A former OceanGate finance director said some engineers in the Titanic-submersible company were teenagers who earned $15 an hour at one point, report says

• A former director at OceanGate said the company hired engineers in their early 20s or late teens.

• She told The New Yorker that some of them were paid around $15 an hour at one point.

• The director said she left OceanGate as it was still prepping its sub for commercial tours.

A former finance director for OceanGate said the company at one point hired several teenagers to be engineers.

The unnamed former executive, who was the director of finance and administration, told The New Yorker's Ben Taub that some of the company's engineers were in their late teens or early 20s.

At one point, some of these employees were paid about $15 an hour, she told Taub.

It's unclear exactly what sort of work OceanGate assigned these employees or when the company hired them. However, the former finance director told Taub she left soon after OceanGate fired David Lochridge, its chief submersible pilot for the Titan. Lochridge said he was fired in 2018.

In 2018, OceanGate was preparing and testing the Titan for underwater tours that would take customers to depths of around 13,000 feet to view the Titanic shipwreck.

The former finance director's claim came as Taub highlighted that OceanGate hired college-age interns to design and build the Titan's electrical system.

"The whole electrical system — that was our design. We implemented it, and it works," Mark Walsh, a Washington State University Everett graduate, told his university's school paper in 2018. Walsh graduated in 2017, the school paper said.

He said he and another student, Nick Nelson, were initially hired by OceanGate as interns but were later given full-time positions in the company's electrical-engineering team. Walsh was put in charge of this team, which included two other WSU interns at the time, he told the school paper.

The Titan imploded on June 18, instantly killing the five people in the vessel. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the implosion.

One of the passengers on board was OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who repeatedly ignored safety warnings about the Titan's hull and disregarded concerns about OceanGate's "experimental approach" with deep-sea submersibles.

Rush's previous complaints about stringent safety regulations and his ambition to innovate have come into the spotlight since the Titan went missing and was subsequently found destroyed. However, the CEO's coworkers and his friends have defended him, saying he was committed to safety and cared for other people.

When contacted for this story, a representative for OceanGate told Insider that the company had no further information to provide.

July 4, 2023: This story was updated to reflect a response from OceanGate.

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