleanians invited disaster by stupidly choosing to live in a port-city, that—like all port-cities—is at, just above, or just below sea level, why would we expect an out-pouring of empathy for super-wealthy risk-takers? After all, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, much like Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 victims, were not taking on exceptional risks.
The bizarre details of this particular case, notwithstanding, the Titan tragedy fits squarely within the frame of a broader societal malaise that begs two important questions. First, how many tons of bricks have to fall on us before we realize that government regulation of private industries—from banking to commercial aviation—is both better for the public at large and far cheaper than socializing wealthy risktakers’ hubris? Second, what is the future of this nation if neoliberalism’s insistence that working people don Milk Bone underwear in a dog-eat-dog world deadens our capacity to empathize with even our neighbors? Progressives cannot pushback against this insanity if we accept the claim that organizing efforts that emphasize our common concerns constitute a betrayal of real and imagined particular interests. Frankly, drawing attention to our mutual interest is a tried-and-true vehicle for nurturing cross-group empathy and broad investment in narrower, but nonetheless important, group interests.
OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan is an expression of a long-legged political problem with a very large cultural footprint. The cult of the super-wealthy and the related insistence that (unregulated) “private sector innovation” is our salvation are a danger to us all. When left to their own devices, our real-life versions of Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne can be every bit as dangerous as the fictional Gordon Gekko, Vilos Cohaagan, or Patrick Bateman.
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Biden’s Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Titan Submarine Disaster
We have seen what happens when things are built from substandard materials with faulty design.
Jul 01, 2023
When President Biden agreed to the debt deal in May, the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) became his pipeline. Climate scientists tell us it’s exactly the wrong thing to be building in 2023 but the president fast-tracked it anyway. He may claim that his hands were tied by Manchin and the Republicans who were willing to hold the economy hostage if they didn’t get their way. But no one is tying the President’s hands when it comes to an important safety measure regarding MVP.
For more than 50 years there’s been a federal law on the books that says all pipe must have an external coating that is “sufficiently ductile to resist cracking.” The purpose of the coating is to prevent corrosion over the many years and decades that the pipeline will be in service. The reason it has to be sufficiently ductile (flexible) to resist cracking is because 40-foot sections of pipe flex quite a bit when they are moved from the factory to the pipeyard to the right of way and finally into a ditch. The factory-applied coating is designed to flex but it loses its flexibility, as well as other qualities if it sits out in the sun for too long.
The National Association of Pipe Coating Applicators (NAPCA) says that the coating shouldn’t be exposed to the sun for more than six months but the MVP pipe was coated 6 or 7 years ago and most of it has been exposed to the sun in pipeyards or along right of ways ever since. The January 2020 issue of Corrosion Management reported (starting on p. 16) that the coating on Keystone XL pipe was “no longer fit for purpose” after it had sat out in the sun for years just as MVP’s pipe has. Every piece of KXL pipe that was tested failed the flexibility test and had cracks in the coating. Cracked coating is obviously no longer corrosion-proof.
The coating shouldn’t be exposed to the sun for more than six months but the MVP pipe was coated 6 or 7 years ago and most of it has been exposed to the sun in pipeyards or along right of ways ever since.
In 2010 a gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno. It killed eight people, injured more than 60 and destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes. It was a 30-inch pipeline. MVP is a 42-inch pipeline that can operate at four times the pressure. It is critical that MVP pipe have a top-quality and corrosion-proof coating, which it currently does not. We know that because of the Corrosion Management study and NAPCA’s warning.
MVP wants to get the pipe buried as soon as possible and they will no doubt claim that either the coating is fine and doesn’t need to be recoated, or that they can somehow properly recoat it in the field. It would be absurd to believe what they say. This is a company that has already paid millions of dollars in fines for hundreds of violations. And Biden should be told that half of the emissions gains from his highly touted EV (electric vehicle) sales last year were wiped out by the year’s number one climate disaster, a methane leak that MVP’s builder couldn’t get under control for thirteen days.
There are only two ways to properly address the coating problem. Either replace all the pipe with new, recently coated pipe or ship all the pipe in the field back to the plant for stripping, cleaning, and recoating, which is what a Keystone XL pipeline manager said was necessary, because the coating process is quite involved and can only properly occur in a factory setting. See this two-minute video.
After the recent submersible disaster in the North Atlantic occurred, we learned that the builder and captain of the Titan sub had been repeatedly warned by experts that his vessel was unsafe because it was built with inferior materials. He disagreed…and he was right…until he wasn’t.
The company building the Mountain Valley Pipeline will be like that guy. They will insist the coating is fine. But they aren’t the captain of this ship. Joe Biden is. This is his call, not Manchin’s or anyone else’s. The chain of command, from the bottom up, is the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA), the U.S. Dept of Transportation, DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and ultimately President Biden. He can enforce the safety rule and ensure that the coating is sufficiently ductile to resist cracking or he can ignore all the warnings like the captain of the Titan did…and then someday maybe send his thoughts and prayers.
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