That too, I guess. But the Coast Guard hearings gave the impression that by the time of the disaster there was nobody left at the company to worry about things like that. People who had leading engineering and operations roles during the design and construction of the sub had been fired years prior for caring too much about safety. For a while, the director of engineering for the whole project was an electrical and software engineer, with no background in materials or submersibles. That left Rush, an engineer by education and one of very few people who had been around from the start, the most competent person around. So when he said that everything’s fine and kept piloting the sub himself, people just believed him.
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