New video reveals the harrowing moment the wife of Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush listened live as the Titan submersible imploded during its deep-sea voyage to the wreck of the Titanic.
Footage recently obtained by the U.S. Coast Guard shows Wendy Rush, an Oceangate company director, attempting to contact Titan on June 18, 2023, as the sub began to dive 2.4 miles towards the Titanic shipwreck, which lies 380 miles from St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada.
On board the sub’s support ship, Rush sat in front of a computer that sent and received text messages from Titan.
“What was that bang?” she said with a smile, unaware that the Titan had just suffered a catastrophic implosion.
Moments later, Rush received a message from the sub stating that it had dropped two eights, which appeared to have led her to believe that the dive was going according to plan.
To Rush, the grim reality of events remained unclear: the message had taken longer to arrive at the support ship than the sound of the implosion.
The video of Rush, first obtained by the BBC for its upcoming documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster, has been presented as evidence to the USCG Marine Board of Investigation, which has spent the last two years investigating the sub’s catastrophic failure.
It took four days for parts of the sub to be discovered following the “catastrophic implosion,” with the sub’s last known position about 1,600 feet away from the Titanic. Debris was found as close as 900 feet away from the ship’s bow, the USCG revealed in a Titan Marine Board of Investigation inquiry in September last year.
All five crew members died, including OceanGate’s CEO, British explorer Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his son Suleman, as well as French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who earned the nickname “Mr Titanic”.
Warning signs had been raised prior to the dive, according to testimony from several former employees at the USGC’s inquiry in September.
Matthew McCoy, who worked at OceanGate for six months in 2017, testified on the final day of the inquiry that the company’s engineering department was “full of college interns” at the time, adding that he “doesn’t believe” there was a professional engineer on staff.
Another former employee described the Titan’s design as an “abomination” and said the disaster was “inevitable.”
Titan had never undergone an independent safety assessment, and a key concern was that the main body of the sub, the hull, where the passengers sat, was made of layers of carbon fibre mixed with resin, which was deemed unreliable under pressure.
The USCG said sensors fitted to Titan show that the bang was caused by delamination, the separation of layered materials.
