The wife of OceanGate’s doomed CEO unknowingly heard and reacted to the moment her husband’s Titan submersible fatally imploded while monitoring the private Titanic exploration on a separate ship, newly released audio reveals.
Stockton Rush’s wife and Director of OceanGate, Wendy Rush, was listening to audio from the submersible’s support ship along with other crew members when a “distinguishable” popping noise played over their sound system.
“What’s that bang,” Wendy Rush asked, according to US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation footage viewed by the BBC.
Rush and the rest of the staff aboard the support ship, Polar Prince, were tracking the vessel’s descent to the resting place of the infamous shipwreck when the tragic implosion occurred 90 minutes into the voyage at approximately 11,000 feet below the surface in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The five passengers inside – including Stockton Rush, billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, and British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58 – were killed instantly.
“You’ll hear a noise that’s external to the room and you’ll see their reaction to it,” one Coast Guard officer explained, comparing the sound to a slamming door.
The support ship was not notified of a communication loss for several minutes, leaving the crew on the surface in the dark of the tragedy that took place.
Because of the delay between the implosion audio and the communication loss message, Wendy Rush continued relaying messages from Titan back to the crew.
“Dropped two weights,” she said over the radio.
A nearby National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorder picked up the implosion.
Static white noise filled the airwaves until a thunderous boom and reverb took over, according to the 20-second recording released in February.
The Coast Guard’s investigation found the Titan’s carbon fiber shell had begun to break apart during a previous voyage to the Titanic, approximately a year before the fatal June 2023 expedition.
Carbon fiber, not made to withstand the immense pressure of deep-sea exploration, can begin to separate into layers, in the process of delamination.
“Delamination at dive 80 was the beginning of the end,” said US Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Katie Williams, according to the BBC.
“Everyone that stepped onboard the Titan after dive 80 was risking their life.”
The fatal voyage was the Titan’s 88th mission, and its first deep dive of 2023.
Days before its catastrophic demise, the Titan experienced a malfunction with its variable ballast tank — which controls the submersible’s buoyancy — causing the platform to invert 45 degrees and sending the back of the craft upwards.
Rush aborted the dive after all five people onboard were tossed around inside the vessel.
Friends of the exploration CEO say he “knew” his submersible would eventually lead to disaster, but Rush continued with the trips to the Titanic.
“He knew that eventually it was going to end like this and he wasn’t going to be held accountable,” Rush’s longtime friend Karl Stanley testified last September during a Coast Guard’s inquiry into the catastrophe.
“The definition of an accident is something that happened unexpectedly and by sheer chance,” Stanley said. “There was nothing unexpected about this. This was expected by everybody that had access to a little bit of information.”
The Coast Guard is expected to release a final report on its investigation later this year, but preliminary findings documented the mangled wreck of the Titan.
Pieces of Rush’s clothing were found among the wreckage, along with business cards and stickers of the Titanic, according to the outlet.
OceanGate has since shut down all operations and said it would cooperate with the investigations.
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