Titan sub hearing latest: OceanGate scientific director says sub malfunctioned days before fatal voyage

“What we’ve all gone through is still very raw. Nothing is ever going to bring our friends back,” she said. “I hope that this investigation creates an understanding that with exploration, there’s risks. And without taking that risk and exploration, the world would still be flat.

“I hope that innovation continues so we can make the oceans accessible to people like me who got to fufill a dream.”

Mission specialist Renata Rojas says she had just finished her lunch when the team lost communications with the Titan submersible.

She said Stockton Rush’s wife, Wendy Rush, usually sat at the communications table.

Shortly before crew members stepped into the Titan submersible, Rojas says she was tasked with storing the belongings of crew members.

“As mission specialist, people get inside the sub, they have to take their hat off, their lifejacket off, and we place that into each individual bags so they know it’s their belongings,” she said. “I was the one holding that bag for them as they got in the sub.”

“It didn’t seem to be anything of concern until 6pm,” the mission specialist said, explaining when OceanGate employees thought something was wrong. “I don’t think we got concerned until it was really overdue.”

She says she believes the Canadian Coast Guard was first notified once the vessel did not resurface.

Instead of coming back to the surface, Rojas said that weather during one dive was so dangerous that OceanGate made a decision to let passengers sleep on the vessel in the ocean for five hours.

“The weather when they came back to the surface was very rough,” she said. “It was safer for them to sleep and wake up five hours later and get them back on the platform.”

She added that one of her colleagues, Tim Catterson, a former OceanGate contractor, expressed that he would never get inside the submersible.

Rojas broke down as she continued to describe what happened on the day of the tragedy. She said all of the passengers were excited to embark on their expedition.

“I saw five people smiling on the way to their journey,” she said. “Excited. We had wonderful weather.”

“I knew what I was doing was very risky,” she said. “I never at any point felt unsafe by the operation.”

The OceanGate mission specialist said she paid OceanGate a deposit in April 2017 for a trip in 2018. The trip was delayed until 2021 because of ongoing testing. Some of the ongoing issues included making a new carbon-fiber hull.

“It had a lot of noise,” she said. “Stockton was very verbal about the dives he did. It was noisy and the noise was not calming down. The sub was probably not strong enough.”

“He must have gone on a different dive,” she said. “Nobody was panicking. Nobody was crying. There was definitely no swearing or yelling.”

Earlier this week, David Lochridge said Stockton Rush, OceanGate CEO, threw the vessel’s controller at him during a voyage after a passenger began to cry over alleged concerns that Rush was driving recklessly.

“He hit me on the side of my head,” Lochridge said during testimony. Rojas said she was on the vessel during the dive but did not witness the interaction.

Speaking to The New York Times, filmmaker James Cameron has said that he shouldn’t have discussed what might’ve happened to the Titan submersible after the vessel imploded.

Cameron is a prominent figure in the deep-diving community. He has taken 33 dives to the wreckage of the Titanic. Following the incident, Cameron was publicly critical of OceanGate, the company that operated the Titan submersible.

When asked about his response to the hearing this week, Cameron told the outlet: “I should not have passed on hearsay information about the weights on national TV. We have enough intentional disinformation in our world today, without adding to it with undisciplined rumor mongering.”