Titanic sub found: OceanGate ex-finance director says she quit after Stockton Rush request

A former passenger of the Titan submersible that imploded last month, killing all five people on board, has spoken out about a brutal implosion warning.

Retired California businessman Bill Price, who went on a Titan dive in 2021, recalled discussing the effects of an implosion before the deep ocean expedition started.

Mr Price recalled some of the analogies of what it would be like to be crushed by extreme pressure in the ocean. He said it would be like a Coke can smashed with a sledgehammer. Or like “an elephant standing on one foot with 100 more elephants on top of it”.

The Independent’s Maroosha Muzzafar has more:

OceanGate Expeditions released a promo video boasting about its “very safe” submersible two months before the vessel catastrophically imploded in the depths of the Atlantic while on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.

The company’s CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman were killed in the ill-fated expedition after the sub lost contact with its mothership on 18 June.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, past passengers who previously went on the 12,000-foot dive aboard the Titan have shared several concerns they had with OceanGate’s safety measures. However, a promotional video posted 10 weeks before the implosion on OceanGate’s Youtube channel advertised the $250,000-a-ticket trip as extremely safe.

OceanGate Expeditions’ former finance director has claimed she quit the company after CEO Stockton Rush asked her to captain the doomed Titan submersible after firing the craft’s original chief pilot David Lochridge.

The employee, who spoke to The New Yorker on condition of anonymity, said: “It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting, I could not work for Stockton. I did not trust him.”

She added that several of the engineers working for the company were in their late teens and early 20s and were at one point being paid $15 an hour.

Voice recordings and other data will be reviewed as part of a US Coast Guard-appointed expert board’s probe into the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible last week.

American and Canadian marine authorities have announced investigations into the circumstances that led to the vessel’s malfunction after its chambers were found in a sea of debris 1,600ft from the wreck of the Titanic.

US Coast Guard Captain Jason Neubauer, who is chairing the investigation, said that he has summoned a Marine Board of Investigation, the highest level of investigation conducted by the Coast Guard. The board’s role is to determine the cause of the tragedy in order to pursue civil or criminal sanctions as necessary.

Voice recordings between the Titan and its mothership Polar Prince will be reviewed by investigators. The mothership’s crew is also being interviewed by different agencies.

Investigators with the Coast Guard have mapped the accident site and salvage operations are expected to continue, Cpt Jason Neubauer said. Once the investigation is wrapped — a timeline has not been laid out — a report with evidence, conclusions and recommendations will be released.

On 26 June, those worst fears were confirmed when the US Coast Guard announced that it had found pieces of the Titan submersible scattered across the ocean floor about 1,600 feet from the bow of the ill-fated ocean liner.

But what exactly caused the Titan to implode? While we don’t yet know the truth of what happened, we do know enough to have some idea of what might have sealed the sub’s fate.

The Independent’s Io Dodds reports:

Passengers on board the sunk Titan submersible likely spent their final moments listening to music in darkness and watching sea creatures in the deep, it has been revealed.

All five onboard the Titanic tourist submarine were confirmed dead on 22 June after the vessel suffered a “catastrophic explosion”.

The tail cone of the submersible was found around 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic wreck following a frantic five-day search operation in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Father and son Shahzada Dawood, 48, and Suleman Dawood, 19, were among the victims.

Christine Dawood, wife of Shahzada and mother of Suleman, has told of the preparations carried out by Stockton Rush, the pilot of the vessel and founder and CEO of OceaGate, the company that ran the voyage.

“It was like a well-oiled operation – you could see they had done this before many times,” Ms Dawood, said of a briefing given to the passengers, in an interview with the New York Times.

Karl Stanley, the owner of a diving expedition company in Honduras and a close friend of Mr Rush, went on a tour aboard the Titan off the coast of the Bahamas in 2019, The New York Times first reported. In emails obtained by Insider of an alleged exchange between the two deep-sea enthusiasts, Mr Stanley told Mr Rush that he had heard a large cracking sound while on the 12,000-foot-deep dive.

“I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse. The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not,” Mr Stanley wrote in a premonitory email, years before the Titan’s catastrophic implosion that killed all five of its passengers.